Новости за 30.07.2021

It is Christmas Day in a great castle. King Arthur and Guinevere and their knights are feasting, when a green man on a big green horse bursts through the door. He lays down a bizarre challenge: He invites anyone of the assembled company to strike him with a weapon, as long as that person comes and finds him one year from now to receive the same stroke in return. This second part of the challenge is mystifying, since if one of them cuts the Green Knight’s head off, presumably he won’t be in a state to do anything next year. Читать дальше...

For the American left of the 1960s and early 1970s, the past refuses to stay past. Two of the most popular films nominated for Best Picture this year—Shaka King’s Judas and the Black Messiah and Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7—daubed the radicals of that era in seductively heroic hues. Reports of last summer’s massive protests against police killings of African Americans often evoked the civil rights and Black Power movements led by figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Stokely Carmichael, and Angela Davis. Читать дальше...

If you support mandatory vaccination to fight Covid-19, you are in good company. The first vaccine mandate in American history came from none other than George Washington at the height of the American Revolution. America’s struggle for independence coincided with a major smallpox epidemic that raged through North America in the 1770s and 1780s, and it was an omnipresent threat to the ragtag Continental Army.

Music-and-travel tycoon Richard Branson didn’t quite make it to space in July, though he came pretty close: From his VSS Unity space capsule, he live-streamed 53.5 miles above the earth and only 8.5 miles short of the Kármán line, where space begins. “To all you kids down there, I was once a child with a dream looking up to the stars,” an ecstatic Branson intoned, while members of the Unity crew bounced, giddy and weightless, behind him.

The act of wearing a mask has been a point of political contention for as long as the pandemic has ravaged the country, and the halls of Congress has seen its share of this stress, as lawmakers have played out the larger cultural conflict in the microcosm of their workplace. So one could be forgiven for breathing a sigh of relief when the mask mandates in the Capitol were lifted—hey, at least that’s one less thing for them to argue about.