Новости за 04.10.2021

On Thursday, the Nobel Prize in literature will be awarded for the 118th time—and for the fourth since it was suspended in 2017 amid a rash of scandals involving sexual assault and gambling. The Swedish Academy, the august body that awards the prize, has since undergone a number of changes; it has only 18 members, but seven have joined in the last three years.

Earlier this year, Anne-Marie Slaughter was invited by Democrats on the House Foreign Affairs Committee to testify on the future of American diplomacy. She was a natural choice for a witness. As a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, and a former director of policy planning for the State Department under President Barack Obama, she had plenty of expertise on the hearing’s subject: “America Forward: Restoring Diplomacy and Development in a Fracturing World.”

As one of those rich guys who will pay boatloads of higher taxes under President Biden’s plan, I have one thing to say to Congress: Do it! Passing this legislation is the most significant step you can take toward economic prosperity.

When Americans talk about the separation of powers, they almost exclusively refer to the federal level. Grade-school students are taught about the checks and balances between Congress, the president, and the Supreme Court and how the Constitution’s authors designed it that way. At higher levels, legal scholars devote considerable attention to how these branches can and should interact with each other. Basic disagreements over each branch’s strength and importance define American political debates... Читать дальше...

Why do the Democrats behave this way? We’ve heard the standard answers. They’re not as disciplined as the Republicans, instinctively less inclined to obey orders (a good thing). They’re more ideologically diverse (also a good thing, up to a point). They actually care about policy outcomes, unlike Republicans, so they have genuine substantive disagreements (another good thing—again, up to a point).

In 1993, a young Jeff Bezos was contemplating a career change. He wanted to leave his executive job at the high-speed–trading investment firm D.E. Shaw & Co., and while he was mulling his next move, he happened to pick up a copy of The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro’s 1989 novel about an aging butler who looks back on his life, surveying a landscape of missed opportunity and remorse. The novel’s rueful atmosphere inspired Bezos, or so the story goes, to come up with a “regret minimization framework” for his own decisions. Читать дальше...