Новости за 17.09.2021

Ken Burns, the celebrated documentarian whose films have chronicled America’s story from jazz to baseball to war, is out with his and his team’s newest work, a four-part documentary about the life of Muhammad Ali. The film, called simply Muhammad Ali and produced by Burns, daughter Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, tells Ali’s full life story, from his Louisville, Kentucky, childhood to his final years, with incredible footage and an array of talking heads—boxing writers, political journalists,... Читать дальше...

Nearly a year ago, the results from the Covid-19 vaccine trials were like a dream come true for health experts: The trials were huge and designed well, and the results were clear and persuasive. The vaccines were extremely safe and even more effective than expected. Only weeks after the data came in, the first health workers were rolling up their sleeves to receive the shots.

This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations, with support from the Wayne Barrett Project.

Ten years ago today, on September 17, 2011, a small band of anarchists, artists, and anti-poverty organizers convened themselves in Zuccotti Park in downtown Manhattan, steps from the New York Stock Exchange. They were there to challenge the power of Wall Street and also to try something new in the annals of modern American protest movements: to be a democratic assembly of all who wanted to participate in deciding how and what they would do next. On their first night together that Saturday, perhaps... Читать дальше...

There is no shortage of areas where American democracy is in desperate need of reform. Most debates on this subject surround the parts of government where voters’ influence is weakest: the geographically unbalanced Senate and its filibuster, the presidency and its haphazard Electoral College, the Supreme Court and its corrosive confirmation process. By comparison, the impact of gerrymandering on the House is far more subtle and thus far less attention-grabbing.

“A great deal of hokey art has been made in the service of excellent causes.” Thus begins Robert Hughes’s pan of the feminist artist Judy Chicago in a December 1980 issue of Time. He was reviewing her massive installation, The Dinner Party. The work is a triangular dinner table set with 39 places; each of the embroidered place settings names a different famous woman from history (Boadicea, Elizabeth I, Margaret Sanger, Ethel Smyth). Each of their places is set with a golden chalice, a napkin,... Читать дальше...

The scope and ambition of any Democratic voting rights bill are, at this point, academic: As long as the filibuster is in place, almost any effort to protect the right to vote from authoritarian-minded Republicans is doomed to die in the Senate. Both measures that have already passed the House of Representatives have met that fate.  But hope springs eternal. Earlier this week, Senate Democrats unveiled their stab at a voting rights bill, the Freedom to Vote Act. 

The novelist Richard Powers has made a name for himself as a gloriously geeky writer, unafraid of big ideas. Over 12 novels, he has tackled race, religion, identity, politics, music, technology, surveillance, genetics, the environment, and more, often in startling ways. In The Gold Bug Variations, he interwove Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” the four base nucleotides of DNA, and the two pairs of lovers of the plot. In The Echo Maker, he juxtaposed a man’s lost memories and connections with the transcendent echoes animating the great... Читать дальше...