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To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

The FIFA campaign, part of a mounting Palestinian effort to press the case against Israeli occupation in international forums, garnered global attention and incited deep concern in Israel’s soccer-obsessed society.

Yaakov Finkelstein, an Israeli diplomat sent to Zurich for the FIFA congress, said any action on the settlement teams would have been “a deal-breaker for us.”

The Palestinians contend the settlement teams violate FIFA rules by, essentially, having one member’s teams playing in another’s turf. The amended Palestinian proposal, which the congress passed overwhelmingly, calls on FIFA to ask the United Nations for official notification of its 2012 resolution upgrading Palestine to nonmember observer-state status “in order to prove the territorial issue.”

And, as the Police Department, prompted by Mr. Garner’s death, undertakes a sweeping review of its use-of-force policies, senior commanders have been taking a hard look at the chokehold ban.

Don't they have human feelings? Don't they have hearts?"

t's now a part of his life and an extension of the culture of hospitality on the island. It's not a choice to help or not, he says; it's about being human.

The annual budget, which garners significant market attention each year, assumes greater importance this time as markets test Modi’s commitment to fiscal consolidation that is also key to determining the path of India’s monetary policy after the biggest interest-rate cuts in six years in 2015.

My own opinion is that that is going to be a sufficient boost to the economy pretty much whatever the government manages to do with the deficit

Effectively the country needs the destruction of the entire Licence Raj. Much has already been done but there’s still a lot to do

Perhaps not in some of the formal measures but the Chinese economy, as it actually works, is in that private sector one of the most viciously free market on the planet at present.

Closely related is a divergence in expectations. In January, Matt Schiavenza argued perceptively in The Atlantic that one striking difference between the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris and a roughly contemporary suicide bombing by a 10-year-old in Nigeria was that France is not a country with a failing government or chronic conflict. As a result, attacks there are more shocking.

Many Americans hear “Paris” and think of the Eiffel Tower; they hear “Beirut” and immediately associate it with war. Yet that’s an outdated impression, as

Nor is Paris quite as calm as Americans might imagine. For example: Riots of considerable size are roughly a yearly event, especially in the banlieues; in 2005, during some of the largest riots in recent memory, three people were killed in violence triggered by police chasing three boys, but clearly emblematic of deeper tensions. This may not be the Paris that many Americans think of, but it is Paris just the same. (Both Paris and Beirut even suffered serious garbage-collection strikes this year.)

Beirut, in fact, was once known as the Paris of the Middle East. And while that name is no longer in common usage, there are still similarities between the cities. In the centers, prosperous neighborhoods offer fine dining and glamorous shopping. Farther out, less wealthy residents—many of them immigrants or children of immigrants—live in working-class districts. Paris’s suburban districts, known as banlieues, are heavily populated by Muslim immigrants.

Or should the empathy gap be attributed to an American and European press that focuses too heavily on attacks in the “West”? It’s far easier to get reporters to Paris than, say, Nairobi, though the critique is unfair to the brave reporters who report from dangerous parts of the globe year-round, not just when violence erupts. It’s a good bet that if American news organizations had devoted every resource that they dedicated to the Paris attacks to the bloodshed in Beirut instead, readers, watchers, and listeners wouldn’t have paid nearly the same amount of attention.

In an article for The Atlantic last year, Jacoba Urist reported on the findings of a study of natural disasters around the world, which found that the level of American media attention correlated with geographic proximity to the U.S. and the number of American tourists who had visited the country in question. (Urist noted that a 1976 Guatemalan earthquake with 4,000 fatalities accrued a third of the media coverage of an Italian earthquake with 1,000 deaths.) And as Faine Greenwood suggested after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, journalists and their audience alike suffer from a novelty bias. If it isn’t new—a new attack, a new place—it won’t garner the same buzz.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg has said the only reason there was no safety check-in for Beirut was that Facebook decided only after the Paris attack to deploy the feature for non-natural disasters. That aside, it makes sense that Facebook would move faster on Paris. After all, there are twice as many people in the Paris urban area as there are in all of Lebanon. Even assuming 100-percent Facebook penetration in Lebanon (not far off, probably), there are simply more Facebook users in Paris for the company to respond to.

