Новости за 30.03.2022

President Biden’s proposed billionaire tax died so quickly that I scarcely had time to formulate an opinion before West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin, the Democrats’ fiftieth vote, shot it down. Now that I’ve had time to think it over, the billionaire tax strikes me as a somewhat radical proposal that, as Mark Twain famously said about Wagner’s music, is better than it sounds. But it’s also, paradoxically, a symptom of the Democrats’ extreme timidity on the general subject of taxation.

If ever there was a reliable constant of Joe Biden’s campaign and presidency, it’s been his habit of invoking the middle class. In his most recent State of the Union speech, Biden said he and Vice President Kamala Harris have sought to “build the economy from the bottom up and the middle out, not from the top down.” Two days ago, in a statement on his new 2023 budget proposal, Biden promised the plan would “grow the economy from the bottom up and the middle out.” During his most recent run for president... Читать дальше...

In January, the McMinn County Board of Education in Tennessee made headlines nationwide with its decision to remove Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, an account of the author’s family’s experience in World War II concentration camps, from the local public school curriculum. As journalists and academics criticized the decision, another transformation to the Tennessee education system was attracting far less attention: The state’s Republican governor, Bill Lee, was negotiating plans to open 50 new “classical education” charter schools. Читать дальше...

Sardinia, well into modern times, had all the trappings of a colony. The highlands of the interior still go by the name “Barbagia,” from the Greek word for barbarians. In the nineteenth century, Piedmontese capitalists stripped the island for timber to build railways for the mainland. The native people featured as an attraction for Europe’s Grand Tourists, who regarded them as a curious sampling of primitives. By 1900, the reaping of the fields was still done by hand. Insect plagues were of such... Читать дальше...

I had the misfortune of publishing my first book in March 2020—right into the teeth of the worst pandemic in modern history. The 40-stop book tour I had planned was supplanted by a few glitchy and disjointed Zoom events before the quantum leap in teleconferencing began.