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He was the “most Christian King” who entered into an alliance with the enemy of Christendom. He was the destroyer of the integrity and tradition of the Gallican Church. He was the voluptuary who allowed his court to be divided into factions

His father, Charles of Angouleme, resembled his namesake and uncle, the graceful lyric poet, Charles of Orleans

The group accepted the easy guardianship at Amboise of Louis, Duke of Orléans, who two years later became King as Louis XII.

The adulation of his mother and sister shielded him from the hatred of Anne of Brittany. The Queen had borne Louise XII an only child, the Princess Claude, who was heiress of Brittany in her mother’s right

Francis was heir-presumptive to the French Crown. A marriage between Francis and Claude seemed a natural arrangement, which would prevent the alienation of the Duchy of Brittany from the French royal house. But the Queen was firmly opposed to it, and the marriage took place only after her death in 1514

the future of the heir-presumptive remained in doubt. In October 1514, Louis XII

married Mary of England, the sister of Henry VIII. Francis was less distressed than his mother

Bonnivet was made Admiral of France, and the long-vacant title of Constable was bestowed upon his cousin, Charles of Bourbon

The election of Charles V marked the beginning of a two-hundred-year conflict between the French monarchy and the Hapsburgs

In February 1516, the grandson of the Emperor, Charles of Austria, inherited the thrones of Aragon and Castile. Six months later, he recognized the French conquest of Milan. At this time there was no hostility between him and Francis I.

Political responsibilities were not neglected in the flush of military success.

opposed to a rival whose encircling dominions included Spain, the Netherlands, Germany and southern Italy, and whose strength was augmented by the wealth of the New World

The contrast between the ebullient King of the Renaissance and the melancholic Emperor has always attracted the attention of historians

The one reliving the ancient myths of the universal monarchy and the crusade against the infidel: the other replacing the symbolic attitudes of the past with the realistic values of the nation state

The two Kings were too much alike in age and temperament to allow common interests to still the spirit of mutual competition

Henry VIII, reading through the terms of a declaration, obligingly omitted his title of King of France

When hostilities began in the following year, the Tudor King, after making some show of mediation, aligned himself with the Emperor. The war went badly

For a year Francis I remained the captive of the Emperor in Madrid, while Louise of Savoy rallied national sentiment for the continuation of the war

The great-grandfather of the Emperor was Charles the Bold of Burgundy. It was as a Burgundian that Charles V claimed the lands that had been seized by Louis XI. The release of the King was not secured until a pledge had been given for the cession of Burgundy

The subsequent death of Catherine of Aragon removed the cause of English disagreement with the Emperor. In the last two wars of the reign Henry VIII reverted to the imperial alliance

In the course of the war, Bourbon was killed during the ferocious assault of his mutinous forces on Rome in May 1527

In the sack of Rome Henry VIII saw an opportunity to win the favour of Clement VII and obtain the annulment of his marriage with Catherine of Aragon. For several years he remained the ally of France

Even after the revelation of the marriage with Anne Boleyn, Francis pleaded the English case during his meeting with the Pope at Marseilles in October 1533

The King had never intended to observe the terms of the Treaty of Madrid. Fresh allies were found in Italy, notably Pope Clement VII

Turkish armies were threatening the eastern imperial marches. In his league with the Sultan Sulaiman he inaugurated one of the most enduring of French policies

a vast Turkish army had erupted into Hungary and overwhelmed the Emperor’s Hungarian allies

The infidel was regarded with mingled curiosity and horror

The Ottoman alliance appalled the conscience of Europe; but the King found it difficult to resist the temptation offered by the expeditions of Charles V to North Africa and the campaigns of his brother, Ferdinand, upon the Bohemian border

Although the King’s diplomacy with the Papacy, the Turk, England and the Princes of the Empire, contained many failures and much duplicity, it was pursued with a realism and a flexibility that offset his lack of strategic ability in war

By June 1538, when Paul III personally negotiated the truce of Nice, it appeared possible to achieve a genuine reconciliation

The significant campaigns of the future were not to be fought in Italy, but on the frontiers of France

The altered texture of French society in the first half of the sixteenth century was, in part, a response to the demands of the monarchy

Francis I never summoned a full Estates-General

In July 1527, in the presence of the King, the Parlement heard from the lips of secretary Robertet a statement so imperious and unequivocal that it represented an unprecedented declaration of monarchical absolutism. The King, like Louis XII before him, was called the father of his people; but, whereas Louis earned his patriarchal status through his benevolence, Francis claimed it as his right

His sister, Marguerite, now Queen of Navarre, was scarcely less influential

Factions long concealed within the court became more apparent after the death of the Dauphin in 1536

The plain and modest Queen Eleonore, sister of Charles V, whom the King had married five years after the death of Claude in 1525, became the centre of the pro-Hapsburg party at the court

He held the office once occupied by de Boisy and, finally, that which the traitor Bourbon had forfeited

the King’s death in 1547

In the last years of the reign the glories of the new monarchy seemed tarnished and outworn

bowed to the zealots of the Sorbonne and aped the gallant ways of his youth

after his release, he abrogated the Treaty of Madrid (January 1526), in which he had been forced, among other concessions, to abandon his Italian claims. He headed a new anti-Spanish alliance, the Holy League of Cognac (May 1526), which united France with the papacy, Milan, Florence, and Venice.

