Новости за 08.02.2022

As it limped through negotiations in Congress and the White House, the Build Back Better Act was known less for its contents, including clean energy tax credits, incentives for electric vehicles, and ambitious welfare state expansions, than its top-line price tag: first the $6.5 trillion advocated by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, then the $3.5 trillion compromise, and finally the meager $1.75 trillion that West Virginia Senator and unofficial president Joe Manchin dictated from his perch above a critical fiftieth Senate vote. Читать дальше...

Last weekend’s nor’easter dumped a full two feet of snow onto Boston, triggering a familiar debate that tore apart the city in a way other topics rarely do. In the days following the blizzard, so-called “space savers” began slowly marking their territory on the city’s public streets.

By the time I got to know Jason Epstein, he had already reinvented publishing at least twice—the high-quality midlist paperback and the high-end Library of America—and had helped launch one of the most influential instruments of American intellectual life, The New York Review of Books. Back on a winter’s day in 2003, Epstein wanted to meet me to wax prophetic about his new vision for American publishing.

Something very funny started happening over the last few months: Conservatives started complaining about gerrymandering. Maybe they suddenly had an epiphany about its corrosive, anti-democratic effects on American politics. Or maybe, contrary to expectations on both sides of the political divide, this decade’s post-census redistricting cycle didn’t tilt things in the GOP’s favor quite as much as anticipated.

In the United States, we’ve all become so inured to our federal system of government, with its individual state constitutions and lack of a uniformed national armed law enforcement authority, that it’s easy to forget we’re something of an anomaly. The Western hemisphere features only two other federated states—Mexico and Brazil—and they have comparatively much more robust national governments. The U.S. model is dinstinctive, functioning as a singular actor abroad but taking a form closer to the European Union closer to home. Читать дальше...