Новости за 19.08.2021

As the Village and the far right continue to heap their scorn on Joe Biden for the way pulling out of Afghanistan has unleashed chaos in Kabul, threatening the lives of the Afghans who stood against the Taliban during the United States’ 20-year occupation, I still say the decision to get out of this unwinnable war took guts. Three previous presidents let the Afghanistan situation drag on while surely knowing that it was a disaster. Biden had the courage to do what none of his predecessors were willing to. Читать дальше...

This summer, the lines at vaccination centers suddenly got shorter. After a few desperate months of shot chasing and limited supply, it seemed (especially to well-resourced, privileged people) as though anyone in the U.S. who wanted a Covid-19 vaccine could get one without much trouble—and that the only barriers to widespread protection were personal choices.

The four great prose works of W.G. Sebald were published around the turn of the millennium, a period once perceived by some as the end of history. Vertigo was quietly released in Germany a year after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn followed in the 1990s, as Europe was completing a utopian project to bind its warring polities into a single, peaceful union. And Austerlitz, his masterpiece, was published in early 2001, mere months before the terrorist attack that... Читать дальше...

How did New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who is set to resign this month after sexual harassment allegations and a cover-up of nursing home deaths from Covid-19 came to light, become lionized as a national leader in the pandemic’s early months? He wasn’t the only governor to hold daily news briefings on the virus’s progress or issue strict emergency orders to check its spread. His ascent to national fame didn’t reflect any actual success, either: The bulk of New York’s Covid-19 deaths occurred... Читать дальше...

In 2009, John Kerry, then the chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, invited a panel of post-9/11 veterans to testify on the shaky status of the war in Afghanistan. Four decades earlier, as a leader in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, an indignant Kerry had testified before the same committee, deriding Washington for blindly creating “a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history.” Now... Читать дальше...