Spanish military superiority eventually owed its success to the introduction in 1521 of the musket (an improved harquebus) and to the refinement of pike and musket tactics in the years preceding the Battle of Pavia. Such tactics dominated land warfare until the Battle of Rocroi in 1643.

The Papal States were restored, and in 1530 the pope crowned Charles V emperor and king of Italy

Italy remained subject to sporadic French incursions into Savoy in 1536–38 and 1542–44 during a third and fourth Habsburg-Valois war, and Spain’s Italian possessions were increasingly taxed to support Charles’s continual campaigns; however, for the remainder of his reign, Charles’s armies fought the French, the Ottomans, and the Protestant princes outside Italy. Notable for Italy was Charles V’s capture of Tunis in 1535 and his glorious march up the Italian peninsula in 1536 to confirm his personal rule. But the Ottomans formally allied themselves with France against the Habsburgs thereafter, defeated an allied fleet at Prevesa, retook Tunis in 1538, and stepped up their assault on the Venetian empire in the Mediterranean.

Italy became a part of the Spanish Habsburg inheritance of his son, Philip II (ruled 1556–98), and, after the Spanish victory over the French at St. Quentin (1557), the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) officially confirmed the era of Spanish domination that had existed in Italy since 1530.

A New York City law regulated where licensed handgun owners can take a locked and unloaded handgun, but it was changed before the court would rule after supporters of gun regulations feared the justices would take an idiosyncratic state law and use it as a vehicle to expand upon Heller. But conservative justices were clearly unhappy with how lower courts were deciding Second Amendment cases.

Five of the 10 cases the court is looking at ask justices to determine whether the Second Amendment allows the government to restrict the ability of citizens to carry a firearm outside the home to those with "good cause" or "justifiable need" to do so.

The law "effectively bars ordinary, law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns outside the home for self-defense," Paul Clement, a lawyer for Rogers, said in court papers. Clement is a former solicitor general under President George W. Bush.

In court papers, New Jersey said it has not "banned carrying a firearm in public; instead, the State has carefully limited public carrying to those individuals with a need to do so."

We hope the court will consider the issue of carry outside the home, as the lower courts have ignored existing Supreme Court precedent regarding the right to bear arms," said the NRA's Amy Hunter.

The plaintiffs in the Massachusetts case, including two firearm dealers and the Gun Owners' Action League, claim that the law is contrary to the decision in Heller, in which Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that Washington, DC's ban on handgun possession in the home "violates the Second Amendment."

Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey said the state's ban is on "weapons with distinct military origins that are used disproportionately in mass public shootings and killings of law enforcement officers."

The court also previously declined to weigh in on challenge to a Chicago suburb's ban on semiautomatic firearms with the capacity to accept more than 10 rounds of ammunition in 2015.

Kavanaugh testified at his Senate confirmation hearing in 2018 that he based his opinion on the Heller decision. "This is all about precedent for me," he said and noted that Scalia had said that dangerous and unusual weapons could be prohibited. Kavanaugh said it's "very important to recognize under the Heller decision that machine guns can be prohibited" but he continued that the ban at issue "seemed to fit common use and not being a dangerous and unusual weapon."

one case challenges the federal ban on out-of-state handgun purchases. The plaintiff, Frederic Russell Mance, Jr. attempted to sell handguns to Tracey and Andrew Hanson, who were residents of the District of Columbia, in Texas. However, federal law generally makes it illegal for a licensed firearms dealer to sell any firearm to a person who does not reside in the same state.

Pena v. Horan concerns California's Unsafe Handgun Act, requiring new models of semiautomatic handguns manufactured or sold in the state to include certain safety features.

"When the court will take another gun case, what it will be, and what the court will decide is all guesswork," said Jonathan Lowy, chief counsel and vice president of pro-gun safety organization Brady: United Against Gun Violence. "They could grant cert in these cases as soon this week, or soon after, and we will be ready to ensure that Americans' right to life is not infringed upon by the gun industry."

"The bottom line is that is that the American public overwhelming supports gun safety laws and what we've seen over the last two years in statehouses across the country lawmakers are responding to that," he said. "So the gun lobby is looking to the courts."

The phrase has come to mean an academic who occasionally addresses a general audience, as if all academics were intellectuals, and some of them were also public ones. In fact, academics and intellectuals are antithetical types. An intellectual is not an expert, and a public intellectual is not an expert who condescends to speak to a wider audience about her area of expertise. An intellectual is a generalist, an autodidact, a thinker who wanders and speculates. As Jack Miles puts it in a stellar essay on the question, “It takes years of disciplined preparation to become an academic. It takes years of undisciplined preparation to become an intellectual.”

