http://www.gazeta.ru/comments/2016/03/14_e_8122775.shtml

A striking French taxi driver protests against Uber in Paris.Photograph: Charles Platiau/Reuters T o understand why we see so few genuine alternatives to US technology giants, it’s instructive to compare the fate of a company like Uber – valued at more than $62.5bn (£44bn) – and that of Kutsuplus ,…

Указание, которое Гитлер дал вермахту 18 декабря 1940 года о подготовке наступления против Советского Союза, погрузило немецкую военную промышленность в фатальное состояние. После быстрой победы над Францией участвовавшие военные и гражданские ведомства, правда, постарались оперативно компенсировать…

In late January, speaking in the Russian city of Stavropol, Vladimir Putin denounced Soviet Communist leader Vladimir Lenin for, as Putin put it, placing an "atomic bomb" under the foundations of the Soviet Union by nationality policies that allowed non-Russians the right to secede. Putin’s comments…

Bill Clinton, left, with Vladimir Putin. William Perry, one, of Clinton’s defence secretaries, said that gains in cooperation after the Cold War ‘were initially squandered more as a result of US actions than Russian’.Photograph: Stephen Jaffe/EPA The current level of hostility in US-Russian…

Open Letter: On Blasphemy, Islamophobia, and the True Enemies of Free Expression by Charb, with a foreword by Adam Gopnik Who Is Charlie?: Xenophobia and the New Middle Class by Emmanuel Todd, translated from the French by Andrew Brown, with maps and diagrams by Philippe Laforgue Situation de la…

About a quarter way into Jeffrey Goldberg’s intimate profile of President Obama, Goldberg mentions German Chancellor Angela Merkel: “one of the few foreign leaders Obama respects.” Thirty-five years ago, The Atlantic ran one of the most famous interviews in the history of journalism: Bill Greider’s…

On January 14, Germany’s Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier gave his inaugural speech to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE), which Berlin will chair during 2016. Steinmeier had one message. “Renewing dialogue, rebuilding trust and restoring security are our…

Moscow and Beyond: 1986-1989 by Andrei Sakharov Hutchinson, 168 pp, £14.99, April 1991, ISBN 0 09 174972 7 Fatal Half-Measures: The Allure of Democracy in the Soviet Union by Yevgeny Yevtushenko , edited and translated by Antonia Bovis Little, Brown, 357 pp, £12.95, May 1991, ISBN 0 316 96883 8 The…

Modern Russia has a reputation for being racist. And for good reason. The number of racist acts committed by Russian football fans doubled last season, according to researchers from the Moscow-based Sova Centre and the Uefa-affiliated Fare Network. There is global concern that the country, which is…

If you follow the news these days, it’s hard not to feel a bit of a chill. The most successful retailer in the United States treats its employees – whether the worker-bees in far-flung warehouses or Ivy League software engineers at a fancy Seattle campus – in ways we used to consider inhumane . A…

Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Republican presidential candidates, Senator Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, Detroit, Michigan, March 3, 2016 The first half of March 2016 may well go down as the turning point in this election and one of the most consequential periods in the history of nomination politics.…

Mickey (Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (Paul Rust) in Netflix’s Love . Suzanne Hanover/Netflix Binge-watching, unlike the binges of gluttons and addicts, has positive associations. When a TV show is described as bingeable, it is a compliment. The idea that binging is something one does when a show is good,…

Mar 4, 2016 Emma Watson played Hermione Granger in eight Harry Potter movies between 2001 and 2011, beginning when she was just ten years old. Since then she has combined work as an actor ( The Perks of Being a Wallflower , The Bling Ring , Noah ) with modelling for Burberry and Lancôme and reading…

Buy When China Rules the World: The Rise of the Middle Kingdom and the End of the Western World by Martin Jacques Allen Lane, 550 pp, £30.00, June 2009, ISBN 978 0 7139 9254 0 Buy Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics: Entrepreneurship and the State by Yasheng Huang Cambridge, 348 pp, £15.99,…

Buy Uncivil Society: 1989 and the Implosion of the Communist Establishment by Stephen Kotkin , with Jan Gross Modern Library, 240 pp, $24.00, October 2009, ISBN 978 0 679 64276 3 Buy Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen Weidenfeld, 451 pp, £25.00, July 2009, ISBN 978 0…

После выстрелов на мосту уже нельзя было воскресить хорошего и честного человека, открытого и порядочного, о личных качествах которого тепло отзывались даже его политические оппоненты. Но еще можно было быстро, честно и открыто расследовать это убийство. Тем более что об исполнителях, если верить…

За этой голливудской интригой, умело подогреваемой пиаром, наблюдал весь мир. За минуту после объявления, что ДиКаприо взял наконец своего «Оскара», в Twitter было написано 440 тыс. твитов на эту тему. Предыдущий рекорд принадлежал знаменитому звездному селфи Элен Де Дженерес — 225 тыс. твитов в…

Everyone who has seriously worked in politics and journalism agrees that this has been the strangest and least predictable presidential campaign we’ve ever seen. This is largely because of Donald Trump’s angry elephantine presence. Though not solely: Bernie Sanders’s fund-raising prowess and skill…

Gary He for Facebook Cory Booker, then mayor of Newark, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg with eleventh-grade math students at the KIPP Newark Collegiate Academy, a charter school, September 2010 In recent years, American public education has been swamped by bad ideas and policies. Our national…

Literary editors who write novels are like princesses who get involved in the manufacture of tiaras: they want a piece of the action, sure, but also they must want to play a more invigorating part in creating the dazzle that defines them. Some editors, like William Maxwell, are novelists no matter…

Mike Stone/Reuters Senator Marco Rubio, Donald Trump, and Senator Ted Cruz at CNN’s Republican debate in Houston, Texas, February 25, 2016 With the results of Tuesday’s nearly dozen contests, most of them in the South, both parties are well on their way to having their candidates. But they’re a long…

Though the show has movie-star charisma, it reeks of macho nonsense. Credit Illustration by Victor Melamed Judged purely on style, HBO’s “True Detective” is a great show. Every week, it offers up shiver-inducing cable intoxicants, from an over-the-top action sequence so liquid it rivals a Scorsese…

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/27/the_admirable_unloveable_parades_end/

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? How has Donald Trump , seemingly out of nowhere,…

Šis temats lielā mērā saistīts nevis ar politoloģiju šī vārda šaurā nozīmē, lai aprakstītu dažādus totalitārus režīmus un pastāstītu, ar ko tie atšķiras no vienkārši autoritāriem režīmiem vai citiem, bet gan ar totalitārisma fascināciju. Proti, ja runājam par totalitārisma pieredzi, ieliekot šo…

Every generation has its clever young men, and Keith Gessen must be counted among them in his. Three years ago he co-founded n+1 , a clever yet chasteningly serious little magazine that offers thoughtful articles about such things as the history of the office cubicle and gravely assesses "the…

By Heart is a series in which authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature. See entries from Karl Ove Knausgaard, Jonathan Franzen, Amy Tan, Khaled Hosseini, and more. Doug McLean The debate about whether fictional characters should be sympathetic tends to focus on…

For its most ardent champions, enthusiasm for coding comes close to evangelism. From Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt—“Let’s get the whole world coding!”—and the actor Ashton Kutcher, to the NBA player Chris Bosh and the rap royalty Snoop Dogg —“support tha american dream n make coding…