For Fernandez, who's slated to leave office in December after eight years at the helm, Sunday's closely watched vote was a test of whether her populist political legacy would endure.For a region where leftist movements have played a growing role, it's an election that could shift the balance of power.

And for the finance world, it's a long-awaited moment that could change how the South American country handles its debt problems and interacts with Wall Street.The election of Macri, a center-right candidate who's mayor of Buenos Aires and the former president of the Boca Juniors football club, could signal a conservative shift for Argentina. Macri has said he wants to rewrite the playbook on Argentina's economy -- a campaign promise that made him popular on Wall Street and drew sharp criticism from his opponents.

In his victory speech Sunday night, Macri promised he'd work to eliminate poverty in Argentina and change the way business is done.

Most disconcertingly for the GOP establishment, the latest poll finds a hefty portion of its electorate, even beyond current Trump supporters, coming around to the idea of Trump as their standard-bearer. Two-thirds of GOP voters said they'd be either enthusiastic or satisfied if he captured the party's nod, while 65% said the brash billionaire had the right temperament to serve as president.

Trump's favorability rating stands at 61% — the best among the field and a nine-point jump from his 52% favorable rating in the October Monmouth poll. Only 29% of Republicans view Trump unfavorably, compared to 33% two months ago

The finding comes amid signs that Trump's call last week for a "total and complete" ban on Muslims entering the United States is resonating with GOP voters. A Bloomberg Politics poll found that two in three Republicans back the ban, although an NBC News/Wall Street Journal survey showed the Republican electorate more divided. 

What's clear, though, is that after briefly surrendering his national polling lead to Carson, Trump is back on top. Of the 12 national polls conducted since November, Trump has led in all of t hem.

As Watts puts the point, the principal purpose of his book is to allow “readers to better appreciate the serious problems that result both from politicians who breach a republic’s political norms and from citizens who choose not to punish them for doing so.

In Watts’s telling of the Roman Republic’s agonizing death, slow-moving structural transformations gradually sowed the seeds of demise.

As the population exploded and the economy became ever more sophisticated, the growing share of poor citizens started to demand redress. But since the institutions of the republic were dominated by patricians who had much to lose from measures like land reform, they never fully addressed the grievances of ordinary Romans.

With popular rage against increasingly dysfunctional institutions swelling, ambitious patricians, determined to outflank their competitors, began to build a fervent base of support by making outsize promises. It was these populares — populists like Tiberius Gracchus and his younger brother Gaius — who, in their bid for power, first broke some of the republic’s most longstanding norms.

The transformation of Rome’s army compounded the challenge of growing inequality. In the early days of the republic, soldiers thought of their participation in military service as a civic duty. Commanders hoped to win great honors and perhaps to attain higher office

But by the late second century B.C., the army had essentially been privatized. Commanders knew that the plunder of new lands could garner them vast riches. Their soldiers signed up for the ride in the hope of gaining a generous allotment of land on which to start a farm.

Far from single-handedly destroying our political system, he is the transitional figure whose election demonstrates the extent to which the failings of our democracy are finally starting to take their toll

During the century and a half between the days of Pyrrhus and the rise of Tiberius Gracchus, there had not been a single outbreak of large-scale political violence. Then Tiberius pushed through land reforms in defiance of the Senate’s veto. In the ensuing fracas, he and hundreds of his followers were murdered. The taboo on naked power politics had been broken, never to recover

“Within a generation of the first political assassination in Rome, politicians had begun to arm their supporters and use the threat of violence to influence the votes of assemblies and the election of magistrates. Within two generations, Rome fell into civil war.”

If we are to avoid the fate that ultimately befell Rome, Watts cautions, it is “vital for all of us to understand how Rome’s republic worked, what it achieved and why, after nearly five centuries, its citizens ultimately turned away from it and toward the autocracy of Augustus.”

the sheer repetitiveness of the calamities that befell Rome only serves to underline the book’s most urgent message.