Public also smacks of publicity, of the new apparatus of celebrity that turns scholars into showmen and makes pundits out of hacks.

celebrity, like the institutionalization that comes with being an academic, is inimical to the intellectual’s mission: questioning the mental status quo. The more a part of things you are—the more embedded in the machinery of status and position—the harder that is to do. As Kazin said, “values are our only home in the universe.” Allegiances, to any group, are fatal. The intellectual’s job is to think past the culture: to question the myths, metaphors, and assumptions that limit our collective imagination. The founder of the breed was Socrates.

As other campaigns scrambled to raise money, Bush’s PAC had money to burn, and burn it they did, mailing small video players with a 15-minute Jeb! documentary pre-downloaded to voters in New Hampshire, and buying digital billboard space in Iowa, where Bush wound up spending nearly $3,000 a vote and finishing in sixth place.

And to paraphrase Winston Churchill’s putdown of his rival Clement Atlee, Bush had “a lot to be modest about.”

Paunchy or skinny, with glasses or without, Bush ran a joyless, self-conscious, disembodied campaign in which he always seemed to be looking at his watch, as his father so famously did in his 1992 town hall debate against Bill Clinton

Bush had his moments, chief among them a brave and principled argument that Donald Trump’s rampant anti-immigrant stance is not only bad policy but bad politics for his Republican Party, which needs Latino voters more than ever.

Four years later, on the morning of Jeb’s second, winning try at the job, the elder Bush so dreaded a possible encore that he confessed to his Secret Service agent, “I am one pathetic nervous wreck,” and told his old friend the journalist Hugh Sidey that he didn’t want to be with Jeb if he lost, “because it would hurt him even more to have us there.”

Yet no epitaph for Bush’s effort could be simpler or truer than the words uttered by one of his longtime advisers on the eve of the New Hampshire primary. “We’re in striking distance in New Hampshire,” he told me with a bit of excessive optimism, before adding with dead-eyed aim: “But they’re not buying what we’re selling this year.”

the centre of a genealogical network which covered half Europe

Through his mother he would inherit Spain and the bloodstained kingdom of Naples as well

through his father he would become one of the great magnates of France as Duke of Burgundy

Clement personally crowned Charles, the last Holy Roman Emperor to be crowned by a pope

Irony often attended Charles

he was the intellectual and moral superior to his rival rulers Henry and Francois

dividing it between his brother Ferdinand and his son, Philip II of Spain

abdicate in 1556

Charles died in the monastery in 1558

The city had a close relationship with England

it became part of Burgundy

Burgundy itself was as much an idea as a place; sometimes expanding as far south as Italy, sometimes pushing north, swallowing the towns of Flanders and northern France

the last truly effective emperor in Europe

An arranged marriage to Margaret of Valois, daughter of Henry II and Catherine de' Medici, brought Parisian Catholics and visiting Huguenots together

Upon the death of François, Duke of Anjou, in 1584, Henry of Navarre became heir to the throne of France

Henry of Navarre became King Henry IV, but it would take a nine-year siege of Paris to secure his crown from the influence of the Holy League and Spanish interference

The situation brought about the War of the Three Henrys, pitting Henry of Navarre against King Henry III of France and the staunchly Catholic Henry, Duke of Guise. Henry of Navarre acted boldly, defeating the army of Henry III

Spanish interference with French succession prompted Henry III to join forces with Henry of Navarre to take control of Paris and the French countryside

Henry III was stabbed on August 1, 1589, and died the next day after declaring Henry of Navarre his successor

He was opposed by the Holy League

Paris finally capitulated on March 22, 1594. Pope Clement reversed Henry's excommunication, and Henry brokered the Peace of Vervins between France and Spain on May 2, 1598

Having united the kingdom and attained peace at home and abroad, Henry IV proceeded to bring prosperity back to France. He lowered taxes on French citizens, made peace with the Ottoman Empire and opened up trade routes to East Asia

Despite his accomplishments, Henry IV endured multiple assassination attempts

He was stabbed to death by a Catholic fanatic on May 14, 1610

Further, Ferdinand and Maximilian signalled their gratitude to Henry by signing separate treaties with Franc

This pattern was repeated later in the 1523-25 campaign which saw Henry VIII allied with the Emperor Charles V against Francis I

The campaigns of 1511-14 were, according to Richard Hoyle, largely funded from the wealth which Henry VII bequeathed to his son

Wolsey hoped to use the enmity between Charles V and Francis I to secure the best diplomatic deal for England from one or other of them in return for English support

England could not compete with France, even with the support of Charles V

Henry VIII was indeed, unlike his father, a warlike monarch, seeking gloire and prestige and pursuing his dynastic rights, just like any other Renaissance prince

the costs of Henry’s wars were indeed considerable: they drained his private resources and those of his subjects

Charles V combined his power as Holy Roman Emperor with his rulership of Spain and Burgundy

However, Wolsey’s diplomatic genius saw even greater opportunities and he was able to persuade the Emperor Maximilian, as well as Spain, Scotland, Venice and a host of others, including Leo X himself, to agree to a non-aggression pact under the aegis of Henry VIII. For a brief while, Henry VIII was the arbiter of Europe and London was its foremost capital

Where Henry VII had been able to resort to economic warfare against Burgundy, this avenue was closed to Henry VIII, due to the fact that the profitability of English cloth was dependent on the rising economic strength of Flanders

Wolsey was playing a double game, but only ever with the intention of putting pressure on Charles V

Henry’s frustration over Charles V’s utter obduracy in this matter led him to turn his back on the Habsburg alliance. Instead, after 1526, Wolsey hoped to use French ambitions to destroy Habsburg power in Italy and either break Charles V’s power over the pope or, at the very least, to cajole the Emperor into negotiations

relations with France became more binding after the sack of Rome in 1527 by a mutinous Imperialist army which obliged Pope Clement VII ‘to live and die a Habsburg’.

