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"On the very day we set aside to honor the life and enduring legacy of Dr. King, these dark and dangerous forces threaten to converge on our city and our Commonwealth, bringing hate and violence," prominent faith leaders warned in a statement released Sunday. "In this difficult moment, and in the face of these threats, we seek to muster Dr. King's moral courage."

There have been threats on law enforcement posted on their official social media sites in the last 24 hours, according to an official with the Virginia State Police.

The threats, which are considered credible by law enforcement, come from mainstream channels and alternative dark web ones used by violent groups and white nationalists from outside of Virginia, according to Northam. The governor added "the conversations are fueled by misinformation and conspiracy theories."

Gilbert acknowledged that although there may be policy differences among the state's GOP and Democratic lawmakers, it was important for all elected officials to stand together against hate. "While we and our Democratic colleagues may have differences, we are all Virginians and we will stand united in opposition to any threats of violence or civil unrest from any quarter," Gilbert said. Gilbert represents the 15th district in the Virginia House of Delegates.

An armed standoff ensued in the House chamber, with police officers drawing their weapons. A pro-Trump protester casually monkeyed around at the dais of the Senate.

It began around 1 p.m., when a mass of Trump supporters, some in camouflage and armed with baseball bats or knives, left the National Mall and, encouraged by President Trump, ascended on the Capitol complex.

“I don’t trust any of these people,” said Eric Martin, 49, a woodworker from Charleston, S.C., as he marveled at the opulence of the Capitol and helped a friend wash pepper spray from his eyes. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The Capitol Police fatally shot a woman inside the building, according to Chief Robert J. Contee of the Metropolitan Police Department, and multiple officers were injured.

“This is what the president has caused today, this insurrection,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said as he and other senators were hustled off to a secure location.

The few police officers standing on the steps of the Capitol were overwhelmed. Their flash bang grenades only invigorated the protesters. Around 2:30, an entrance near the west side of the Capitol descended into chaos as a wave of Trump supporters wearing Make America Great Again apparel pressed past police barricades.

For about an hour, the Trump loyalists went in and out of at least one entrance of the Capitol with little disruption from the police.

Soon, a nervous energy pulsed through the room. The police began to close the gallery doors, which had remained open to allow for better ventilation as lawmakers streamed in. Congressional leaders were quickly ushered out, as staff aides urged lawmakers in the gallery and on the floor to remain calm.

In the House, just after 2:30 p.m., a police officer stepped on the dais and informed lawmakers that they might need to duck under their chairs.

Frantic shouting filled the room as lawmakers struggled to unfold the plastic bags that they were instructed to prepare to put over their heads in case of tear gas.

In a surreal scene of chaos and glee, hundreds of Trump loyalists roamed the halls, taking photos and breaking into offices. No police officers were in view.

“We’re claiming the House, and the Senate is ours,” a sweaty man in a checked shirt shouted, stabbing his finger in the air.

“You guys just need to go outside,” he said to a man in a green backpack. Asked why the police were not forcing the mob out, the officer said, “We just got to let them do their thing for now.”

One protester came up to him and shouted in his face, “Traitor!” When another man approached to apologize to the officer, the officer replied, “You’re fine.”

Around 3:30 p.m., about 25 police officers had entered the Crypt and started asking people to move back. A few minutes later, dozens more, wearing riot gear and some in gas masks, ejected the roughly 150 protesters in the Crypt.

Protesters repeatedly exited the building bearing trophies that they had torn off walls. A few carried “Area Closed” signs that they had snatched and then stormed past.

By 7 p.m., the presence of police officers and federal agents had drastically increased along the National Mall. Officers pushed back against aggressive protesters as they prepared for the possibility of more unrest overnight.

“We want to go back,” Mr. Crow said. “And finish the business of the people to show that we are a democracy, and that the government is stronger than any mob.”

With Georgia voters set to decide control of the US Senate in Tuesday's runoffs, the challenges to the voting rolls in Hancock County, whose residents have long fought for their right to vote, remain under the supervision of a court-appointed examiner. Legal experts say the US Supreme Court pulling teeth from the Voting Rights Act is to blame.

Black households had a median income of $22,056 ($37,083 for White); almost 34% of Black residents lived in poverty (22% for White); and 26% of Black households received food benefits (6% for White).

Ahead of the 2015 Sparta elections, the lawsuit said, BOER Vice Chairwoman Nancy Stephens, who is White, began filing voter challenges as a citizen, then voting on them as a board member. When concerns were raised, a local resident began filing challenges "in a format that closely resembled the format of those filed by the Vice Chair," the lawsuit said.

The challengers "consistently failed to provide credible evidence based upon personal knowledge that the challenged voters were not qualified to vote," the lawsuit said.

The BOER, responding to the lawsuit, "vigorously" and "strenuously" denied illegally targeting Black voters or violating state laws.

He went through the 2014 voting roll and pulled voters he knew were dead or had moved and submitted 14 challenges.

"Sitting after two of the meetings, I thought, 'What would they do if someone challenged some White voters?'" recalled Webb, who is Black.

Thornton can't understand why the BOER would claim he didn't live in the county, or why the board would try to remove him from the rolls. His catfish farm is in unincorporated Mayfield, 20 minutes outside Sparta, and he wasn't eligible to vote in the city elections.

BOER members didn't take Webb's challenges seriously and defended White voters.