Like the original populist, Trump was propelled to power by the all-too-real failures of a political system that is unable to curb growing inequality or to mobilize its most eminent citizens around a shared conception of the common good.

And like Gracchus, Trump believes that, because he is acting in the name of the dispossessed, he is perfectly justified in shredding the Republic’s traditions.

It took a long time for these tensions to build. But once they reached a critical point, Rome’s descent into chaos and dysfunction was astonishingly swift.

The bad news is that the coming decades are unlikely to afford us many moments of calm and tranquillity.

If the central analogy that animates “Mortal Republic” is correct, the current challenge to America’s political system is likely to persist long after its present occupant has left the White House.

She went on to say that the prestigious and exclusive Penn Law Review had a “diversity mandate,” and that some black students face an “uphill battle” because they aren’t properly matched to the high-level school. “We’re not saying they shouldn’t go to college – we’re not saying that,” she said. “I mean, some of them shouldn’t.”

Wax would not talk with the Forward on the record about the controversy. But she did write an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal last week pointing out that Ruger had not actually released data that would have proved her right or wrong – which the petition itself also asked for – and called on him to do so.

She also claimed in a return appearance to Bloggingheads last week that she was a mentor to black students and had never received a bias complaint until last year, and that Penn’s blind grading process prevents her from knowing which grade she is giving to which students until the semester ends.

She also admitted that she did not have data that could prove her original statement about class rank correct.

In an 2015 article explaining her opposition to affirmative action programs, Wax described her childhood as “part of a close-knit, observant, conservative Jewish family in a predominantly Catholic town….Although it was common in our culture to complain a lot — about friends, relatives, business partners, bad luck, and the general cluelessness of non-Jews—we were not permitted to complain that anti-Semitism and discrimination were standing in our way. We knew discrimination was out there, but the discussion was limited to anti-Semitism as a general social problem rather than as a stumbling block in individual lives.”

Her 2009 book “Race, Wrongs and Remedies” argued that cultural-behavioral issues, not racism, are the most important factors preventing African-American progress. Such statements have garnered criticism from black Penn students as far back as 2005.

Nonetheless, according to RateMyProfessors.com, Wax has received mostly high marks from her students in recent years, though one commenter described her as someone who is “obsessed with her own victimization at the hands of forces she believes deserve blame for being victims themselves” but is nonetheless a “decent instructor when she can just stick to the course content.”

But for Penn students, especially students of color, the decision to remove Wax from her introductory class was the right one. “It’s been incredible to see how black students and alumni came together, grappled with how to handle this, and moved to create a change, and I hope that it continues,” the president of Penn’s Black Law Students Association, Nick Hall, told Philly.com.

Wax, for her part, sees her experience as part of an ominous trend, which could especially affect Jewish students. “Jews have been harmed by the threats to freedom of opinion and debate, the punishments for candor, and the decline in rigorous standards in the academy that have accompanied progressive hegemony, which insists upon the sacrosanct status of affirmative action and other policies favored by the left,” Wax wrote in an email to the Forward. She added that such pressures were especially powerful on female students. “Things were so much better in the 1970s, when I was a young women undergraduate at Yale. I am grateful to have come of age during that period. I wouldn’t want to be an undergraduate at an elite college today.”

“Owning one’s moment” is a clever way to rebrand “surviving the rat race.” In the new work culture, enduring or even merely liking one’s job is not enough. Workers should love what they do, and then promote that love on social media, thus fusing their identities to that of their employers. Why else would LinkedIn build its own version of Snapchat Stories?

Most visibly, WeWork — which investors recently valued at $47 billion — is on its way to becoming the Starbucks of office culture. It has exported its brand of performative workaholism to 27 countries, with 400,000 tenants, including workers from 30 percent of the Global Fortune 500.

hymns to the virtues of relentless work remind me of nothing so much as Soviet-era propaganda, which promoted impossible-seeming feats of worker productivity to motivate the labor force

Mr. Heinemeier Hansson said that despite data showing long hours improve neither productivity nor creativity, myths about overwork persist because they justify the extreme wealth created for a small group of elite techies. “It’s grim and exploitative,” he said.

