Новости за 11.02.2022

“Do something.”

This is the mantra of the foreign policy pundit class when practically anything happens in the world.

There’s a civil war in Libya. “Do something.”

A humanitarian crisis in Syria. “Do something.”

China is ramping up pressure on Taiwan. “Do something.”

And today, as Russia seemingly prepares to invade Ukraine, the response has been the same. “Do something.”

Yet as the Ukraine crisis continues to unfold and, increasingly, all sides appear to be seeking an off-ramp from war... Читать дальше...

Bosses can be such a drag. Some are just run-of-the-mill unpleasant. Others are truly horrible. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Dunder Mifflin’s Michael Scott (of The Office) have both directed gruesome invectives at their employees; both have fulsomely congratulated themselves about their respective offices. Can you spot who said what?

Nearly six months after a chaotic and widely criticized withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, capping an ignominious two decades of conflict that saw the war-ravaged country quickly retaken by the Taliban, the Biden administration and Congress have yet to fully address the lingering crises facing the American allies left behind and the evacuees living in limbo without a pathway to citizenship.

Here’s what happened this week

It was another big week in developments related to the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Rudy Giuliani, former President Donald Trump’s lawyer and a frequent main character of these updates, reportedly asked a Republican prosecutor in northern Michigan to turn over his county’s voting machines to the Trump team. According to The Washington Post, Giuliani and other members of Trump’s legal team asked Antrim County prosecutor James Rossiter for the machines... Читать дальше...

It used to puzzle me that so many feminist books deal in literary criticism. Mary Wollstonecraft takes on Rousseau, Simone de Beauvoir attacks D.H. Lawrence, Shulamith Firestone spends several pages on a story by Herbert Gold, and Kate Millett pulls apart, well, everybody. Freud is a target, for blaming everything on women, as is Marx, for forgetting them. Couldn’t arguments for women’s liberation be mounted in themselves? Why perform the work of dissection when you could be proposing some more irresistible vision of the world? Читать дальше...

The best advice I’ve ever received came from my mom. “Don’t write anything that you wouldn’t want the whole world to see,” she often said when I was younger. That wisdom served me pretty well throughout the rise of social media, and it often comes in handy in a profession where everything under your byline may be scrutinized by what can be a less-than-forgiving national audience. But I don’t think I’ll ever be anywhere near as good at following that advice as former President Donald Trump apparently is. Читать дальше...