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The page-by-page detail of the book is much of the reason to read it, but if you reduced its complexities and tangles to their essence, they would amount to these three points:

First, through most of human history, people have chosen to intertwine religion with all their other activities, including, notably, how they are governed. This was “not because ambitious churchmen had ‘mixed up’ two essentially distinct activities,” she says, “but because people wanted to endow everything they did with significance.”

econd, this involvement with politics means that religions have often been tied up with violence: Crusaders, conquistadors, jihadists and many more. But — a point Armstrong cares about so much that she makes it dozens of times — the violence almost always originates with the state and spills over to religion, rather than vice versa

For months, worried parents in Flint, Mich., arrived at their pediatricians’ offices in droves. Holding a toddler by the hand or an infant in their arms, they all have the same question: Are their children being poisoned?

To find out, all it takes is a prick of the finger, a small letting of blood. If tests come back positive, the potentially severe consequences are far more difficult to discern.

That’s how lead works. It leaves its mark quietly, with a virtually invisible trail. But years later, when a child shows signs of a learning disability or behavioral issues, lead’s prior presence in the bloodstream suddenly becomes inescapable.

It has been more than two months since Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president of the United States, a historic moment for the country, as Harris is the first woman and the first woman of color to hold the second highest office in the land. Yet, Harris -- along with her husband, Georgetown Law professor Douglas Emhoff -- is still, ostensibly, living out of suitcases, unable to move into the private residence reserved for the vice president because it's still undergoing renovations.

It's unclear why the renovations are taking so long, said one administration official, but it's a situation that has left Harris increasingly and understandably bothered, according to several people who spoke to CNN about her situation. "She is getting frustrated," said another administration official, noting with each passing day the desire to move in to her designated house -- a stately, turreted mansion two-and-a-half miles from the White House -- grows more intense.

CNN has looked at various government contracts, awarded for myriad issues at the vice president's residence over the last few years, many of which detail intensive foundational work. From recently wrapped projects on a retention pond to a replaced tank system for $164,000 from last September, repairs and upkeep appear constant. There's also an ongoing $3.8 million contract for "plumbing, heating and air-conditioning contractors," according to the contract on the United States government spending website.

The Federal Election Commission on Tuesday said it had fined the publisher of the National Enquirer for its role in a "hush-money" payment made to quiet a woman who alleged an affair with former President Donald Trump during the 2016 election cycle, according to documents made public by Common Cause, a watchdog group.

The $187,500 fine came after the commission found that American Media Inc., whose successor is A360 Media, LLC, made an illegal corporate campaign contribution by paying $150,000 during Trump's first presidential campaign to prevent former Playboy model Karen McDougal from going public with her claims of an affair. Trump has denied the affair.

The FEC conciliation agreement with A360 Media -- made public by Common Cause, which had filed a complaint about the McDougal payment -- came after AMI signed a 2018 non-prosecution agreement with Manhattan federal prosecutors in which it admitted that its "principal purpose in entering into the agreement" to pay McDougal "was to suppress [McDougal's] story so as to prevent it from influencing the election."

the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

I first began seriously considering the immortality of white supremacy after listening to Nell Irvin Painter.

 Here are a couple interviews on that point--one with Phoebe Judge at WUNC in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, the other with Jonathan Judaken before a lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis.

The two that really pushed me over were were Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom and Barbara and Karen Fields' Racecraft. Morgan is indispensable. There is no single book I've found myself reviewing more over the past five years. 

I wish to return to one of the original features of blogging—the documentation of public thinking. I would suggest that more writers, more academics, and more journalists do this, and do so honestly.

It have come to believe that arguing with the self is as important as arguing with the broader world.

the assumption of that "something new" is happening "racially," that these terms are somehow constant is one of the great, and underestimated, barriers to understanding the case for reparations.

How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

An America at war with Islam plays right into Al Qaeda’s recruitment spiel. This month’s incessant and indiscriminate orgy of Muslim-bashing is a national security disaster for that reason — Osama bin Laden’s “next video script has just written itself,” as the former F.B.I. terrorist interrogator Ali Soufan put it — but not just for that reason. America’s Muslim partners, those our troops are fighting and dying for, are collateral damage. If the cleric behind Park51 — a man who has participated in events with Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, for heaven’s sake — is labeled a closet terrorist sympathizer and a Nazi by some of the loudest and most powerful conservative voices in America, which Muslims are not?