Elon Musk

He tweeted in November that there are easier places to work than Tesla, “but nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” The correct number of hours “varies per person,” he continued, but is “about 80 sustained, peaking about 100 at times. Pain level increases exponentially above 80.”

This is toil glamour, and it is going mainstream.

Today’s messages glorify personal profit, even if bosses and investors — not workers — are the ones capturing most of the gains. Wage growth has been essentially stagnant for years.

the concept of productivity has taken on an almost spiritual dimension. Techies here have internalized the idea — rooted in the Protestant work ethic — that work is not something you do to get what you want; the work itself is all. Therefore any life hack or company perk that optimizes their day, allowing them to fit in even more work, is not just desirable but inherently good.

this is dehumanizing and toxic. “It creates the assumption that the only value we have as human beings is our productivity capability — our ability to work, rather than our humanity,

Jonathan Crawford, a San Francisco-based entrepreneur, told me that he sacrificed his relationships and gained more than 40 pounds while working on Storenvy, his e-commerce start-up. If he socialized, it was at a networking event. If he read, it was a business book. He rarely did anything that didn’t have a “direct R.O.I.,” or return on investment, for his company.

Bernie Klinder, a consultant for a large tech company, said he tried to limit himself to five 11-hour days per week, which adds up to an extra day of productivity. “If your peers are competitive, working a ‘normal workweek’ will make you look like a slacker,” he wrote in an email

Millennials, Ms. Petersen argues, are just desperately striving to meet their own high expectations. An entire generation was raised to expect that good grades and extracurricular overachievement would reward them with fulfilling jobs that feed their passions. Instead, they wound up with precarious, meaningless work and a mountain of student loan debt.

In 17th-century England, work was lauded as a cure for vice, Mr. Spencer said, but the unrewarding truth just drove workers to drink more.

“People aren’t going to stand for this,” he said, using an expletive, “or buy the propaganda that eternal bliss lies at monitoring your own bathroom breaks.” He was referring to an interview that the former chief executive of Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, gave in 2016, in which she said that working 130 hours a week was possible “if you’re strategic about when you sleep, when you shower, and how often you go to the bathroom.”

Ms. Mayer’s comments were widely panned on social media when the interview ran, but since then, Quora users have eagerly shared their own strategies for mimicking her schedule. Likewise, Mr. Musk’s “pain level” tweets drew plenty of critical takes, but they also garnered just as many accolades and requests for jobs.

The grim reality of 2019 is that begging a billionaire for employment via Twitter is not considered embarrassing, but a perfectly plausible way to get ahead. On some level, you have to respect the hustlers who see a dismal system and understand that success in it requires total, shameless buy-in. If we’re doomed to toil away until we die, we may as well pretend to like it. Even on Mondays.

The sharp acceleration in cases – just two weeks ago the official number was less than 2,000 – has led to the WHO warning that the US is overtaking countries such as Italy as the global hotspot for the virus.

early one in 10 Americans have no health insurance, while a widespread lack of sick pay across the country has forced many ill people into work despite the risk of spreading the virus.

the US response has been hobbled by the administration’s rejection of standard WHO testing kits, instead opting to develop its own, which turned out to be faulty.

The true scale of infection in the US is almost certainly far worse, with a severe lack of testing having stymied efforts to contain Covid-19 once it emerged near Seattle

Muddled messaging from the White House, where Trump has often contradicted the sombre warnings of his top infectious disease expert, Dr Anthony Fauci, has done little to Americans stop congregating on beaches or in shopping malls.

Authorities in New York are scouring the world for the ventilators, masks and gowns needed for an unfolding public health emergency that is expected to peak in the next three weeks.

The apex of this pandemic is higher and sooner than we thought,” said Andrew Cuomo, the New York governor who has garnered praise for his handling of the crisis. “I will turn this state upside down to get the hospital beds we need.”

