Новости за 19.05.2022

The Western, until quite recently, was especially valuable as a mythic preserve: a form in which Good and Evil could be easily identified and in which Good could triumph. Lately it is becoming an arena for exultation in gore with perhaps a fade-out nod to virtue—a Theater of Cruelty on the cheap. The Italian-made Westerns have done it in an almost childish way: their gore is so patently contrived that the shock is merely annoying, like a boy’s thrusting a dead mouse in your face and cackling at your disgust. Читать дальше...

The United States will be asking a lot of its electric grid over the coming decades. Everything from home heating to transportation will need to move to the grid, as a system built to distribute electrons out from a central source transforms to accept them back from millions of rooftop solar arrays—all as it swiftly excises coal and gas and weathers the climate crisis those fuel sources have already created. Given the magnitude of the task ahead, it’s understandable that people are asking questions about how electricity is governed. Читать дальше...

In early May, the United States Federal Reserve ordered the largest interest rate hike in over 20 years. This week, Fed Chair Jerome Powell declared he “won’t hesitate” to go even further, calling action on inflation an “unconditional need.”

At 17, Gustavo Otzoy emigrated from Guatemala to Los Angeles, where he was held in immigrant detention for nearly three weeks. On his first day free, he explored Echo Park Lake—16 acres of grass, paths, and palm trees, an expansive body of water, a pristine view of the downtown skyline. Nearly 40 years later, now a U.S. citizen, Otzoy found himself heading back to the park. He’d just been released after serving a yearlong sentence in prison. He couldn’t return to the home he’d once owned in Palmdale... Читать дальше...

The famous athlete doubts the planet
is round and sweet. Its magnetic navel
adrift escapes like leaves turned dryly
underfoot. The moon, so
immense you can smell its breath,
demands its sugar like your Great
Aunt Ginny. A flame deflates atop
a skull. So sweet, this scent, so many
flies. Éluard writes, “the Earth
is blue like an orange.” Watch it quiver,
as on a Globetrotter’s finger. The universe,
a smoke-filled soap bubble, dances
iridescent in space. Читать дальше...

Tomorrow he’ll be ordinary again
but today I watch his familiar charge,
the ritual pulls and tugs. All month
a kind of gloom—sea turtles strangled
in fishing nets, their bodies like temples
in the sand. I want to get close, examine
their shells for divination texts. For a billion
years we were told a tortoise held four elephants
on its back and the elephants held the world.
It’s hard not to think: dead turtle, dead world.

I tell my husband it happened a hundred years
ago. Читать дальше...

Justice Clarence Thomas, the senior member of the ascendant wing of the Supreme Court, has some concerns. He is worried about the court’s perception among the American people as it turns further and further to the right. He is dismayed by the decline of the court’s internal trust and mutual respect after its soon-to-be ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade went public a few weeks ago. And he does not seem to appreciate his own role in bringing these circumstances about.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen traveled to Poland this week to urge support for a 15 percent global minimum tax on corporate income. These negotiations are slow going, but the Poles will be pushovers compared to the United States Senate. The same Senate Republicans who wish to impose a minimum income tax on people refuse to impose one on corporations.

To never be touched again. That line
has a sound. Hear it?
I don’t want to bring a story
to it. Not even an image.
It has a sound. Listen.

When I was young and dreamy,
I longed to be a poet,
not one with his arms
wrapped around the universe
or on his knees before a goddess,
not waving from Mount Parnassus
nor wearing a cape like Lord Byron,
rather just reporting on a dog or an orange.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. An erratic, buffoonish Republican with dangerous ideas is rising in the polls and surging into contention in his party primary. Democrats, fearing the possibility that the primary might produce a nominee palatable enough to make inroads with moderates, see the more extreme candidate as an easy mark and boost his candidacy. In some instances, they open their own wallets, spending big on elaborate ad buys that help him broaden his appeal with primary voters. Читать дальше...