In January 1528 a reluctant Henry found himself at war with Charles V with the only accessible Habsburg target being England’s trading partner, Burgundy

no contemporary monarch weighted up military gains against an artificial measure of financial expenditure, as the dismal legacy of incipient financial crises which Francis I, Henry II, Charles V and Philip II variously bequeathed underlines

The Angouleme family was a cadet branch of the royal house of Valois. Francis' father, Charles, died on January 1st, 1496, and in 1498, the boy became heir presumptive to the reigning monarch, Louis XII

Louis XII died leaving no surviving son and Francis succeeded him as king on January 1st, 1515. Francis's accession was greeted favourably by the French nobility

His mother, Louise of Savoy

He was determined to avenge the defeats which Louis XII had suffered there and to capture the duchy of Milan which he regarded as his inheritance

On September l4th, 1515, at the Battle of Marignano, Francis defeated a large Swiss army allied to the duke of Milan and so regained the duchy. He secured his prize by a concordat with Leo X and, later, by treaties with the Swiss, with Charles of Spain and with the Holy Roman Emperor, Maxmillian

In 1533, Francis concluded a marriage alliance with Clement VII which he hoped would detach the pope from his allegiance to Charles V and thus help both him and Henry VIII

The young Tudor's great role-model was Henry V and he regarded northern France as his inheritance, rather in the way Francis saw Milan

In 1513, Henry had invaded France in alliance with the pope, the emperor and the king of Spain

Nevertheless, these victories and the subsequent peace treaty with Louis XII, allowed Henry to feel that controlling France was a great way of demonstrating his own impressive royal power

In England, Francis found an ally in the person of Anne Boleyn who virtually replaced Wolsey as the lynch-pin in Anglo-French contacts

Like Wolsey before her, Anne encouraged continued exchanges between the two monarchs and she also patronised English scholars in France

Henry then allowed himself to believe, incorrectly, that Francis approved of these claims

Henry VIII's accession in 1509 had generated the same kind of excitement as witnessed in France in 1515. The two kings did indeed have many personal similarities and rivalry between them was almost inevitable

Against this background and despite the difficulties, Anglo-French contacts were maintained and Francis constantly sought Henry's financial and military support against Charles V

Francis spent increasing amounts of time in Paris and at Fontainebleau where his steadily expanding artistic collections and library were shown to all important visitors

During the 1540s, Henry VIII also insisted, more than ever, that his was an imperial kingship

Much of this augmentation work was undertaken by the same John Leland who had witnessed Bude's work for Francis in the 1520s

Francis discussed Henry's building ideas with his ambassador, Sir John Wallop, to whom he also gave a guided tour of his private gallery and baths at Fontainebleau.

Henry's personal Psalter, in which he is depicted as King David, his second great role-model after Henry V, was produced by Jean Mallard who had been Francis I's court poet in the 1550s

In July 1544 thirty-one years after his first invasion, Henry once again crossed the Channel to set about the conquest of France. He managed to capture Boulogne

Francis I died on March 51st, 1547, barely two months after Henry VIII's death in January

that of the king as the warrior-leader whose greatness lay in military success and the distribution of largesse to his elite companions

Henry VIII's concept of his kingship was centred on the same ideal and his efforts to make his monarchy conform to it, partly through competition with France, pre-dated the start of Francis I's reign

This sophistication was particularly evident in Francis's artistic and intellectual patronage and it is here that his 'Renaissance' influence on Henry VIII is most apparent

On May 6th, 1994, after opening the Channel Tunnel jointly with President Mitterand, the Queen observed that Britain and France, 'for all their ages-long rivalry, complement each other well, perhaps better than we realise'

First and foremost, the climate was changing. Sound familiar? Medieval Europe benefitted from several centuries of warmer weather, which boosted crop yields, but by the 14th century, the world was entering the so-called Little Ice Age

As the population grew, increasingly marginal land was turned over to agriculture, with diminishing returns, resulting in lower yields per capita and pushing the population dangerously close to subsistence levels. This left little slack in the economy to absorb a significant shock, and the 14th century would soon bring one shock after another.

From AD 1000, Europe's population doubled or even tripled, and the economy became increasingly commercialized, underwritten by an increasingly sophisticated financial system, as new cities and towns emerged, universities were founded across the continent, and the magnificent Gothic cathedrals surpassed the Great Pyramid at Giza as the tallest man-made structures in the world.