Cuomo also condemned Fema and the Trump administration again, saying: “You want a pat on the back for sending 400 ventilators? What are we going to do with 400 ventilators when we need 30,000 ventilators? You’re missing the magnitude of the problem, and the problem is defined by the magnitude.”

The number of cases was higher in New York, he said, “because it started here first because we have global travelers coming here first. Because we have more density than other places. You will see this in suburban communities across the country. We are just a test case. We are just a test case. And that’s how the nation should look at it. Where we are today, you will be in three weeks or five weeks or six weeks.”

Trump has signaled that he is prepared to wind down restrictions at the end of a 15-day window in an attempt to bolster the economy and a sagging stock market.

Former South Bend, Ind. Mayor Pete Buttigieg issued a dire warning about Sanders’ early surge in the delegate chase. “Before we rush to nominate Sen. Sanders,” realize that he “believes in an inflexible, ideological revolution that leaves out most Democrats, not to mention most Americans,” Buttigieg argued in his Nevada concession speech.

Sanders’ supporters also emphasized that it wasn’t just “Bernie bros” who handed him the decisive victory in the most diverse state so far in the nominating process. His Nevada win reflected a broad cross-section of the party – those with college degrees, and those without, union members and non-union members, young people and voters in every age group except those over 65. Exit polls showed that the coalition included more than half of Hispanic voters, nearly four times as much support as Biden garnered. Even those Democrats who consider themselves moderate or conservative narrowly went for Sanders.

Excitement was building throughout the Sanders camp in the days leading up to the caucuses, especially after former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg’s debate debut ended up  an embarrassing bust. Elizabeth Warren bloodied him with zingers and questions about the non-disclosure agreements women have signed after legal disputes with the billionaire businessman. But Saturday’s results showed, as some had noted beforehand, that her fire was misdirected. She helped let Sanders skate to a crushing  victory.

a clip of Newsome’s speech posted on Facebook had garnered millions of views and thousands of comments applauding a rare instance of unity and civility in today’s toxic political climate.

After wading through the throng of mostly-white attendees, some of whom shouted hostile remarks,  and past a speaker who told those gathered to ignore the Black Lives Matter activists, Newsome was invited up on the the makeshift stage near the Washington Monument at the impromptu invitation of the event’s organizer, Tommy Hodges, who had to persuade some in the crowd to hear them out.

The result was an open dialogue between members of two seemingly opposing movements

“I expected hostility. I expected anger. I even expected the possibility of violence,” Newsome said Tuesday in a phone interview, “but the one thing I did not expect was an invitation to speak on that stage.”

Newsome concluded his speech by saying, “If we really want to make America great, we do it together.” And then the crowd cheered.

Afterward a few Trump supporters approached him and expressed their appreciation for his speech, including a Bikers for Trump member, who asked Newsome if he could pose for a photo with his grandson.

It wasn’t Clinton’s unpopularity that made Trump acceptable. It was partisan hyper-polarization that made someone who could reasonably be seen as a flawed candidate appear unacceptable in comparison to someone who, prior to the effects of that polarization kicking in, the great majority of the public recognized as manifestly unsuited to and unqualified for the job.

Not just any crazy person could accomplish what Trump did. Trump embodies what I’ve come to think of as a ‘dominationist’ politics which profoundly resonates with the base of the GOP and has an expanding resonance across the party. Party leaders made the judgment that since they couldn’t defeat Trump they should join him, hoping he would deliver on a policy agenda favoring money and using public policy to center risk on individuals. That hope has been entirely confirmed.

t this is the factor that is structural, responsible on its own for a substantial amount of Trump’s support, and because it is structural quite likely to endure into future elections.

Ms. Le Pen, the leader of France’s far-right National Front party, has a similar fear, and she sees birthright citizenship as the vehicle for replacement. Although she doesn’t use the term favored by many Republicans in the United States (“anchor babies”), she insists, as she told me in an interview last May, that “we must stop creating automatic French citizens.”