Flint Mayor Karen Weaver on Tuesday outlined  an estimated $55-million public works project expected to begin within a month to remove Flint's lead-contaminated pipes from the water distribution system.

First priority will be given to high-risk households with pregnant women and children, Weaver said at a news conference at City Hall.

Last week, Weaver called for the immediate removal of the city's lead-contaminated pipes and announced a plan that included help from Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero, who has offered technical assistance from the Lansing Board of Water and Light. Lansing has removed about 13,500 lead pipes in the city.

Tragedy ForgesAlliance for Change After a young rugby player died in Northern Ireland, his family anda brain expert set about to establish concussion guidelines in Britain.

As a heartbroken Mr. Robinson and his family left the Old Townhall Courthouse in Belfast, Northern Ireland, that day in September 2013, they were told they could slip out the back to avoid the news media. But Mr. Robinson was determined that his son should not die in vain, so he, along with his ex-wife, Karen Walton, and their families, exited through the front, spoke to a scrum of reporters and instantly landed among the most vocal advocates for concussion safety standards in Britain.

Within months, Mr. Robinson was meeting with politicians, sports executives, professional athletes and, most important, Dr. Willie Stewart, the foremost scientist on the subject in Britain who formed a bond with Mr. Robinson that has helped produce some of the most comprehensive concussion guidelines in the world.

They sent Hillary and Bill Clinton's daughter Chelsea out on behalf of her mother to bash Senator Bernie Sanders on the issue of health care.

But when it's the first time (as this was for Clinton the younger), the surrogate should be sure whereof she speaks, and had better stick to talking about her candidate, not the opponent

Unfortunately, Chelsea Clinton misrepresented Senator Sanders' position, and her premiere performance on the stump backfired, producing a flood of political donations to Sanders.

Powerful and damning accounts of the Bush administration’s determination to work what Vice President Dick Cheney called “the dark side” and its elaborate efforts to legalize torture (including arduous attempts to narrowly define torture as leading to “serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure or permanent damage” is likely to result) can be found in two essential books, “The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib,” edited by Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, and “Standard Operating Procedure,” by Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris

An important personal perspective is now provided by Eric Fair’s candid and chilling new book, “Consequence,” which is at once an agonized confession of his own complicity as an interrogator at Abu Ghraib and an indictment of the system that enabled and tried to justify torture.

In 2007, Mr. Fair says, he confessed everything to a lawyer from the Department of Justice and two agents from the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, providing pictures, letters, names, firsthand accounts, locations and techniques. He was not prosecuted. “We tortured people the right way,” he writes, “following the right procedures, and used the approved techniques.”

he grand total for all political ad spending in the 2016 election cycle, according to Advertising Age, was $9.8bn. The ads allegedly produced by inmates of a Russian troll farm, which have made up this week’s ration of horror and panic in the halls of the American punditburo, cost about $100,000 to place on Facebook.

What the Russian trolls allegedly did was “an act of war ... a sneak attack using 21st-century methods”, wrote the columnist Karen Tumulty. “Our democracy is in serious danger,” declared America’s star thought-leader Thomas Friedman on Sunday, raging against the weakling Trump for not getting tough with these trolls and their sponsors. “Protecting our democracy obviously concerns Trump not at all,” agreed columnist Eugene Robinson on Tuesday.

Of what, specifically, did this sophistication consist? In what startling insights was this creativity made manifest? “Fallon said it was stunning to realize that the Russians understood how Trump was trying to woo disaffected [Bernie] Sanders supporters ...”

On Sunday, administrators for Ravelry, a site for knitters, crocheters, designers and anyone dabbling in the fibre arts, said that they were making any expression of support for Trump and his administration in forum posts, patterns, on their personal profile pages or elsewhere permanently off limits. “We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy,” the site’s administrators said in a post.

The Trump ban comes only months after political upheaval gripped the knitting and crochet community around issues of racial and cultural insensitivity. That debate was sparked by popular knitwear designer and blogger Karen Templer, who wrote in January about a planned trip to India, likening it, in her excitement, to visiting Mars. Many in the craft community objected to the characterisation, calling it othering and reductive.

Ravelry said its new policy was not banning participation from people who supported Trump, only expressions of that support.

