Новости за 27.12.2021

I came to Joan Didion backwards, starting with the wry and savage essays of Political Fictions, and only later working my way backward through her oeuvre. It began in 2001. I was in college. It’s hard to remember now the terrifying political unanimity of that moment, the way that the deep popular cynicism and indifference of the post-Cold War, post-Clinton scandals evaporated on September 11, to be replaced by a furious national id that couldn’t brook the slightest deviation from a newly (at least, newly open) warlike national purpose. Читать дальше...

When Joe Biden entered the White House earlier this year, he arrived with the rising sense that the United States would at last realize the threats that illicit finance and trans-national corruption—kleptocracy, in other words—pose to both national security and domestic democracy alike. After all, the U.S. had just lived through four years of Donald Trump’s misrule, which provided a front-row seat to the spectacle created by a president drenched in anonymous wealth and bent on tilting American policy and subverting American democracy. Читать дальше...

In late April of 2020, many Americans were shocked by the Trump administration’s executive order to keep the nation’s meatpacking plants humming: Covid-19 was tearing through the plants where workers labored, crammed shoulder to shoulder, sickening them and helping to spread the virus in their communities. The companies who owned the plants publicly insisted that shuttering plants would spark a meat shortage and imperil the country’s food supply. Behind the scenes, they used their access with... Читать дальше...

New Orleans is making an ambitious bid to deliver WiFi to the homes of its poorest residents. Using “smart,” electronic streetlights as nodes, it wants to establish a new citywide internet service, one that will compete with existing carriers like Cox and AT&T. The city intends to include a free tier for everyone who needs it, a group amounting to at least 16 percent of the population.