Just as Mr. Trump has plenty to say about Islamic State attacks but generally has no comment about hate crimes against Indians, blacks and Muslims, the European far-right is quick to denounce any violent act committed by a Muslim but rarely feels compelled to forcefully condemn attacks on mosques or neo-Nazis marching near synagogues on Yom Kippur.

Their ideology is especially dangerous because they present themselves as natives valiantly defending the homeland. Because they look and sound like most of their co-citizens, they garner sympathy from the majority in ways that Islamists never could. White nationalism is in many ways a mirror image of radical Islamism. Both share a nostalgic obsession with a purist form of identity: for one, a medieval Islamic state; for the other, a white nation unpolluted by immigrant blood.

Lately Trump has been doing what comes naturally to him — dictating tweet-like statements, calling into conservative talk shows, and generally stirring up trouble. "I like this better than Twitter," he claimed on Newsmax. "Actually they did us a favor. This is better."

Trump has shown no courtesy to President Joe Biden since leaving the White House.

On the phone with one of his biggest sycophants, Newsmax's Greg Kelly, on Monday evening, Kelly speculated about Biden's mental faculties, prompting Trump to say "there's something" going on with Biden. Trump then questioned "whether or not he understands what he's signing" when bills cross his desk.

Trump is the first US president to lose re-election in nearly thirty years.

Trump, of course, proudly stands as the GOP antithesis of Bush 41. President 45, as some of his allies now call him, lest they identify him as "former," was uncharacteristically quiet upon leaving the White House. But he set up an office in Florida within days and began issuing statements that were widely picked up by the media — a cheap replacement for his account on Twitter, which banned him in the wake of the Capitol riot.

"The code of the presidents club is to get out of the way and let the new commander in chief have a year or two," CNN presidential historian Douglas Brinkley said.

Since then, he has gradually increased his visibility, with emails to members of the media from "45 Office" so far in March, twice as many as in February

"Trump's unique in that he wants to make a lot of racket and garner attention after leaving the White House,"

Trump said "people have seen some silence" from him, "but actually, if you take a look at what's happened over the last period of time, we're sending out releases. They're getting picked up much better than any tweet."

Trump also teased plans for "our own platform,"

Trump told Boothe that he now believes official statements to the public are "much more elegant than a tweet, and I think it gets picked up better. You're seeing that."

"Picked up" was the key phrase. The need for pickup — meaning attention from the American news media — is at the heart of Trump's post-presidential actions.

And he is continuing to push the incendiary claims that led up to the January 6 riot, about winning the 2020 election and Biden stealing it from him, despite pleas even from within his own party to stop lying.

Trump seemed self-aware about his media approach during a podcast taping with Lisa Boothe, which was released on Monday morning. Trump was Boothe's inaugural guest — which means the podcast does not yet have a high profile or a massive following. Trump said in a statement that she has been doing "an outstanding job" on Fox, so perhaps he wanted to give her new podcast a boost.

Brinkley likened Trump to "an active political hand grenade, ready to blow up the US political system any way he can.

Last week Trump called into Fox for a live interview with Maria Bartiromo. The next day his comments to Bartiromo were in heavy rotation on other right-wing networks and outlets.

To Kelly, he hedged about the possibility of a new social platform, saying that "something will happen with social media if I want it to happen."

“North Korea uses weapons tests strategically, both to make needed improvements to its weapons and to garner global attention,”

As the policy review continues — and the possibility that the Biden administration will abandon the summit diplomacy of President Donald J. Trump grows — North Korea appears to be “returning to a familiar pattern of using provocations to raise tensions,” Ms. Lee said.

“This latest North Korean missile launch is most likely a reaction to U.S. President Joe Biden’s downplaying and seeming to laugh off their weekend missile tests,” said Harry J. Kazianis, senior director of Korean studies at the National Interest in Washington. “The Kim regime, just like during the Trump years, will react to even the slightest of what they feel are any sort of loss of face or disparaging comments coming out of Washington.”

