Новости за 15.03.2023

After a Norfolk Southern derailment crippled East Palestine, Ohio, and after Congress had its first hearing taking the company to task for industry corruption, federal regulators on Wednesday approved the first major U.S. corporate railroad merger in more than two decades: Canadian Pacific’s $31 billion acquisition of Kansas City Southern.

Texas-based Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk is poised to change the entire market for abortion pills.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously accepted a draft plan with suggestions on how to pay millions in reparations to the city’s Black residents, in an effort to atone for centuries of slavery and systemic racism.

A just society would not allow teachers to hit disabled kids at school. Sounds reasonable enough, right? Well, Oklahoma Republicans disagree.

The people are not letting the government off the hook for breaking promises. Numerous conservation, environmental, local, and indigenous advocacy groups have filed lawsuits against the government to stop Willow, a massive oil drilling project in Alaska set to pillage up to 600 million barrels of crude oil over 30 years.

The liberal arts in higher education are in crisis. At state schools and private colleges alike, administrators are eliminating majors, reducing programs, and sacrificing the traditional calling of the university on an altar of financial efficiency. My alma mater, Valparaiso University, a small Lutheran university in northwest Indiana, has momentarily become ground zero in the battle over the values and priorities that will determine the future of higher education in the United States.

Roald Dahl’s children’s books are not exactly the nicest. Dahl’s characters glory in insults and meanness. The adults are generally horrible, the children gleefully vengeful; his bullies usually get their comeuppance. So when it came out recently that Dahl’s publishers had edited new editions of his work with the help of “sensitivity” readers, it was hardly surprising—and it was also hard not to laugh. How much can a handful of essentially cosmetic changes really do? On episode 63 of The Politics of Everything... Читать дальше...

In the December 2022 print edition of The New Republic, I explored the possible futures the United States could face under the anti-democratic pressures it is now experiencing. One of the more likely outcomes was a “Two Americas” scenario, where the Supreme Court broadly upheld states’ rights, and red states were unable (or unwilling) to press the issue of turning California into a legal clone of Alabama or Florida.

Even for haters, it’s hard to deny that the pitch for Apple TV+’s Ted Lasso is a pretty audacious play. The fish-out-of-water show follows the titular Ted Lasso, an affable caricature of an aggressively optimistic Midwestern college football coach, as he accepts a job to coach a struggling Premier League soccer team in London. It’s not necessarily meant as a dig to say that the premise of this show could plausibly also describe a Super Bowl beer commercial or a cut-for-time Saturday Night Live sketch. Читать дальше...

Tennessee Republicans are continuing the assault on trans people’s rights, this time by arguing they shouldn’t be able to have their driver’s licenses reflect who they are.