Новости за 07.10.2021

It finally happened. After years of getting my Nobel Prize in literature predictions wrong—and, in some cases, missing the mark in spectacular fashion—I got one right. On Thursday morning, the Swedish Academy announced that Abdulrazak Gurnah, the Zanzibari British novelist and literary critic, had won the Nobel Prize for “his uncompromising and compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fate of the refugee in the gulf between cultures and continents.”

In a report earlier this week, a French commission on child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church found that more than 330,000 children had been abused over the past 70 years, with about two-thirds of them abused by Catholic clergy. The revelation is the latest and perhaps most exhaustive look yet into a phenomenon found around the world—and it’s a stark reminder of how the United States, after all these years, still hasn’t produced a full accounting of its own such tragedy.

The 86-year-old Man Ray had outlived most of his closest contemporaries when he died in Paris in 1976. Tristan Tzara, the impresario of Dada, conked off on Christmas Day 1963. André Breton, the petty tyrant of surrealism, succumbed to a heart attack in 1966. Marcel Duchamp, Ray’s confidant and sometime collaborator, died in 1968, followed by Picasso in 1973. Salvador Dalí was still alive but had already ripened into florid mediocrity, capped by a pharmaceutical twilight in Spain. As one of the... Читать дальше...

For years, Sarah Stone woke up expecting to hear from her friend Kenny Riffle. It was rarely anything important. Just a “hi” or a “good morning” or a “how are you?” Sarah was in recovery from years of opioid misuse; Kenny was struggling to stop.

In the course of researching this review of the new James Bond movie, No Time to Die, starring Daniel Craig, I rewatched License to Kill (1989), one of my favorites. In it, Timothy Dalton is a dark Bond, a grieving thug running amok in the fictional Republic of Isthmus after the murder of his friend, and the closest forerunner to Craig’s gritty debut in Casino Royale (2006). About halfway into the film, however, there came a moment I had never noticed before. It’s night, and Bond is rappelling... Читать дальше...

In the United States, immigration is first and foremost a matter of caps and limits. The maximum number of refugees the Biden administration has agreed to accept in fiscal year 2022: 125,000. The number of refugees it has so far funded for that year: 65,000. The number of refugees actually accepted in 2021 (despite a refugee ceiling of 62,500): only 7,600. 

What does Kyrsten Sinema want? Nobody knows; she won’t say. The Arizona senator is known for living out loud in plenty of other ways—she favors patterned dresses, gaudy accessories, and profane jewelry (literally); her identity is bound up in attention-seeking hobbies (fancy wine, triathlons). But when it comes to her actual job, which is being a United States senator, she says next to nothing—most notably about her decision to hold up the progress of two important bills that constitute the Biden agenda. Читать дальше...