Новости за 27.12.2022

Four power substations in the state of Washington were attacked on Sunday, knocking out power for more than 14,000 customers. The Christmas day station attackers damaged equipment at each station and set a fire at one.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter, Tesla’s stock value has been cut in half. Musk’s reckless behavior—from reinstating far-right radicals and banning journalists, to haphazardly laying off workers, posting Nazi pictures, encouraging people to vote Republican, and alienating advertisers galore—has played a large role in the dramatic free-fall.

Over the holiday, New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi produced a compulsively readable dispatch on the nascent presidential campaign of Donald Trump, who has been largely holed up at Mar-a-Lago since leaving office. It’s a detail-rich endeavor, but one particular factoid jumped out: Trump apparently is a massive fan of Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, in which Gloria Swanson cemented her icon status playing the role of Norma Desmond: a silent film–era superstar driven to near madness by her own keen sense of faded glory... Читать дальше...

Representative-elect and apparent serial fabulist George Santos is back in the news, and he comes bearing even worse explanations than ever for the many noteworthy discrepancies in his biography.

Given a slew of recent events, plus an abysmal showing by the Republican candidates in the 2022 midterms, there is a very good possibility that 2023 will be the year the Republican Party finally cuts ties with the man who has in the last three election cycles proven himself to be electoral poison.

Midway through Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise (1985), Jack Gladney, professor of Hitler studies at a generic, brochure-friendly liberal arts college, is about to sit down for dinner when sirens start blaring. Over the radio, there are news reports of a mysterious “black billowing cloud” sweeping the region. Seconds later, the story is updated; it is now an “airborne toxic event.” Jack and his (fourth) wife, the self-medicating, spacey Babette, go on with their meal. They can fathom their own deaths (an obsessive fear they share)... Читать дальше...

Los Angeles City Councilman Kevin de León has said he will not resign in the wake of racist audio featuring him and other councilmembers that scandalized the City Council in the weeks before the midterm elections. His stated reason for clinging to power? The beleaguered city lawmaker says that he wants to increase his focus on addressing homelessness in his district. “No, I will not resign, because there is a lot of work ahead,” he said in an October interview with Noticiero Univision, specifically... Читать дальше...

From book bans to bomb threats, 2022 has been characterized by a disturbing rise in right-wing violence brought on by the viral moral panic of very online fearmongers. And the biggest target of this mayhem has been the transgender community. Figures like Libs of TikTok’s Chaya Raichik, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and the Manhattan Institute’s Chris Rufo have joined conservative politicians in flooding right-wing airwaves with hate speech and misinformation on issues like gender-affirming care and children’s sports. Читать дальше...

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, it shook the country in ways that I don’t think anyone fully anticipated. Ahead of the decision, it was easy to point to data saying that most people and health professionals thought the procedure should be fully legal. But after the decision, there was no longer any room for doubt about what the people truly wanted.