Новости за 06.12.2021

The late Bob Dole, whose two major presidential races I chronicled in 1988 and 1996, remains a man of conflicting parts. I can see the pieces of his long career—the ambition, the suffering, the stoicism, the patriotism, and the partisanship—but they never cohere into a single inscription beneath a statue. Neither a political hero nor a rogue, neither a statesman nor a scalawag, Dole embodied the complexities of dealmaking on Capitol Hill. And in writing about him, I mourn both his loss at age... Читать дальше...

It’s been over two months since as many as 15,000 Haitian asylum-seekers were forced to take shelter in an encampment underneath the international bridge in the borderlands of Del Rio, Texas. In September, harrowing images of Border Patrol agents on horseback, corralling and whipping a group of asylum-seekers as they waded across the Rio Grande, triggered widespread condemnation. Since then, advocates estimate the Biden administration has deported some 9,200 people who stayed at the Del Rio camp to Haiti. Читать дальше...

Nearly two years into a global pandemic that’s provided every one of us with a crash course in epidemiology, it’s a simple task to rattle off all of the problems with America’s coronavirus response. The government slashed pandemic preparedness funding before the pathogen even existed and mobilized far too late once it did. It lagged behind on critical masking recommendations and failed to fund vaccination programs until months after the first shots rolled out. These are just some memorable highlights on a long list of snafus. Читать дальше...

“Man,” observed the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins in his pathbreaking 1985 work, Islands of History, “lives by a kind of periodic deicide.” The specific god-killing he had in mind was heart-stoppingly real. In January 1779, the British explorer James Cook arrived in the waters around the Hawaiian Islands. His timing was impeccable: He came ashore during an annual indigenous rite known as the Makahiki, when locals celebrated the future return (and rule) of the fertility god Lono. Cook’s... Читать дальше...

Back in 2011, shortly after he had left a two-year stint in the White House serving as then–Vice President Joe Biden’s chief economic policy adviser, Jared Bernstein did what everyone of any notoriety in the early 2000s did: He started a blog.

As if having one Weiss to endure weren’t enough, I see now that Bari has a younger sister, Suzy, who took to Substack last week to offer up a sympathetic account of frontline health care workers who don’t want to get vaccinated. I’m not going to link to it. I have enough stuff weighing on my conscience without adding helping to spread ridiculous propaganda to the list. Suffice it to say that sentences like “In New York City, for example, the city-wide mandate appears to have prompted 18,000 public school employees to get the vaccine... Читать дальше...

In the summer of 2019, the presidential campaign of Joe Biden, then merely a milquetoast former vice president, surprised climate change advocates with an ambitious proposal to cut carbon emissions. Biden was suddenly offering much more than tax incentives for green businesses or an expansion of electric car infrastructure. He embraced many of the tenets of the Green New Deal while promising to punish the companies responsible for heavy greenhouse gas emissions; he promised laws against greenhouse... Читать дальше...