Cooler and wetter weather depressed agricultural yields, at a time when there was already very little slack in the food supply. This contributed to a broader economic slowdown, as yields declined and prices rose, but it also brought Europe to the edge of famine.

beginning in 1311, Europe began to experience a series of crop failures across the continent in what became known as the Great Famine. Reaching a peak in northern Europe in 1315-1317, the Great Famine may have killed 5 to 10% of Europe's population

At the same time, Europe entered a prolonged period of heightened geopolitical conflict, during which a dizzying array of kingdoms, principalities, sultanates and city-states waged innumerable wars, both large and small.

These conflicts inhibited trade between northern and southern Europe and between western Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, further slowing the European economy and incurring a massive fiscal burden that would soon ruin the European financial system and provoke uprisings in both France and England

Northern Italy was the heart of the financial system at this time, and a small number of very large Italian banks, often referred to as "super-companies," were lending huge sums of money across Europe

All available money was loaned out or tied up in investments, leaving the banks severely under-capitalized and vulnerable to insolvency in the event of a sudden large withdraw or a major default on their loans.

war broke out between England and France in 1294, prompting King Edward I to withdraw huge sums of money from the Riccardi of Lucca, approximately equivalent to several billion dollars today. The Riccardi simply did not have the money, and Edward seized whatever assets he could. Then, over the following decades, three more super banks, the Frescobaldi, the Bardi and the Peruzzi, all of Florence, were each ruined by successive English kings who refused to pay their debts.

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church, the cultural and epistemological bedrock of Medieval Europe, was facing the most significant legitimacy crisis in centuries

he King's men attempted to arrest the elderly Pope, inadvertently killing him. Shortly thereafter, in 1305, a Frenchman, Clement V, was chosen to be the next pope, and the papacy was relocated to Avignon, France. This understandably cast a long shadow over the Holy See, and the Avignon Popes were widely disliked and distrusted. The crisis only deepened in 1378 when a second pope was elected in Rome and a third pope was briefly elected in 1409 before all three were deposed in 1417.

We might compare this crisis of faith with the current legitimacy crisis of science in the United States. Like the scientific method, the Church was a shared way of knowing — a pathway to common understanding, which was essential to the social order of Medieval Europe.

It was in the midst of this spiritual, economic and geopolitical crisis that the Black Death arrived, sweeping through Europe in 1347-1353 and upending the balance of power, almost overnight

the economic effects of the plague were nothing short of earthshattering. By killing perhaps 50% of the labor force, the Black Death drastically altered the supply of labor, land and coin. Wages skyrocketed, as labor was in short supply, and rents declined, as the plummeting population density created a surplus of land

Both of these developments substantially benefitted commoners, at the expense of the elite, particularly in England.

The archetypal serf was not paid for their work in the lord's fields — that was their obligation to the lord in exchange for the use of the lord's land. The modern equivalent would be if your landlord was also your boss, and in order to live in your apartment, you had to sign away your freedom and that of your children, in perpetuity.

Not only that, the medieval lord was also the primary unit of legal, civic and military power, often serving as the first stop for legal matters and the first defense against brigands and rival kingdoms.

With perhaps half the population gone, there were simply not enough peasants to work the land, and the average income of the English lord declined significantly. In response, the lord's wheat fields were increasingly turned over to livestock, or rented out to tenant farmers, who would pay the lord a fixed rent, keeping the agricultural produce for themselves.

The ambitious commoner could now acquire sizable tracts of land, and with the agricultural product of that land entirely at their disposal, commoners were incentivized to maximize the productivity of their land and sell the surplus at market for a profit. This transition is often referred to as the birth of Agrarian Capitalism.

In the wake of the Black Death, plague doctors were among the first to believe they had surpassed the knowledge of the Greek and Roman world; ironically, they were wrong, but the lower mortality of later outbreaks led many doctors to proclaim they had cured the disease, which instilled a new faith in scientific progress

Sumptuary laws, which restricted what commoners could wear and eat, also became common during the 14th and 15th Centuries. However, these laws do not appear to have been effective, and tensions continued to mount between the aristocracy and the wider populace, who were increasingly impatient for change.

Urban laborers and craftsmen also benefitted from rising wages. The average lifespan increased, and standards of living improved across the board. The shortage of skilled tradesmen even created new opportunities for urban women

starting in the 14th century, infantry units comprised of commoners, like the Swiss pikemen and English longbowmen, began to win a series of decisive victories against mounted knights, revolutionizing military tactics and hastening the obsolescence of the feudal aristocracy.

a new intellectual spirit was taking root across western Europe. Influential thinkers like John Wycliffe and Marsilius of Padua began to question the worldly authority of both the Church and the state, arguing that power rested ultimately with the populace rather than the ruler, and the unworthy ruler could lose their right to govern

This, combined with the soaring fiscal burden of near-constant war, set off a series of uprisings, most notably the French Jacquerie of 1358 and the English Peasants' Revolt of 1381. The aristocracy responded with force wherever they could, but they could not turn back the clock.

seven-hundred years later, what, if anything, can we learn from this — what can the crises and consequences of the 14th century tell us about our own pandemic and the impending aftermath?

