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For the past decade or more, Tufton Street has been the primary command center for libertarian lobbying groups, a free-market ideological workshop cloistered quietly in the heart of power.

the package was more than folly. It was the consummation of plans designed on Tufton Street, and of an alliance with Ms. Truss stretching back years. Under her watch, Britain has become a libertarian laboratory.

Those plans are, in outline, very simple. The libertarian groups based on the street — by the latest count, there were six of them (with two more close by) — operate as a coordinated nexus of policy wonks and media whisperers. In the words of Shahmir Sanni, who worked for the Vote Leave pro-Brexit referendum campaign originally based at 55 Tufton Street, they have one basic instinct: “that anything funded by the state is wrong.” Shrinking the state, cutting taxes and ushering private companies into the public realm are their guiding principles.

Experts say that younger collectors often regard art from the distant past as remote and irrelevant, and find the technical aspects of a sale off-putting. “Old masters are difficult to approach because of the problem of condition and attribution,” Turquin said. Today’s buyers tend to be interested in paintings by artists who are under 45 0c, not over 400.

The fixation with “the Now” (as Sotheby’s calls its most of-the-moment auction category) could be viewed as just a byproduct of fashionable 21st-century life. But for sociologists, changes in the art market are one of the many elements that reflect how the pace and preoccupations of our culture have altered over more than 100 years. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen’s landmark socio-economic study, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” showed how free time and superfluity — what we now call luxury — conferred status, or “reputability,” on the wealthiest individuals in late 19th-century America.

First, the broad strokes: In 2019, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimated that 15.8 percent of American adults took prescription pills for mental health.

We are depressed, anxious, tired and distracted. What’s new is this: Almost a quarter of Americans over the age of 18 are now medicated for one or more of these conditions.

according to data provided to The Times by Express Scripts, a pharmacy benefits manager, prescriptions across three categories of mental health medications — depression, anxiety and A.D.H.D. — have all risen since the pandemic began. But they have done so unevenly, telling a different story for each age group and each class of medication.

There is a bitter irony in Cheney’s fall: She is being undone by the very politics her father championed. Weaponizing patriotism? Abandoning the truth? Vice President Dick Cheney was a pioneer.

In my new book, “The Destructionists: The Twenty-Five-Year Crack-Up of the Republican Party,” I traced the actions of GOP leaders who essentially created the Trump era by removing the guardrails of our political system. Dick Cheney was one such leader.

her father abandoned the truth in the most profound way, starting a war on the basis of lies. Liz Cheney denounces the evil of preying on patriotism. But her father was a key figure in a White House that politicized the 9/11 attacks and portrayed the administration’s opponents as traitors.

Mr. Obama’s and Mr. Fisher’s plan hinged on recruiting blue-collar whites back into a reborn version of the March on Washington coalition. According to Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher, these votes could be won over with a platform that appealed to both the values and the material interests of working people. That meant shifting away from race-based initiatives toward universal economic policies whose benefits would, in practice, tilt toward African Americans — in short, “use class as a proxy for race.”

Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher didn’t pretend that racism had been expunged from American life. “Precisely because America is a racist society,” they wrote, “we cannot realistically expect white America to make special concessions towards blacks over the long haul.”

Demanding that white Americans grapple with four centuries of racial oppression might be a morally respectable position, but it was terrible politics. “Those blacks who most fervently insist on the pervasiveness of white racism have adopted a strategy that depends on white guilt for its effectiveness,” they wrote, ridiculing the idea that whites would “one day wake up, realize the error of their ways, and provide blacks with wholesale reparations in order to expiate white demons.”

military historian Antony Beevor suggests that it could be as many as 12 million people. Other estimates range higher still

The Whites unleashed their own terror. “We were forbidden to shoot prisoners,” wrote one White soldier. “They were to be killed with a sabre or the bayonet. Ammunition was too precious and had to be kept for combat.” Some captured Reds were burned alive, while Cossacks would whip Reds to death “with metal ramrods, bury them in the ground up to their neck and then cut off the head with their sabre, or castrate them, and hang them on trees in their dozens.

White forces sometimes paused their pursuit of the Reds to carry out pogroms; during the civil war, an estimated 50,000 to 60,000 Jews were murdered. About such things my beloved uncle Boris did not speak (nor did I, more than 50 years ago, know what to ask him), except to acknowledge, in his memoirs, that in fighting the Communists his fellow Whites “tended not to take prisoners.”

