Новости за 10.11.2016

Class trumps gender in American politics. Sexism worked against Hillary Clinton, but class resent­ment worked against her far more. “A few days’ paid leave ain’t gonna support a family. Neither is minimum wage. Men aren’t interested in working at McDonald’s for $15 per hour instead of $9.50. What they want are steady jobs that deliver a solid middle-class life to Americans who don’t have a college degree. Trump promises that. I doubt he’ll deliver, but at least he understands what they need”

The British Crown unseals the archives of Windsor Castle, a “treasure trove of nearly 350,000 documents”, including George III’s essay on the loss of the American colonies. “He had never seen the American continent, and rarely set foot outside London. But his private papers reveal that he closely tracked the war’s path in maps and regiment lists. A man of routine, he dated his daily letters to the minute as the conflict raged on. He tried hard to picture the England that his children would inherit”

Conrad’s novel imagined as a building. “The skyscraper is composed of a clean, well-defined volume and a formless, organic, irregular mass that seems to be enveloping the volume while supporting it and, at the same time, oozing from it like a leak from a crack. The shape of the central, glass and steel building is that of an upside-down truncated square pyramid—tall and slender, bright and reflective like a spear stuck into the ground. The accretion is geometrically fluid. with few openings”

Discursive autobiographical essay about growing up in India, interspersed with digressions about history and myth, politics and culture, caste and wealth. “One does not simply exit the caste system, but one can sure as hell scramble it beyond recognition and render it unusable by having software and urban modernity eat it. This, incidentally, has been the single most positive development I’ve witnessed in my life. If software can eat the Indian caste system, it can eat anything”

A mea culpa on behalf of the American press. “We journalists made the same mistake the Republicans made, the same mistake the Democrats made. We were too sure of our own influence, too lazy to bother hearing things first-hand, too much in love with ourselves to imagine that so many people could hate and distrust us as much as they apparently do.Just like the politicians, our job was to listen, and we talked instead. Now America will do its own talking for a while”

Sufferers from Capgras Syndrome believe that loved ones have been replaced by identical imposters. Robert Capgras, the psychiatrist who catalogued the disorder in 1918, interpreted it as a delusion. Later it was recategorised as an organic disease of the frontal cortex. But as we move through social media to virtual reality, Capgras may prove an evolutionary strength. “It’s not that loved ones and friends are mistaken for simulations, but that simulations are mistaken for them”