There will be no labor shortage in the wake of the coronavirus; quite the opposite, there will likely be a labor surplus, due to the ensuing economic contraction. As for rents, the housing market is essentially frozen as people shelter in place, and housing prices are likely to decline in a recession, but the real cost of housing relative to income is unlikely to see the kind of seismic shift experienced after the Black Death.

most presciently for our own time, Europe was headed for a climate catastrophe, and regardless of the Black Death, the continent would have almost certainly faced a series of demographic shocks, like the Great Plague, until considerable changes were made to the existing socio-economic system.

The lesson we should take from this today is not the differences between the coronavirus and the Black Death, but rather the broader similarities between the 14th century and the 21st century

war between China and the US still looms ever larger, socio-economic inequality is reaching record levels, trust in institutions and our established epistemology is waning, and as we enter the worst depression since the 1930s, climate change once again threatens to throw us back into the Middle Ages

if we continue business as usual, what happens next is likely to be much worse. The calamitous 21st century is just getting started, and a more apt parallel for the Black Death is probably yet to come

For its study, the corps focused on storm surge — the rising seas that often inundate the coastline during storms — made worse lately by stronger hurricanes and higher sea levels. But that is only one concern.

South Florida, flat and low-lying, sits on porous limestone, which allows the ocean to swell up through the ground. Even when there is no storm, rising seas contribute to more significant tidal flooding, where streets fill with water even on sunny days.

“What you realize is each of these problems, which are totally intersecting, are handled by different parts of the government,” said Amy C. Clement, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Miami and the chairwoman of the city of Miami’s climate resilience committee.

The dramatic $6 billion proposal remains tentative and at least five years off. But the startling suggestion of a massive sea wall up to 20 feet high cutting across beautiful Biscayne Bay was enough to jolt some Miamians to attention

The price tag for all that needs to be done, however, is in the billions. The estimate for Miami-Dade County alone to phase out some 120,000 septic tanks is about $4 billion, and that does not include the thousands of dollars that each homeowner would also have to pay.

“We were, like, ruh-roh,” said Ken Russell, the Miami city commissioner whose district includes Brickell. “The $40 billion in assets you’re trying to protect will be diminished if you build a wall around downtown because you’re going to affect market values and quality of life.”

To some critics, the plan harks back to more than a century of dredging and pumping of the Florida Everglades, which made way for intensive farming and sprawling development but disregarded the serious damage to the environment that the state is still wrestling with.

In fact, when local governments have asked the public how they would like to tackle climate change, residents by far prefer what is known as green infrastructure: layered coastal protection from a mix of dunes, sea grasses, coral reefs and mangroves, said Zelalem Adefris, vice president for policy and advocacy at Catalyst Miami, which works with low-income communities in the county.

On a recent afternoon along the stretch of Brickell Bay Drive where a wall might go, Rachel Silverstein, executive director of Miami Waterkeeper, an environmental research and activist group, stood next to high-rises built right up to the water

“Instead of seeing this beautiful water, you would see a gross wall,” she said.

"This idiotic ruling will not prevent abortions," Cezary Jasinski, a 23-year-old student, told Reuters in central Warsaw. "But for every woman who will experience pain because of this ruling, or will be forced to give birth to a child with Down syndrome, they (court judges) will be to blame."

The months-long delay between the ruling and its implementation appears to be a result of the large protests that ensued. Last October, a planned "women's strike" drew more than 400,000 protesters across more than 400 Polish cities and towns.

"In cases when the fetus doesn't have a skull or has no chance to live outside the womb, there should be a choice. We will work on this," Suski told Polish public radio, according to Reuters.

Clement Beaune, France's European Affairs minister, wrote on Twitter: "A sad day that reminds us that rights can recede if they are not defended. The fight goes on."

There were 1,100 abortions performed last year in Poland; of those, 1,074 were due to fetal abnormalities, The New York Times reports.

Doctors in Poland can be jailed for performing illegal abortions.

it’s not just law enforcement: Clearview has also licensed the app to at least a handful of companies for security purposes.

“The weaponization possibilities of this are endless,” said Eric Goldman, co-director of the High Tech Law Institute at Santa Clara University. “Imagine a rogue law enforcement officer who wants to stalk potential romantic partners, or a foreign government using this to dig up secrets about people to blackmail them or throw them in jail.”

While the company was dodging me, it was also monitoring me. At my request, a number of police officers had run my photo through the Clearview app. They soon received phone calls from company representatives asking if they were talking to the media — a sign that Clearview has the ability and, in this case, the appetite to monitor whom law enforcement is searching for.

The company eventually started answering my questions, saying that its earlier silence was typical of an early-stage start-up in stealth mode. Mr. Ton-That acknowledged designing a prototype for use with augmented-reality glasses but said the company had no plans to release it.

In addition to Mr. Ton-That, Clearview was founded by Richard Schwartz — who was an aide to Rudolph W. Giuliani when he was mayor of New York — and backed financially by Peter Thiel, a venture capitalist behind Facebook and Palantir.

“I’ve come to the conclusion that because information constantly increases, there’s never going to be privacy,” Mr. Scalzo said. “Laws have to determine what’s legal, but you can’t ban technology. Sure, that might lead to a dystopian future or something, but you can’t ban it.”