The scientists at the bench discovered that the money markets would not only punish left-wing experiments in changing the balance between states and markets, but they were also sensitive to experiments that pushed too far to the right. A cowed Ms. Truss apologized, and Mr. Kwarteng’s successor has reversed almost all of the planned cuts and limited the term for energy supports.

The mini-budget subjected the entire economy to experimental treatment. This was put in explicit terms in a celebratory post by a Tory journalist and think tanker claiming that Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng had been “incubated” by the Institute of Economic Affairs in their early years and “Britain is now their laboratory.”

ince the 1970s, the world of think tanks had embraced a framing of the world in terms of discrete spaces that could become what they called laboratories for new policies

Writing in the wake of the 2008 financial crash, Slama asked ‘whether our old democracies, faced with an economic, sociological, demographic and intellectual shock unprecedented in the last 70 years, are in danger of evolving in a direction comparable… to the tribal and arbitrary model that is hampering the development of most Third World countries.’

The 2008 crash was just the first shock of many to strike the West, each one weakening further its foundations. The overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011 precipitated the first great migrant crisis, and Angela Merkel provoked the second four years later by opening Europe’s borders to more than a million migrants; Islamic terrorism has left hundreds dead; Covid lockdowns caused irreparable economic, mental and social damage; environmental obsessiveness is reawakening class divisions; progressive radicalism is stoking identitarian tensions and the war in Ukraine has sent energy prices and inflation soaring.

France is at the epicentre of these shockwaves, and a growing number of prominent thinkers and commentators are warning that culturally and economically the country is in grave danger. In a recent interview the economist Agnes Verdier Molinié cautioned that ‘France is on the verge of bankruptcy’ and that the annual cost of its debt will hit €70 billion in 2024

In May 1945 a lone Russian soldier approached the Brinnlitz Nazi labour camp on a horse. He had come to tell the inmates they were free. Delighted as they were — the soldier was rewarded with hugs — the newly liberated men and women were also bewildered. Where would they go now?Realising that their liberator was, like them, a Jew, the former prisoners peppered him with questions. “Have you been in Poland?” they asked, since that was where most of them had come from. “Yes,” replied the officer, “I’ve just come from Poland.” “Are there any Jews left up there?” The officer told them what was simply the truth: “I saw none.”So where should they go? The officer looked them in the face: “I don’t know where you ought to go. Don’t go east — that much I can tell you. But don’t go west either.” He paused and added: “They don’t like us anywhere.”

My mother’s father, Alfred Wiener, had been one of the leaders of Germany’s Jews in the 1920s and 1930s and articulated the view of most German Jews at that time, though by no means all of them. He supported those Jews who wanted to settle in Palestine, but he didn’t support the creation of a Jewish state there.

As I relate in my recent family memoir, Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad, in 1927 Alfred published a highly successful book based on his travels in Palestine. He argued strongly against the Zionist project. There were, he said, too many Jews in Europe to fit into such a tiny area, the economic ideas of the settlers were utopian, and (he was a considerable Arabic scholar) peace with Palestinian Arabs would be hard to come by. His critics said that his survey of the area was biased and described him as “one of the leaders of German anti-Zionism”.

The more I covered Biden, the more I came to feel affection and respect for him. Then, as now, he could be a tough boss, occasionally angry and hard on his staff. But throughout his life, Biden has usually been on the side of the underdog. I’ve rarely met a politician so rooted in the unpretentious middle-class ethos of the neighborhood he grew up in. He has a seemingly instinctive ability to bond with those who are hurting.

He has his faults — the tendency to talk too much, the chip on his shoulder about those who think they are smarter than he is, the gaffes, that episode of plagiarism and the moments of confusion — but I’ve always thought: Give me a leader who identifies with those who feel looked down upon. Give me a leader whose moral compass generally sends him in the right direction.

But I’ve also come to fear and loathe Donald Trump. I cannot fathom what damage that increasingly deranged man might do to this country if given a second term. And the fact is that as the polls and the mood of the electorate stand today, Trump has a decent chance of beating Biden in November of next year and regaining power in 2025.

