Новости за 24.11.2021

The American economy is doing pretty well as the slowly pandemic recedes from our lives. Weekly jobless claims fell last week to just 199,000 filings, an extreme low not seen since 1969. The tight labor market is a boon for workers: Wage growth in the third quarter of 2021 was at its highest in roughly two decades. And while there are concerns about inflation and supply-chain woes, we’re seeing a much sharper economic recovery—and even a boost in some ways—after the pandemic than we did after the Great Recession. Читать дальше...

Although former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo has been out of office for more than four months after resigning amid sexual harassment and misconduct allegations, he still casts a long shadow over the state’s politics. The whispers about the ex-governor’s future plans began before he even left office. A day after Cuomo announced his resignation, WNYC reported that his critics were already fretting that he would run again for the governorship in a year —he did, after all, still have $20 million in his campaign account. Читать дальше...

More than 100,000 people fatally overdosed between April 2020 and April 2021, a nearly 30 percent jump from the previous year, and an unprecedented death toll often blamed by the media on pharmaceutical companies and prescription opioids like OxyContin.

When René Magritte was a little boy growing up in Belgium in the early 1900s, he had a friend called Raymond who lived a few doors down. Raymond recalls going over to play at the Magrittes’ house, where René’s father Léopold kept a room full of “white metal containers of Cocoline”—a new, coconut oil-based form of margarine which he sold for work—“and advertising posters, too.” Raymond remembers the Cocoline well, he once said, “because René and I played with it, climbed on it, made tunnels through it... Читать дальше...

I spend a fair amount of time criticizing the Supreme Court and the justices. I’ll probably do so more often in the months and years ahead. So it feels almost strange to recognize them for doing something that is unambiguously good: revamping their format for oral arguments this term. The long-overdue changes to the most public part of their work are better for the lawyers, better for the justices, and better for the American public. Unfortunately, not all of these tweaks are guaranteed to stick around. Читать дальше...

The Biden administration is treating rising energy prices with more urgency than the climate crisis. After encouraging OPEC to drill more over the last few weeks, Biden on Tuesday announced that he’ll release 50 million barrels of crude oil from strategic reserves—the largest ever such drawdown, and only the second time reserves have been used to influence gas prices, up 60 percent over a year ago. The move comes amid broader concerns about rising inflation, and on the tail of the administration... Читать дальше...

The power had flickered out just as the meeting at the Conference of Bishops worship space was set to begin. It was mid-August, and without working AC, Belém—the capital city of Pará in the Amazon, situated just south of the equator—was brutally hot and suffocatingly humid. That left the 50-odd social movement leaders, trade unionists, indigenous land defenders, feminists, and educators to fan themselves with whatever flyers and pamphlets were around. There was an indignity beyond all the sweaty brows. Читать дальше...

The rats are everywhere, more of them all the time, in our streets and our apartment complexes, cavorting on picnic tables and playgrounds—or so the pandemic’s hyperventilating news reports would suggest. Is the rodential bonanza real, or are we just noticing rats more? How are outdoor dining, gentrification, and climate change implicated? And why does our anxiety about rats seem to intensify after large-scale disasters? On episode 39 of The Politics of Everything, hosts Laura Marsh and Alex Pareene... Читать дальше...