Новости за 28.06.2021

My friend Dan Savage and I had a little exchange on Twitter the other day.

Among L. Ron Hubbard’s most pressing concerns was a singular problem: how to get his followers to turn their nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns. Like a Californian Hamlet, the founder of Scientology pondered the dilemma of “to be or not to be” and settled on beingness. There was no real basis for Hubbard’s morphological experiments, as linguist Amanda Montell explains in her new book, Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism; he simply “liked the sound of technical jargon.” So much so, in fact,... Читать дальше...

Check out these state vaccination numbers. Here are the top 10, with the percentage of the adult population that has received both shots: Vermont, 64.6 percent; Maine, 60.5; Massachusetts, 60.4; Connecticut, 59,4; Rhode Island, 57.7; New Jersey, 55.3; New Hampshire, 54.9; Maryland, 54.4; Washington, 53.3; and New Mexico, 52.9. (New York, for those of you who insist that New York is the center of the known universe, is next, 11th, at 52.7.)

When I called Mike Quinn this winter, he had just found out a client of his had died. She was 90, and she’d lost her husband, a playwright and writer who was also Quinn’s client, a couple of years earlier. Quinn was planning a trip to New York City to begin dealing with her estate. And to get the cat.

In 1975, shortly after moving to Oregon’s Siuslaw National Forest, Carol Van Strum began seeing tank trucks and helicopters spraying something pungent. “No one knew what they were spraying, or what it was for,” she recalled. “A lot of people just assumed, ‘It’s the government doing it, it must be okay.’” It wasn’t. Van Strum’s garden wilted. Her children became sick. Then her dog died. Around the region, women experienced a startling uptick in miscarriages. Fauns were born with no eyes, and frogs were found with extra limbs. Читать дальше...

This Pride month, as revelers hit the streets to celebrate LGBTQ history, Republican state legislatures are hard at work trying to erase it. And it’s not just epochal events like the Stonewall riots, or towering figures like Harvey Milk, that could be wiped from classroom instruction. In public schools in Tennessee, Arkansas, and Montana, it may soon become illegal even to mention Bayard Rustin, the openly gay co-organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, or educate kids about the AIDS crisis. 

With the coronavirus pandemic waning across the United States, a new government report has kicked up a surprising and groundbreaking health statistic: Medicaid enrollment now tops 80 million people. That means nearly one in four Americans rely on the public program for health insurance coverage—8 million more than just a year ago. The uptick was likely driven by a host of factors: the implementation of Medicaid expansion in several new states in 2020, layoffs and employer-sponsored insurance loss rendering people newly eligible... Читать дальше...