Health care

before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it.

Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.

the Lost Cause was far more than a military narrative. It provided a comprehensive account of the war’s origins, conduct, and consequences. The conflict, in this telling, had little to do with slavery, but instead was caused, depending on which book you read, by the protective tariff, arguments over states’ rights, or white southerners’ desire for individual liberty. Confederate soldiers were defeated not by superior generalship or greater fighting spirit but by the Union’s advantages in manpower, resources, and industrial technology.

And the nation’s victory was marred by what followed: the era of Reconstruction, portrayed as a time of corruption and misgovernment, when the southern white population was subjected to the humiliation of “Negro domination.” This account of history was easily understandable and, like all ideologies, most convincing to those who benefited from it—proponents of white supremacy.

After the war, Longstreet had emerged as a singular figure: the most prominent white southerner to join the Republican Party and proclaim his support for Black male suffrage and officeholding. Leading the biracial Louisiana militia and the New Orleans Metropolitan Police, he also battled violent believers in white supremacy.

No one has known what happened to the princes in the Tower, but a consensus has long held that Richard III probably had them bumped off. However, the woman who found the king’s remains in a car park now believes she has cleared him of murder.

Philippa Langley, who discovered the last Plantagenet king’s remains in Leicester 11 years ago, believes that the princes, Edward V and Richard, Duke of York, were not murdered and later became the so-called pretenders to the throne, Lambert Simnel and Perkin Warbeck.

She believes that four key documents have provided proof that the boys were alive in the years after Richard III’s reign. They have all been shown to be contemporaneous to the period, and are also explored in more detail in her new book, The Princes in the Tower.

Fascism is not mere oppression. It is a more holistic ideology that elevates the state over the individual (except for a sole leader, around whom there is a cult of personality), glorifies hypernationalism and racism, worships military power, hates liberal democracy, and wallows in nostalgia and historical grievances. It asserts that all public activity should serve the regime, and that all power must be gathered in the fist of the leader and exercised only by his party.

According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill. (A rare benefit of his disordered character is that his defensiveness and pettiness likely continue to limit the size of his personality cult.)

We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists, fascists. We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country … On Veterans Day, we pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country, that lie and steal and cheat on elections and will do anything possible … legally or illegally to destroy America and to destroy the American dream.

“I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.

Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”

what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind

At this time of year, students are buying textbooks and looking for ways to avoid reading them

What has changed is how many study guides, or cheat sheets, are available online and on mobile phones. Whether you know them as CliffsNotes, SparkNotes or Shmoop, these seemingly ubiquitous guides are now, in many cases, free.

“Two to three years ago, the wisdom was that students do research online, but not study online,” said Emily Sawtell, a founder of McGraw-Hill’s online collaborative study site called GradeGuru. “That has changed in the last 12 months.” Ms. Sawtell said she had tracked a significant increase in the search term “study guide” on Google.

here is no reason to panic. The United States has had a nearly perfect economic cooling over the past few years, maintaining a strong jobs market and good GDP growth while settling down from the post-covid reopening highs. We are not only doing better than anyone expected; we are doing far better than our peers in Europe, including Britain, and Japan

So, what’s going on? Something that sounds bad but is, in reality, encouraging: The era of cheap is over.

The past five years — which have featured a pandemic, the war in Ukraine and the aftermath of both — signal the end to an economy that was based on cheap everything: cheap money, cheap energy and cheap labor

Given how controversial New College is, why do you want to teach there now?Well, the simple nitty gritty reason is that I’m 85 years old, and someone who asks me to teach courses is a godsend. So I responded affirmatively.

t first I wanted to ask about Ralston College, in Savannah, Ga., which you’ve been involved with at the planning stage, and which seems to promise a kind of great books or neotraditional education.

It took about a decade of fundraising and planning and gift-giving for the college to begin but it’s now in operation. I was there less than a year ago, giving a lecture and talking to students and faculty members. I gave a talk about hate speech and free speech. And the morning before the talk, I attended a class on Homer, the Iliad. What was amazing about it was that not only was the Iliad being read in the original Greek, but the conversations between the students and the faculty member were being conducted in Greek. And six months before this course began, no student in it — and there were about 25 — had any knowledge whatsoever of the Greek language or Greek culture.