I doubt the last claim: that “instrumental racists” believe voters will perhaps only respond to racism. And I doubt that voters, in fact, only respond to racism. Something distinct and deeper is at work. This deeper force explains nearly all of Trump’s most odious and irresponsible comments, not just the racist ones. It helps explain why so many conservatives and Republicans were caught off guard by Trump’s rise and the resonance of his bigotry.

Karen Stenner, author of the 2005 book The Authoritarian Dynamic. The book built on research literature that distinguishes between “authoritarians,” who prize what Stenner calls “oneness and sameness” so much so that they are prone to support coercion to effect it, and “libertarians,” who not only defend but affirmatively prize diversity and difference. (Those labels are not to be conflated with the popular definitions of the terms.)

“fears regarding immorality and crime, claims about the critical need to reestablish some normative order, and elaboration of plans for accomplishing this” occupied the bulk of “their psychic space,” consuming a vastly disproportionate share of their time and energy.

All Politics Are National

Reminders of campaign glory form a red stripe across the white walls of a cramped conference room in a GOP fundraising office. There is a poster commemorating "NIXON" in colorful all-caps, as well as framed photographs marking the victories of George W. Bush. Cartoons of former first ladies stretch from corner to corner. Missing was any reference to Donald J. Trump. Maybe Karen Handel chose to meet here because it's the only place in Georgia where he isn't hanging over her head.

Tom Price, who resigned in January to become Trump's secretary of Health and Human Services, was reelected here six times without his support dipping below 62 percent.

Little wonder that many have a hair-trigger reaction whenever they perceive that a commentator is blind to prejudice or going to absurd lengths to minimize its existence.

Yet as sympathetic as I am to the corrective impulse, I fear one of its manifestations is preventing people from grasping insights crucial to the anti-racist project.

We discussed the work of Karen Stenner, a leading scholar of authoritarianism, who warned in her 2005 book that academic and political elites too often fail to recognize the difference between conservatives and authoritarians.

Whatever our goal, a lot of readers found the story offensive, with many seizing on the idea we were normalizing neo-Nazi views and behavior. “How to normalize Nazis 101!” one reader wrote on Twitter. “I’m both shocked and disgusted by this article,” wrote another. “Attempting to ‘normalize’ white supremacist groups – should Never have been printed!”

Some readers did see value in the piece. Shane Bauer, a senior reporter at Mother Jones and a winner of the National Magazine Award, tweeted: “People mad about this article want to believe that Nazis are monsters we cannot relate to. White supremacists are normal ass white people and it’s been that way in America since 1776. We will continue to be in trouble till we understand that.”

Others urged us to focus our journalism less on those pushing hate and more on those on the receiving end of that hate. “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies?” asked Karen Attiah, an editor at The Washington Post. “Why not a piece about the mother of Heather Heyer, the woman who was killed in Charlottesville? Follow-ups on those who were injured? Or how PoC are coping?”

Protesters against last month’s military takeover in Myanmar returned to the streets in large numbers Thursday, a day after staging a “silence strike” in which people were urged to stay home and businesses to close for the day.

Social media accounts and local news outlets reported violent attacks on demonstrators in Hpa-an, the capital of the southeastern Karen state, as well as the eastern Shan state’s capital of Taunggyi and Mon state’s capital of Mawlamyine, also in the southeast.

The military’s Feb. 1 seizure of power ousted the elected government of Aung San Suu Kyi, whose party won a landslide election victory last November. It put the brakes on the Southeast Asian nation’s return to democracy that began when Suu Kyi’s party took office in 2016 for its first term, after more than five decades of military rule

At least 114 civilians were killed across Myanmar on Saturday, according to a tally by the independent Myanmar Now news outlet, as the military junta continued to crack down on peaceful protests.The killings in 44 towns and cities across the country would represent the bloodiest day of protests since a military coup last month.

Among those killed is reportedly a 13-year-old girl, who was shot in her house after the junta's armed forces opened fire in residential areas of Meikhtila, in Mandalay region, according to Myanmar Now. She is among 20 minors killed since the start of the protests, Myanmar Now reported.

The lethal crackdown came on the country's Armed Forces Day. Senior Gen. Min Aung Hlaing, the junta leader, said during a parade in the capital Naypyitaw to mark the event that the military would protect the people and strive for democracy, Reuters reported.State television had said on Friday that protesters risked being shot "in the head and back." Despite this, demonstrators against the February 1 coup came out on the streets of Yangon, Mandalay and other towns.