Новости за 21.10.2021

On Wednesday, Donald Trump announced the launch of his long-awaited social media company, TRUTH Social. “I created TRUTH Social and TMTG (Trump Media and Technology Group) to stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech,” Trump said in a press release. “We live in a world where the Taliban has a huge presence on Twitter, yet your favorite American president has been silenced. This is unacceptable.”

Earlier this week, Marc Lore, the 50-year-old billionaire who most recently worked as a high-level executive at Walmart and also founded Diapers.com, granted USA Today an interview about the $400 billion, five million–person city he’s planning to build in the American West. The story was remarkably straight-faced, full of all the self-aggrandizing details you tend to get when a tech entrepreneur decides it’s his destiny to wrestle society under control. The city’s name, Telosa, comes from the... Читать дальше...

An independent senator from a New England state who caucuses with Democrats delivered an impassioned speech that quickly went viral on Tuesday, warning that a spate of bills passed in Republican-controlled states restricting voting rights would lead to a hollowing out of American democracy unless the Senate acts swiftly to pass its own legislation.

The centerpiece of the White House’s climate agenda, the Clean Energy Payment Program, or CEPP, seemingly expired unceremoniously late last week due to West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin’s opposition. Progressives—who’ve watched the reconciliation package be winnowed down from $6 trillion to just $1.9 trillion—are now scrambling to figure out how to bring some kind of comparable emissions-reducing plan back from the dead before world leaders start debating the future of the Paris Agreement in Glasgow on Halloween. Читать дальше...

A lot of people are mad at Attorney General Merrick Garland these days. Much of it comes from predictable quarters. For instance, earlier this month, Garland announced he would create a federal task force to address a “disturbing” recent surge in “harassment, intimidation, and threats of violence” against school board members and educators. Republican lawmakers and right-wing parents, who hope to foment a suburban backlash to Democrats ahead of next year’s midterms, tellingly took it as a personal attack on them and lashed out accordingly. Читать дальше...

Divinity was everywhere I looked in Mobile, Alabama. It glinted in the language used to describe the pandemic: the purgatory of its looping ebbs and flows, the perils of congregation, the miracle of vaccines, and the blind devoutness of the sheep inoculated with them. Hoping to tap its deeply religious community’s trust, Mobile County had converted some of the city’s 370-plus places of worship into vaccination clinics. Hoping to boost its health care workers’ morale, local leaders asked the houses... Читать дальше...

The passing of former Secretary of State Colin Powell has provided the occasion for reflection on the man’s most consequential act, which also happened to be his most shameful one: his February 2003 speech at the United Nations, in which he persuasively laid out an array of phony evidence that the Iraqis harbored a substantial cache of weapons of mass destruction, or WMDs, emphatically calling for war in response.

Herodotus tells us that the massive Persian fleet sent to conquer Greece lost half its ships to a freak storm,” Gerard Baker advised in a column in The Wall Street Journal, the tutelary organ of the American business class, on August 9. The column appeared the same day the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was issued. Baker’s allusion to a weather disaster of the distant past was meant to ridicule the idea that there was anything unusual about the extreme weather... Читать дальше...

For an industry that prides itself on hard-bitten bullshit detection, journalism has long relied on fables of civic uplift to supply its reason for being. The mission of American journalism is broadly understood to be essential to the functioning of our democracy, by cultivating and empowering an informed citizenry. In a republic predicated on an ideal of rough social equality, knowledge is indeed power—and when knowledge ceases to circulate in wide and open channels, the prospects for democratic renewal dim accordingly. Читать дальше...