Новости за 03.09.2021

Every summer in Brooklyn, for at least a few weeks, it gets harder to breathe. Air quality alerts burn up our phones, warning us to stay inside. By all rights, it ought to be treated as a severe weather event like a storm or fire: Air pollution puts us in physical danger, leaving us more vulnerable to lung diseases, heart attacks, and even Covid-19. Even in the United States, which enjoys cleaner air than much of the world, air pollution killed an estimated 230,000 people in 2018.

Amid the many circuitries of outrage, distraction, and algorithmic surveillance that now go by the name of online life, the temptation to log off and unplug for good grows greater by the nanosecond. Reflection and introspection are in desperately short supply when so much of our common world is strategically programmed and miniaturized to serve as maximally viral or trending “content.”

In the last few days before the recall election that will decide whether Governor Gavin Newsom, who was democratically elected less than four years ago, can stay in office, Newsom and his team are increasingly leaning on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to keep him in office.

There is a poignant pleasure to be found in loving something past its prime. Watching The Chair, a Netflix limited series in which Sandra Oh plays an academic struggling to stave off the decline of the English department she heads at a lesser liberal arts college called Pembroke, I caught myself in some nostalgia for my youth. It’s only partly that the show, down to its soundtrack, seems squarely aimed at my demographic, thirtysomethings with vague, long-abandoned designs on grad school. More than that... Читать дальше...

Salman Rushdie, the Booker Prize winning novelist, insists that he is not, like so many media members before him, going to Substack—at least not full-time. He won’t be publishing his next book on the newsletter platform. Instead, he’s taken an advance from the company to fool around with “whatever comes into” his head. This will apparently include a serialized novella. “I think that new technology always makes possible new art forms, and I think literature has not found its new form in this digital age,” Rushdie told The Guardian. Читать дальше...

These days, one of the scariest phrases in the English language has become, “A deeply divided Supreme Court ruled...” The late-night Wednesday 5-to-4 decision rejecting the first challenge to the draconian Texas abortion law is an ominous indication of the intentions of what is, in effect, the Trump Court.

The Supreme Court declined to block a Texas law prohibiting most abortions, in a late-night opinion on Tuesday, igniting fears among abortion rights activists that the conservative-majority court will overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision establishing access to the procedure as a constitutional right.