Новости за 23.12.2021

For Danielle Swift, the need for rent control in St. Paul, Minnesota gained new urgency at the end of 2020, when her mother suddenly received a massive rent increase. Swift, an organizer with the Frogtown Neighborhood Association, suspects that her mother’s landlord decided to increase her rent after she informed her landlord of a maintenance issue. “My mom ended up moving a roommate in, which she wasn’t supposed to do, but she didn’t really have too many options,” Swift told me.

George Orwell may have had the right idea about how Democrats should react to the apostasy of Joe Manchin. In 1984, Orwell describes Two Minutes Hate as a daily ritual during which party members rage against Enemies of the People like Emmanuel Goldstein who had rebelled against Big Brother. As Orwell puts it, “The horrible thing about Two Minutes Hate was not that one was obliged to act a part, but, on the contrary, it was impossible to avoid joining in.” 

The first time I saw Penélope Cruz’s face, contorted and weeping, was during the brief opening sequence of Pedro ­Almodóvar’s 1997 film, Live Flesh. Cruz plays a sex worker who gives birth on Christmas (to a boy who will be the movie’s protagonist) on a bus in the middle of the night. Hollywood hadn’t yet typecast her as a manic-dreamy Spanish sex symbol, and I remember being struck—then, and again in Almodóvar’s 1999 masterwork, All About My Mother—by her odd, disarming configuration of flesh and bone. Читать дальше...

Since Kabul fell to the Taliban in August, Afghanistan’s economy and banking system have been in freefall. More than half its population is facing food insecurity, including up to one million children who could die of starvation this winter. The scale of misery in a single year could dwarf the damage inflicted to the country during America’s 20-year war.