Новости за 27.03.2017

On January 22, 1930, not quite three months after the stock-market crash and the ensuing economic collapse, the Times, in a front-page article, quoted President Herbert Hoover saying that “the tide of employment has changed in the right direction.” His Secretary of Labor, James J. Davis, citing reports on America’s industries, pronounced the country “well on the way to complete recovery.”

When my mother’s mother was in her early twenties, a century ago, a suitor took her duck hunting in a rowboat on a lake near Austin, Texas, where she grew up. He steadied his shotgun by resting the barrel on her right shoulder—she was sitting in the bow—and when he fired he not only missed the duck but also permanently damaged her hearing, especially on that side. The loss became more severe as she got older, and by the time I was in college she was having serious trouble with telephones. (“I’m glad it’s not raining! Читать дальше...

“Riverdale,” which airs on the CW, has a witty conceit: take the “Archie” comic-book characters, then peer at them through the neon-noir lens of “Twin Peaks.” Riverdale is now a run-down maple-syrup town, where snooty founding families are hiding dark secrets. Veronica Lodge is a Bettie Page-style bombshell; Archie Andrews is a sensitive jock with a six-pack; Betty Cooper is a virgin with a blond ponytail, but she’s also an amateur detective who takes Ritalin. The show’s banter is up to date—“What do you say... Читать дальше...

At a town-hall meeting in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last March, Donald Trump was prompted for his views about abortion. He’d been pro-choice once, but as a Presidential candidate he was an eager, if ill-informed, pro-lifer. Much of his answer took the form of free-floating clauses, like dialogue from a bad experimental play, which made his actual positions challenging to parse. But Trump did manage to make one point clearly, and to repeat it. When the interviewer, Chris Matthews, of MSNBC, asked whether... Читать дальше...

Not long ago, Fay Ennis, a retired market-research executive who just celebrated her ninety-second birthday, was telling family members stories from her past, which turned into an occasion for bringing out a box of moody black-and-white photographs. She had posed for them seventy years ago, as a graduate student at Columbia, where Margaret Mead was one of her professors. The pictures were taken by Saul Leiter, who later became well known as a member of the so-called New York School.

Divided We Stand, by Marjorie J. Spruill (Bloomsbury). In 1977, thousands of feminists flooded Houston for the federally funded National Women’s Conference, bringing together a diverse, bipartisan group of women to adopt a National Plan of Action—the culmination of an era of rapid legislative gains for women. The same weekend, anti-feminist forces, led by the charismatic and caustic Phyllis Schlafly, held a nearly all-white Pro-Life, Pro-Family Rally across town, mobilizing a radical-conservative movement that was to grow rapidly. Читать дальше...

Near the counter of the old, lamented Avenue Victor Hugo Bookshop in Boston, there were boxes of ephemera: the standard hodgepodge of mangy postcards, wedding announcements, lobby cards, 45s, hippie stickers and patches, Civil Defense pamphlets and evacuation maps, poker chips, Old Maid decks, and the like, along with skinny small-press or homemade books, some even handwritten. It was in one of those boxes, in the early nineties, that I found a copy of “Are You Ready, Mary Baker Eddy???,” published... Читать дальше...

Unenlightened

In Adam Gopnik’s review of recent works on the crisis in liberalism, he discusses Joel Mokyr’s theory, laid out in his book “A Culture of Change,” that the successful exchanges between scientists and artisans are often what propel the growth of a civilization (Books, March 20th). But Mokyr’s true concern is a more fundamental cultural question: Why did some sixteenth-century Europeans start thinking that they could materially improve their lives? He concludes that, in the course of the previous two hundred years... Читать дальше...

We were cold. All day we were cold.We thought of bitter gods (hard not to think of godsso close to the heavens) and were frightened.The mountain is divided. On one side the sun spilled its brilliance.The snow glistened. The aspen and birch trees stood tall and tiny mountain chickadees chased one another in strangeand compelling harmony. If there was terrorism in our midst,we did not know it. If there was an animal that threatened us,we did not sense it, though one of us saw a wolf lurking in the forest. Читать дальше...

A few years ago, after he starred in “Transformers,” the actor Shia LaBeouf seemed poised to become the next Johnny Depp; instead, he started behaving more like the next James Franco. In 2014, he showed up at the Berlin Film Festival wearing a tuxedo, with a brown paper bag over his head. This was a piece of performance art called “I AM NOT FAMOUS ANYMORE,” which he had created with the artists Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner. The trio went on to produce a skywriting project, a hitchhiking project... Читать дальше...

Last Monday, twenty-one public-school students burst through the door of a building at Thirty-ninth Street and Lancaster Avenue, in West Philadelphia, for a session of Fake News Finders, an after-school workshop run by the nonprofit group Mighty Writers. An eight-year-old named Thomas parked his scooter opposite a framed photograph of Barack Obama beneath a “Black Lives Matter” banner. A ten-year-old named Musa carried his violin sheet music. James, eleven, had a backpack filled with snacks. All but three of the students were boys. Читать дальше...

In the early nineteen-sixties, when cholesterol was declared an enemy of health, my parents quickly enlisted in the war on fat. Onion rolls slathered with butter, herring in thick cream sauce, brisket of beef with a side of stuffed derma, and other staples of our family cuisine disappeared from our table. Margarine dethroned butter, vinegar replaced cream sauce, poached fish substituted for brisket. I recall experiencing something like withdrawal, daydreaming about past feasts as my stomach grumbled. Читать дальше...

A giant step up into the dip—the unavoidable tremble of cocktail tumblersagainst bottles of bourbon and bittersdroning the spitoon.

Georgi, a Russian refugee who came to Sweden with his family when he was five years old, could talk at length about the virtues of the Volvo. His doctor described him as “the most ‘Swedeified’ in his family.” He was also one of the most popular boys in his class. For his thirteenth birthday, two friends listed some of the qualities that he evoked: energetic, fun, happy all the time, good human being, amazingly kind, awesome at soccer, sly.

One evening last November, a fifty-four-year-old woman from the Bronx arrived at the emergency room at Columbia University’s medical center with a grinding headache. Her vision had become blurry, she told the E.R. doctors, and her left hand felt numb and weak. The doctors examined her and ordered a CT scan of her head.

On a velvety March evening in Mandeville Canyon, high above the rest of Los Angeles, Norman Lear’s living room was jammed with powerful people eager to learn the secrets of longevity. When the symposium’s first speaker asked how many people there wanted to live to two hundred, if they could remain healthy, almost every hand went up. Understandably, then, the Moroccan phyllo chicken puffs weren’t going fast. The venture capitalists were keeping slim to maintain their imposing vitality, the scientists... Читать дальше...

Nebraskans are being encouraged to pick their favorite turtle, snake or lizard to become the first state reptile.

The Nebraska Game and Parks Commission is offering boater safety classes.

The Ethel S. Abbott Charitable Foundation provided endowments and grants in 2016 totaling $807,200, trustees said in a news release.

Park became South Korea's first democratically elected president to be removed from office when a court upheld her impeachment this month.