On Friday, after a North Korean businessman was extradited from Malaysia to face trial in an American court on charges of money laundering and violating international sanctions, North Korea warned that Washington would pay “a due price.”

“North Korea believes that if the United States tries to impose sanctions, China will provide cover for it,” he said.

Analysis of district-level voting patterns suggests that Republicans enjoy an inbuilt 2.1 percentage-point advantage in contests for the House majority. Joe Biden won the national vote by 4.6 points in 2020. He won the median House seat, Illinois’s Fourteenth Congressional District, by 2.5 points.

Not since the mid-1990s have Republican senators represented a majority of American voters. The 50 Democratic senators elected in 2020 represent nearly 42 million more Americans than the 50 Republicans.

Shifting power from an overmighty presidency to a Congress that overindulges reactionary minorities will do democracy no good. The post-Watergate reformers recognized that logic, and joined their limits on the presidency to an attempted modernization of Congress.

the reformers of the 1970s understood the architecture of American democracy. Power flowed from Congress to the presidency precisely because the presidency was the most accountable branch of the federal government. If the flow was to be reversed, Congress needed to be democratized. This same problem presents itself with even greater force in the 2020s.

The 60-vote Senate has become an accepted fact of American politics, along with presidents who lose the popular vote, and state legislatures where 45 percent of the vote is converted into 55 percent of the seats, or more.

The Senate is defended by a sequence of rationalizations: It’s good that a Wyoming vote counts 68 times more than a California vote. It’s good that garnering 59 out of 100 votes does not suffice to enact laws. It’s good that any one legislator is able to disrupt the proceedings. These rationalizations have proved contagious. If minority rule is good sometimes, why not more of the time?

As the Senate has deviated further and further from majoritarian norms, the House and the state legislatures have followed. Among the great merits of Jentleson’s Kill Switch is that it reminds us how recent this trend is.

In the era of the 67-vote filibuster, the tools of minority rule were used to defend racial segregation, a cause that even its supporters did not like to defend openly.

In an important new book, Kill Switch, Adam Jentleson offers a harrowing portrait of how anti-majoritarian dysfunction has paralyzed the U.S. Senate.

The Framers’ constitutional design balanced majority rights as they were understood at the time—the rights of a majority of those persons possessed of full citizenship who voted in state and House elections—against a federal Senate to protect the rights of smaller states and a judiciary insulated from passing political passions

it’s one thing to respect regional and cultural minorities; it’s another to let those minorities impose hostile preferences upon an unwilling majority, year in, year out, with every exit from federal minority rule blocked by even more obdurate systems of minority rule at the state level.

Jentleson offers a program for reform that begins with the outright elimination of the filibuster. But without constitutional change more radical than anything contemplated today, the Senate will always remain counter-majoritarian—and Senate reform can accordingly take the country only so far toward the reanimation of the majority-rule principle.

the House, often falsely complimented as the “people’s House,” is the part of the government most in need of democratic change. Change to the House depends on change to the anti-majoritarian state legislatures that redraw congressional districts—and that change depends on renewal of the voting-rights laws the federal courts have so weakened over the past decade and a half.

In the meantime, the federal and state executive branches are the tools most available to the disempowered majority.

America got the imperial presidency in the first place in great part because of the defects of Congress. From free trade to civil rights, the post-1945 presidency would act to do things in the broad public interest over the truculent obstruction of Congresses dominated by narrow and backward-looking minority interests.

But presidents, even the greatest of them, are not magicians. Since 2010, the U.S. political system has been ever more extremely biased toward its narrow and backward-looking ideological minorities. Weaken the executive branches, federal and state, and you privilege those ideological minorities.

don’t overcorrect, and don’t overdo it. Under present rules and conditions, the executive power, state and federal, is the least antidemocratic power in the American political design.

The only hope for bringing majority rule to the rest of American politics is voting-rights enforcement by the federal Department of Justice—and maybe some forward-thinking governors—against the probable resistance of the U.S. Senate, the Republican-dominated federal courts, and the minority-rule state legislatures.

