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Across the street, Keandra McDole, sister of a wheelchair-bound Black man who was killed in 2015 by the Delaware police, chanted “Lauren Witzke’s got to go,”

On internet forums and social media platforms, people arguing about hotly contested topics like vaccines, climate change and voter fraud sometimes bolster their point or challenge their interlocutors by slipping in the acronym “D.Y.O.R.”

The slogan, which appeared in conspiracy theory circles in the 1990s, has grown in popularity over the past decade as conflicts over the reliability of expert judgment have become more pronounced.

It promotes an individualistic, freethinking approach to understanding the world: Don’t be gullible — go and find out for yourself what the truth is.

What happens next in American history, according to Andersen, happens without malevolence, or even intention. Our national character gels into one that’s distinctly comfortable fogging up the boundary between fantasy and reality in nearly every realm.

Enterprising businessmen quickly figure out ways to make money off the Americans who gleefully embrace untruths. The 1800s see an explosion of water cures and homeopathy and something called mesmerism,

Cody was in this way the father of Hollywood, the industry that did the most, Andersen says, to break down the mental barriers between the real and unreal.

the question posed by this age of revelation is simple: Now that you know something new and troubling and even terrible about your leaders or your institutions, what will you do with this knowledge?

For Baptists as for all of us, the direction of history after Trump will be determined not just by Providence’s challenge, but by our freely chosen answer.

so far the Trump presidency has clearly been a kind of apocalypse — not (yet) in the “world-historical calamity” sense of the word, but in the original Greek meaning: an unveiling, an uncovering, an exposure of truths that had heretofore been hidden.

Everything in the world, he argues, is either racist or antiracist:

the idea of any higher or lower standard for anything is racist, which is why Kendi has no time either for standardized tests. In this view of the world, difference always means hierarchy.

Inequity is defined as any difference between any ethnic groups in their average outcomes in any field of life or work. Any policy that leads to any racial differentials in anything that doesn’t roughly reflect the racial demographics of the society is ipso facto racist.

We, the consuming public, have failed to properly understand the new tech superpowers, he suggests, leaving little hope for stodgy and reluctant American regulators. The scope of their influence is obscured by the sheer number of things they do and sell, or problems they purport to be solving, and by our outdated sense of what constitutes a monopoly. To that end, Foer promotes the concept of the “knowledge monopoly,” which he qualifies with a mischievous grin. “My hope is that we revive ‘monopoly’ as a core piece of political rhetoric that broadly denotes dominant firms with pernicious powers,” he says, rather than as a “technical” term referring to one company cornerning a market. (His new monopolists, after all, aren’t raising prices. They’re giving things away free).

His best assessment of what has happened to media in general in the last decade is tucked in an aside about what Facebook, Google and Amazon all offer, or threaten: They are the “primary bundlers” of commercial media, whether it’s books, articles or video. “They are the ones that create a usable, coherent product from its disparate parts. Their business model is infinitely better than the one it displaced.”

More broadly, truly ambitious tech companies are in the business of creating markets, not competing in them; of wrapping themselves around industries, not merely disrupting them.

the defense mounted by Trump’s allies made perfect sense to those following live on social media, in groups sealed off from general scrutiny, where facts are established by volume, and confirmation comes from likes.

The echo chambers that take hold on social media reach beyond the effects of media coverage partial to the president, which he promotes to counter fact-based reporting.

The effect of social media is to jack up the tenor of everything,” said Carl Cameron, who spent more than two decades as a reporter for Fox News before leaving in 2017.

Mr. Pence has the power to recognize any lawmaker who objects.

Any lawmaker can challenge a state’s Electoral College votes, but it takes one member of the House and one senator to formally object to a state’s result and bring the challenge to a vote by lawmakers. The objection must be in writing.

Once an objection is filed with the backing of a House member and a senator, lawmakers break up into their separate chambers to discuss and vote. There is a two-hour time limit per objection. At the end of debate, lawmakers hold a simple majority vote on the objection. Both the House and the Senate must agree for the challenge to be successful.

In November 2018, after a vote that did not matter enough to him to push conspiracy theories about the outcome, President Trump stood in the Rose Garden and delivered the hard truth.

On Monday, after the administrator of the General Services Administration formally designated President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the apparent winner of the election, Mr. Trump blessed the move on Twitter while still vowing to move ahead with legal challenges.

Certainly Mr. Trump’s predecessors have appreciated many perks of the post, holding court with favored entertainers or athletes at the White House and growing fond of their privileged temporary address. But this president has taken a more conspicuous shine to such advantages than most.

The Republican Party is learning what should have been obvious from the outset: Mr. Trump’s chaotic personality can’t be contained. Indeed, combining it with the awesome power of the presidency virtually guaranteed he would become more volatile and transgressive. His presidency is infecting the entire party.

policy is hardly the whole story. When it comes to the Republican Party and Mr. Trump, the most profound and dangerous shift has occurred not in policy but in the province of disposition and demeanor, temperament and cast of mind. This arena is more amorphous than policy but can be at least as important.