“In 2017, Peter gave a talented young founder $200,000, which two years later converted to equity in Clearview AI,” said Jeremiah Hall, Mr. Thiel’s spokesman. “That was Peter’s only contribution; he is not involved in the company.”

He began in 2016 by recruiting a couple of engineers. One helped design a program that can automatically collect images of people’s faces from across the internet, such as employment sites, news sites, educational sites, and social networks including Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and even Venmo

Representatives of those companies said their policies prohibit such scraping, and Twitter said it explicitly banned use of its data for facial recognition

Another engineer was hired to perfect a facial recognition algorithm that was derived from academic papers. The result: a system that uses what Mr. Ton-That described as a “state-of-the-art neural net” to convert all the images into mathematical formulas, or vectors, based on facial geometry — like how far apart a person’s eyes are

Clearview created a vast directory that clustered all the photos with similar vectors into “neighborhoods.”

When a user uploads a photo of a face into Clearview’s system, it converts the face into a vector and then shows all the scraped photos stored in that vector’s neighborhood — along with the links to the sites from which those images came.

Mr. Schwartz paid for server costs and basic expenses, but the operation was bare bones; everyone worked from home. “I was living on credit card debt,” Mr. Ton-That said. “Plus, I was a Bitcoin believer, so I had some of those.”

The company soon changed its name to Clearview AI and began marketing to law enforcement. That was when the company got its first round of funding from outside investors: Mr. Thiel and Kirenaga Partners

Mr. Schwartz and Mr. Ton-That met in 2016 at a book event at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank. Mr. Schwartz, now 61, had amassed an impressive Rolodex working for Mr. Giuliani in the 1990s and serving as the editorial page editor of The New York Daily News in the early 2000s. The two soon decided to go into the facial recognition business together: Mr. Ton-That would build the app, and Mr. Schwartz would use his contacts to drum up commercial interest.

They immediately got a match: The man appeared in a video that someone had posted on social media, and his name was included in a caption on the video. “He did not have a driver’s license and hadn’t been arrested as an adult, so he wasn’t in government databases,”

The man was arrested and charged; Mr. Cohen said he probably wouldn’t have been identified without the ability to search social media for his face. The Indiana State Police became Clearview’s first paying customer, according to the company

Clearview deployed current and former Republican officials to approach police forces, offering free trials and annual licenses for as little as $2,000. Mr. Schwartz tapped his political connections to help make government officials aware of the tool

The company’s most effective sales technique was offering 30-day free trials to officers, who then encouraged their acquisition departments to sign up and praised the tool to officers from other police departments at conferences and online, according to the company and documents provided by police departments in response to public-record requests. Mr. Ton-That finally had his viral hit.

Photos “could be covertly taken with telephoto lens and input into the software, without ‘burning’ the surveillance operation,” the detective wrote in the email, provided to The Times by two researchers,

Sergeant Ferrara found Clearview’s app superior, he said. Its nationwide database of images is much larger, and unlike FACES, Clearview’s algorithm doesn’t require photos of people looking straight at the camera.

“With Clearview, you can use photos that aren’t perfect,” Sergeant Ferrara said. “A person can be wearing a hat or glasses, or it can be a profile shot or partial view of their face.”

Mr. Ton-That said the tool does not always work. Most of the photos in Clearview’s database are taken at eye level. Much of the material that the police upload is from surveillance cameras mounted on ceilings or high on walls.

Despite that, the company said, its tool finds matches up to 75 percent of the time. But it is unclear how often the tool delivers false matches, because it has not been tested by an independent party

One reason that Clearview is catching on is that its service is unique. That’s because Facebook and other social media sites prohibit people from scraping users’ images — Clearview is violating the sites’ terms of service.

Some law enforcement officials said they didn’t realize the photos they uploaded were being sent to and stored on Clearview’s servers. Clearview tries to pre-empt concerns with an F.A.Q. document given to would-be clients that says its customer-support employees won’t look at the photos that the police upload.

Mr. Clement, now a partner at Kirkland & Ellis, wrote that the authorities don’t have to tell defendants that they were identified via Clearview, as long as it isn’t the sole basis for getting a warrant to arrest them.

Because the police upload photos of people they’re trying to identify, Clearview possesses a growing database of individuals who have attracted attention from law enforcement. The company also has the ability to manipulate the results that the police see.

After the company realized I was asking officers to run my photo through the app, my face was flagged by Clearview’s systems and for a while showed no matches. When asked about this, Mr. Ton-That laughed and called it a “software bug.”

“It’s creepy what they’re doing, but there will be many more of these companies. There is no monopoly on math,” said Al Gidari, a privacy professor at Stanford Law School. “Absent a very strong federal privacy law, we’re all screwed.”

But if your profile has already been scraped, it is too late. The company keeps all the images it has scraped even if they are later deleted or taken down, though Mr. Ton-That said the company was working on a tool that would let people request that images be removed if they had been taken down from the website of origin

Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern University in Boston, sees Clearview as the latest proof that facial recognition should be banned in the United States.