The presidency and the governorships have not always advanced the cause of majority rule in the past. They will not always do so in the future. But at this moment, that’s precisely what they’re poised to do. The enemies of the majority-rule principle understand that fact. The friends of majority rule should absorb it too.

In terms of who this guy is and who you are absolutely nothing has changed. And yet here you are—arguing with him on Twitter or Facebook. And you, yourself, are being brought to the brink of insanity. But you can’t seem to stop. You have to respond or read the comments of the other people responding and your cortisol and adrenaline levels are spiking and your blood pressure is rising and you’re suddenly at risk of a heart attack

And the ugly truth is that you’ve become addicted to arguing with the “End Is Nigh” sandwich board guy

Anti-vaccers, anti-maskers, Qanon, cancel-culture, Alex Jones, flat-earthers, racists, anti-racists, anti-anti-racists, and of course the Twitter stylings of our Dear Leader.

Back in 2011 Chamath Palihapitiya left Facebook and said of his former company, “It literally is a point now where I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works.”

I’m here to make the case that all modern social, political, and sociological ills can be traced to social media. It is single-handedly responsible for the tearing apart of our social fabric which Palihapitiya so presciently predicted

It’s not “part of” the problem. It is the problem: An insidious malware slowly corrupting our society in ways that are extremely difficult to quantify, but the effects of which are evident all around us.

maybe you don’t even know why you’re doing it. But you can’t stop, won’t stop.

(2) The unfortunate reality that media organizations are so starved for content that every time something outrageous garners a small buzz on social media they immediately project and amplify it out to the masses.

(1) The fact that your phone in your pocket guarantees that you can get your fix at every minute of every day.

Before the internet people socialized in relatively small, geographically constrained groups. They had friends and colleagues and relatives and they communicated with these people largely in person or via the phone using the rules of engagement that have been evolving generations.

Of course, these are patently insane ideas that don’t deserve consideration. But there you are considering them

These include facial movements, and vocal intonation or more global cues such as “does this person look and smell like they haven’t showered for a week?” These are tried and true and essential components to a healthy social “network.”

In such an environment the only place for the “End Is Nigh” guy to get an audience is on the street corner

But along came the internet and the EIN guy became an anonymous Internet denizen who could insert himself into conversations across the globe. First he did this on listservs and chat rooms and message boards. Then he did it in the comments sections. And with the advent of social media, he did it right in your face, courtesy of The Algorithm

EIN guy is now just part of the crowd. And what’s worse, while every town has one EIN guy, the internet has allowed all of the EIN guys to find each other so that now they think they’re just as normal as everyone else.

Now you’re doubting yourself, too, because it’s one thing to ignore one crazy guy—but a crazy movement?

No—you can’t ignore that—it’s your duty as a responsible citizen to quash it before it gets out of control and you don’t even realize that instead of quashing it, you’re now part of it.

Because what EIN guy always wanted—more than anything—was for the normies to stop walking past him. He wanted them to notice him and argue with him because that would be a sign that what he had to say was important and legitimate.

Social media has made it possible for deranged people to break through what I think of as the holistic herd immunity of sanity which geography has traditionally conferred

And once they broke through, thanks to social media, the traditional media decided to start elevating them.

journalistic outlets now rush out to broadcast anything weird enough to draw an audience

Maybe the earth is flat?! Maybe Qanon is right?! Maybe vaccines are super dangerous ?!

it’s all brought to you exclusively and specifically by social media. It is exacerbated by two things:

So what’s the answer? It’s shockingly simple. Leave all social media. Try it for one month.

There are very real actions that social media companies can take to help move things back towards sanity. People like Tristan Harris and Jaron Lanier and Roger McNamee have been discussing this for years. But social media companies aren’t going to do anything helpful so long as the incentive structure is what it is today.

Like most evil things that are bad for you, social media has enough attractive, useful, and even beneficial components to give you the false impression that it’s actually a good thing. Or at least harmless

In the future, we may be able to defang and declaw it and everyone can have it as a pet. But that’s somewhere down the road when Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the most powerful man in the world.