At the national level the Republican Party has become a destructive and anarchic political force in American life.

To mobilize new or inactive voters this election, adding a personal touch has been key.

Instead, she wrote about children and the importance of policies that protect them. It made Ms. East wonder if Maria was, like her, an educator.

Ms. East, who lives just outside of Philadelphia, connected with one other part of the letter: A plea to vote in the upcoming election. So she did, casting a ballot in a presidential race for only the second time in her life, and the first since 2012. Having just graduated and in the midst of a move, Ms. East did not vote in 2016.

The author demonstrates that there is far more to economics than Thomas Carlyle's “dismal science”. And she does so with all the style and panache that you would expect from the author of the 1998 bestseller, “A Beautiful Mind”

In lesser hands Ms Nasar's story might have degenerated into a series of pen portraits: tittle-tattle for the middlebrow. But she unifies her account with a series of big questions. How, for example, did humanity escape from the grinding poverty that has been its lot through most of human history? Why was a static society replaced by a dynamic one? And how best to cope with the booms and busts that have been capitalism's peculiar contribution to human life?

In Marx's view the capitalist system, for all its ability to unleash productive power, was haunted by a contradiction: the drive to increase profits would immiserate the poor and lead to crises of overproduction

The virtues most admired in such places, then and now, are what Shirley Robin Letwin once called the vigorous virtues: “upright, self-sufficient, energetic, adventurous, independent minded, loyal to friends and robust against foes.”

The sins that can cause the most trouble are not the social sins — injustice, incivility, etc. They are the personal sins — laziness, self-indulgence, drinking, sleeping around.

Voters in these places could use some help. But these Americans, like most Americans, vote on the basis of their vision of what makes a great nation. These voters, like most voters, believe that the values of the people are the health of the nation.

When Rudolph W. Giuliani was treating his efforts to carry out President Trump’s wishes to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election as a payment opportunity — he proposed a daily retainer of $20,000 for his legal services from the burgeoning Trump campaign legal fund — the president dismissed it and responded by demanding to personally approve each expense.

Even as he complains about Mr. Giuliani’s latest efforts as fruitless, the president remains unusually deferential to him in public and in private. “Don’t underestimate him,” Mr. Trump has told advisers.

But only up to a point. While Mr. Trump and his advisers balked at the $20,000 request weeks ago, it is unclear whether the president will sign off on Mr. Giuliani being paid anything other than expenses.

Flake gave an impressive and far-reaching speech indicting Trump’s web of lies and the damage his international pals (e.g., Vladimir Putin) are doing to freedom of the press.

Give him credit — but only partial credit. Elected Republicans engage in much of the same anti-truth propaganda as the president does. The evening programming of an entire TV cable “news” network is dedicated to conspiracy theories, misleading information about immigrants and terrorists, and refusal to cover facts that contradict the president’s tropes.

Trump did not materialize out of thin air. He masterfully manipulated white grievance and anti-elite conspiracy-mongering. But the ground was plowed by many of Flake’s colleagues and by Republicans’ self-selected news outlets. Getting rid of Trump will help, but unless and until the mind-set that permeates the right is dismantled, the war on the truth will rage on.

Most people assume that Darwin was talking about physical strength when referring to “survival of the fittest,” meaning that a tougher, more resilient species always will win out over its weaker counterparts. But what if he didn’t mean that at all

researchers at Duke University’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, believe something else has been at work among species that have thrived throughout history, successfully reproducing to sustain themselves, and it has nothing to do with beating up the competition.

Their new book, “Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity,” posits that friendly partnerships among species and shared humanity have worked throughout centuries to ensure successful evolution. Species endure — humans, other animals and plants — they write, based on friendliness, partnership and communication.

Will the Supreme Court Deadlock on the Texas Abortion Case?

If Justice Anthony Kennedy were a character from Lord of the Rings, he would be Treebeard the Ent—a giant walking tree who makes up his mind in his own time and then goes wherever he is going without worrying much about what’s in the underbrush.

Together, those requirements will impel the closure of about 34 of the 40 abortion clinics in the state.

The idea that “everything is connected” is a powerful one, and two understandings of it seem to run parallel. The conspiracy theorist believes it literally and spends every waking hour adding to the chain of connections.

But ordinary minds, uninfected by conspiracy madness, also believe that there are deeper connections in the world and that our job as thinking creatures is to discover those links. This is fundamental to basic rationality. We don’t just treat symptoms, but look for the deeper causes of what ails us. And it is fundamental to good citizenship, too, in that we must also search for the covert ways that power operates,

one is tempted to invert the usual relation between conspiracy thinking and rational thinking, with the former now understood as the dominant thought pattern in America and the latter the aberration. Our politics, our literature, our popular culture and our social media are saturated with it. There is probably no cure. It is, at best, our chronic condition, and perhaps our terminal one.