We’ve relied on industry efforts to self-police and not embrace such a risky technology, but now those dams are breaking because there is so much money on the table,”

“I don’t see a future where we harness the benefits of face recognition technology without the crippling abuse of the surveillance that comes with it. The only way to stop it is to ban it.”

Mr. Ton-That said he was reluctant. “There’s always going to be a community of bad people who will misuse it,” he said.

Even if Clearview doesn’t make its app publicly available, a copycat company might, now that the taboo is broken. Searching someone by face could become as easy as Googling a name

Someone walking down the street would be immediately identifiable — and his or her home address would be only a few clicks away. It would herald the end of public anonymity.

with those often-invisible systems that we take for granted until they fail, such as the electrical grid or medical implants, pharmaceuticals and the blood supply.

It’s possible to see a future in which we are dependent on the perfect, continuous performance of air conditioning the way many people are dependent on lifesaving drugs, planes are dependent on air traffic control, and a colony on the moon or Mars would be dependent on perpetual sources of oxygen and water.

AC’s basic trajectory has been from a curiosity and luxury to an amenity to a necessity. It has changed how we live and where we live, and reconfigured our cities, houses, politics and identity. And now it is bound up with our hope for survival as a species.

Where would we be without it? Much of the South would be poorer than it is now, and isolated, with high mortality rates and lower educational achievement. There would be no skyscrapers in Atlanta, no high-rise apartment buildings in Dallas and Houston. In our hottest states, including the Sun Belt, public institutions, including universities, libraries and entertainment venues, would be fewer and more minimally developed.

Entertainment would still be seasonal. City theaters would close as temperatures rise, and music, drama and the movies would migrate outdoors. Many of the products we take for granted, including textiles and foodstuffs that rely on atmospheric controls or refrigeration, would be of far inferior quality and much more expensive.

Architecture would look very different, at least for those who could afford such niceties as higher ceilings, wider eaves and more sharply pitched roofs (all of which can passively cool a house). The picture window — a source not just of light but also of heat, and which can’t be opened for ventilation — would not be a key element of suburban design.

The ranch house, with thin walls and low ceilings, laid out in relentless grids across the Sun Belt since the 1950s and immortalized in the haunting photographs of Robert Adams, wouldn’t define the vernacular architecture of America.

The net migration from the South, which continued from the Civil War until around 1964 (when air conditioning was well established in the country’s hottest states), would be ongoing.

air conditioning increased political polarization, with an influx of Northern Republicans into the South, and a resorting of the Democrats into a northern, more progressive, urban party without a conservative Dixiecrat wing.

It may have also changed the way women conceive of feminism and liberation from patriarchy, from a model based on independence and working outside the home in the early 20th century to one structured around the supposed leisure offered by the modern, air-conditioned tract home in the middle of the century.

Less tangible are the poetic details of life before AC that are embedded in art and literature. Staying cool in hot weather was often a social experience, a collective lethargy that brought one closer to family and community

Throughout the history of mechanical ventilation and “comfort cooling,” there was resistance to innovation, with a vocal and determined “open air” movement that opposed mechanical ventilation in public schools.

To seek to do it on the basis that Labour can again be a national party in geographical and class terms, winning working- and middle class support alike, deserves that description even more.

It challenges the view that the dominant progressive parties of the industrial era must accommodate themselves to operating within a more pluralist party system and amid the looser class loyalties of the new millennium

it says that such segmentation is neither inevitable nor even desirable, providing that the party remains a broad church and – crucially – avoids foolish accommodations with the activist left.

it is certainly not New Labour 2.0 either, and calling it so does not make it so. Indeed the Starmer strategy of focusing on working-class support is at odds with one of New Labour’s most central tenets.

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown believed that Labour would prosper in the modern era only by reducing its dependence on working-class voters and the unions and by becoming a middle-class, progressive party, like the US Democrats.

This is actually quite a traditional, and almost old-fashioned, view of Labour’s role. Starmer’s aspiration to make Labour a national and essentially social democratic party again is one that Clement Attlee or Harold Wilson would have understood.

Many of New Zealand’s more traditionally minded scientists, however, see the spiritual and moral aspects of mātauranga as contradictory to conventional science, which is supposed to be value-neutral and limited to knowledge that can be empirically proven.

Kendall Clements, a marine biologist who signed the letter, said they were not trying to disrespect mātauranga, but to emphasize the differences between it and conventional science.

“In trying to probe that difference, we may collectively come to a better understanding of a solution than if we drew on a single body of knowledge in isolation,” he said.

Some alleged that the letter was an example of white supremacy. Waikaremoana Waitoki, the president of the New Zealand Psychological Society, denounced the letter’s “racist tropes” and “moral panic.”

The situation became more tense after the polarizing British biologist Richard Dawkins denounced the Royal Society’s investigation and described mātauranga as “not science and not true.”

For Te Arawa, the melding of mātauranga with conventional science has proved successful. Amid the weedy jungle in Lake Rotomā’s shallows, an enormous clearing has emerged.

“We’ve essentially created new mātauranga,” Mr. O’Neill said before carefully tucking his dreadlocks beneath the cap of his wet suit and slipping into the lake. “And we’re going to use it to finish the last of the lake weed off.”