History Readings

“The Beneficiary” describes the making and spending of “a moderately sized American fortune” that lasted from one Gilded Age to another. It is often very funny, with some moments paced like a drawing room comedy.

Yet the duke inherited something more (or other) than money, and what comes to dominate his daughter’s narrative is her sense of wealth’s “misfortune.”

money is always being made and somewhere another such “‘place’ is being born,” in the Bay Area or China or Mumbai. “Maybe it’s fueled by a fortune reaped in private equity or online shopping or social media,” but wherever it is and by whomever it’s made that money will hire the day’s most fashionable architects, it will buy yachts and throw big parties, for “the signifiers of arrival are remarkably unchanged.”

The words of Bill O’Reilly from 2007 echo in my memory: “But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have.” Is that what this is all about?

In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.

Americans still loved technology, Khanna said, but too many of them felt locked out of the country’s economic future and were looking for someone to blame.

Without an intervention, he worried that wealth would continue to pile up in Silicon Valley and anger in the country would continue to grow. “It seems like every company in the world has to be here,” Larsen said. “It’s just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger.

whenever I can, I take the boy along with me. He is excellent company and possesses the key virtue of any co-traveler — the ability to roll with the punches.

I’ve taken him to Central America and the Middle East and Africa and Europe, and everywhere it is the same, an inspection of ephemerality. “Look at that bird,” I say, pointing to a white cotinga in Costa Rica. “Look before it goes.”

It is a fleet thing coursing through the mangrove forest, soaring over the black branches, out of view. I hold back a word. I do not say, “Look before it goes extinct.” But that is what I mean.

humans are not yet beyond saving themselves from the worst ravages of global warming. There’s fight in us yet, even if it’s a bit shapeless.

The problem – and it’s an existential threat both profound and perverse – is that those who lead us and have power over our shared destiny are ignoring global warming to the point of criminal negligence

Worse than that, their policies, language, patronal obligations and acts of bad faith are poisoning us, training citizens to accept the prospect of inexorable loss, unstoppable chaos, certain doom.

“In just a few hours today, 650 million euros was donated to rebuild Notre Dame,” South Africa-based journalist Simon Allison tweeted. “In six months, just 15 million euros has been pledged to restore Brazil’s National Museum. I think this is what they call white privilege.

we have slipped into some bad values. We're too individualistic, when we should be a little more communal. We're too cognitive, up in our head, and analytical, when we should be more emotional and relational. We steer our kids toward career success, and not toward moral joy.

But joy is when the self disappears, when you transcend yourself. There's a woman in the book who I interviewed in Ohio who the worst thing happened to her that could happen. She came home one Sunday, and her husband had killed their kids and himself.

I found people who realized the core truth, you can't solve your problems on the level of consciousness at which you created them. They went deeper into themselves. And they discovered a level of ability for care. And they lead marvelous lives.

The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren't, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real

The first force is Donald Trump, who represents a threat to the American systems of governance

I don’t know if his actions meet the legal standard of obstruction of justice, but they certainly meet the common-sense standard of interference with justice.

populist parties in Germany and Europe are increasingly campaigning against environmental rules. Such opposition perfectly fits into populist narratives and patterns: skepticism about science, anger over “political correctness” and a libertarian reflex against government regulations in general

The mainstream right is following suit, claiming to try to cut off the far right but in reality taking advantage of a suddenly attractive political target.

Environmental issues produce the same fundamental cleavages as migration. Both migration and environmental policies are aiming at global and moral goals that citizens profit from only in the abstract, while the costs are immediate.

today, digital platforms—which deliver exponentially more ads than their newsprint predecessors—are making these core civil-rights laws increasingly challenging to enforce. The opacity of the digital-ad ecosystem is a major barrier to ensuring justice and equal opportunity.

The study’s results show digital advertising working exactly as designed—and exactly in ways that can perpetuate the types of harms that civil-rights laws are meant to address. Simply put, ad platforms such as Facebook make money when people click on ads. But an individual’s tendency to click on certain types of ads (and not others) often reflects deep-seated social inequities: the neighborhood they live in, where they went to school, how much money they have. An ad system that is designed to maximize clicks, and to maximize profits for Facebook, will naturally reinforce these social inequities and so serve as a barrier to equal opportunity.

These dynamics are a perfect illustration of why the “disparate impact” doctrine—a bedrock principle of civil-rights law—is such an important tool in the era of algorithms. Under disparate impact, even unintentional actions can amount to illegal discrimination if they have an adverse impact on protected groups.

For much of human history, what we now call “privacy” was better known as being rich

depended on another, even more impressive achievement: the creation of a middle class

The historical link between privacy and the forces of wealth creation helps explain why privacy is under siege today. It reminds us, first, that mass privacy is not a basic feature of human existence but a byproduct of a specific economic arrangemen

Hundreds of human reviewers across the globe, from Romania to Venezuela, listen to audio clips recorded from Amazon Echo speakers, usually without owners’ knowledge

This global review team fine-tunes the Amazon Echo’s software by listening to clips of users asking Alexa questions or issuing commands, and then verifying whether Alexa responded appropriately.

Amazon says these recordings are anonymized, with any identifying information removed, and that each of these recorded exchanges came only after users engaged with the device by uttering the “wake word.”

the notion that free speech is an expression of one’s power rather than a contribution to truth or toward a reasonable settlement. In this notion, speech is more determined by one’s desire to get the better of an opponent or to defeat an enemy than offered as persuasion to an audience.

Speech is like a gesture or wail of defiance, a rallying cry, or shout of triumph. It is defined as coming from within oneself against the hostility awaiting from others in the outside world; it is not defined by the need to address them, their needs and their opinions. Speech is irrational rather than rational, for this view regards reason as nothing but an instrument of power with no power of its own.

Thus understood, free speech is no longer possible or desirable. It is diminished by the view that seizes on the power of speech to manipulate and denies its power to enlighten

The show, after all, is airing in an environment—its audiences’ own version of the Known World—that is itself being steadily shaped by lies. The leader who misleads with impunity, weaponizing lies as an easy means to uneasy ends. The system that allows him to do it, because the illusions often suit the purposes of the powerful. The wheel that, refusing to break, spins on through the dullness of inertia. The looming threat, totalizing and existential, dismissed as a fantasy; the war against it that will be fought with too few resources and insufficient conviction; the world that will be knocked off its axis by untruths molded into myths.

farmers, agricultural scientists and industry officials say a new threat has been ruining harvests, upending lives and adding to the surge of families migrating to the United States: climate change.

Gradually rising temperatures, more extreme weather events and increasingly unpredictable patterns — like rain not falling when it should, or pouring when it shouldn’t — have disrupted growing cycles and promoted the relentless spread of pests.

Central America is among the regions most vulnerable to climate change, scientists say. And because agriculture employs much of the labor force — about 28 percent in Honduras alone, according to the World Bank — the livelihoods of millions of people are at stake.

There is, or should be, a democratic element to capitalism — and an economic element to how we define democracy.

After all, oligarchy does have an economic element to it; in fact, it is explicitly economic. Oligarchy is the rule of the few, and these few have been understood since Aristotle’s time to be men of wealth, property, nobility, what have you.

But somehow, as the definition of democracy has been handed down to us over the years, the word has come to mean the existence and exercise of a few basic rights and principles. The people — the “demos” — are imbued with no particular economic characteristic. This is wrong. Our definition of democracy needs to change