The BOER determined before the hearing that four of Webb's challenged voters were dead and removed them from the rolls. Of the remaining challenges, the board nixed one voter from the rolls and moved another to inactive status. Both were Asian American, the lawsuit said.

"What they did was beyond voter suppression. If something is wrong with your voter registration, they should call you and tell you what's wrong. What they were doing is taking you off the rolls, and you wouldn't find out until the election," Webb told CNN. "They were making Black votes disappear."

Since the death of the Georgia civil rights icon US Rep. John Lewis, politicians and activists have called for Congress to honor Lewis by crafting an updated coverage formula, as permitted by the high court, but it hasn't come to pass.

Julie Houk with the Lawyers Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, who worked on the Hancock County case, disagrees with the Supreme Court's finding "that the conditions that originally justified these measures no longer characterize voting in the covered jurisdictions."

The Lawyers' Committee has also challenged restrictive absentee ballot rules and fought voter purges, redistricting decisions and efforts to limit ballot drop boxes -- which tend to burden minorities the most.

In Macon-Bibb County, Georgia, Houk said, elections officials moved a Black voting precinct -- in a community that had rocky relations with law enforcement -- to the sheriff's office, which she called "very problematic" as it threatened to dissuade African Americans from voting.

In 2015, Georgia's then-Secretary of State Brian Kemp cited Shelby in informing counties they were "no longer required to submit polling place changes to the Department of Justice."

The ACLU of Georgia reported in September that of 313,243 voters removed from the state rolls in 2019, almost 200,000 were likely erroneously purged.

Two weeks before the November general election, ProPublica, in collaboration with public broadcasters, reported, "The state's voter rolls have grown by nearly 2 million since the US Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, but polling locations have been cut by almost 10%, with Metro Atlanta hit particularly hard."

This is why preclearance was so important: Discriminating against Black voters would've been rejected

The truth about 2015 "depends on what side you talk to," he said. No candidate could win in the city, now estimated at 89% African American, without securing a swath of the Black vote, said Haywood, who is White and is certain he was elected on his promise of reform, he said.

"We are way past problems with Black and White here," Haywood said. "Now, people are excited things are getting fixed."

Before the Voting Rights Act of 1965, it had no Black elected officials until John McCown -- an activist more in the mold of Stokely Carmichael than Martin Luther King Jr. -- came to town, luring investment and ushering Black residents to power.

McCown remains revered among many Black residents, despite investigations into his alleged misspending of grant money and other improprieties. They consider his achievements landmarks, including an affordable housing project and job creators like a cinder block factory and Thornton's now-defunct catfish farm. McCown's antebellum home still stands, abandoned and in need of upkeep.

A 1976 plane crash killed McCown, and a federal investigation into his fundraising killed the county's resurrected prosperity, but his legacy survived in the Black leaders succeeding him. "He created a political strategy, and African Americans voted themselves into power," Thornton said. "It has come to a point where (Hancock County) is one of the most impoverished in America. There is a wives' tale -- I don't know if it's true or not -- that some political leaders in Georgia have always said that if we can't vote the people of Hancock County out, we'll starve them out -- and there's been a disproportionate lack of growth to this particular community."

The BOER "strenuously denied" that it was illegally targeting Black voters with its challenges but agreed to enter the consent decree and abide by the standards and procedures the decree lays out. The court also ordered the defendants to pay more than $500,000 in attorneys' fees and other expenses, court documents show.As part of the consent decree, the BOER agreed to "not engage in discriminatory challenges to voters' eligibility," and to adhere to certain procedures in such challenges, according to court documents. It also restored certain voters to its rolls and agreed not to take action on other voters restored to the rolls for at least two federal election cycles.

"It had a chilling effect on voters," she said. "A lot of folks decided voting wasn't worth it."

"It will affect several elections down the road because people will say that I'm not going to be bothered by this ever again. I'm not going to vote," Warren said. "You have virtually destroyed their whole trust in the system altogether."

The county has submitted voters it wants removed, as instructed, and during the November election, the NAACP "seemed to think everything went OK," he said. Spencer's team is "always concerned," he said, and events happening at the state and national level, including Georgia's secretary of state calling to end no-excuse absentee voting and President Donald Trump challenging elections results, only exacerbate his worry.

"I am definitely worried that once the consent decree ends that the BOER will start its same antics again," he said. "They can say, 'Hey, we'll get everybody except Johnny Thornton, and the other people that we go for might not have the legal means or expertise to push back or to fight against the system.'"

Warren, in addition to previously serving as Sparta's registrar, is a Black county resident who began filming BOER meetings in 2015 when he learned of the challenges. He had trouble last year, he said, when applying for a mail-in ballot. A county elections official told him his home wasn't his registered address, he said. He isn't alleging any misbehavior -- he was able to sort it out before the general election -- but such a county notice might have been enough to deter a less-resolute voter from casting her or his ballot. In poor, rural areas like Hancock County, minor hiccups such as a rainy day or a washed-out road can have major effects on voting.

Too often, the victories we have won have proved to be ephemeral or incomplete, and our full acceptance as Americans has once again been denied.

Mr. Trump is too late. We are everywhere in America. We are in the bone and the blood and the root of the country. We are not going anywhere, certainly not to some fantasy of a new “separate but equal” segregation, we in “our” cities, white people in “their” suburbs.

Perhaps the president is confused by how the Rev. Dr. King Martin Luther King Jr., in his greatest speech, referred to the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as a “promissory note to which every American is to fall heir.” Perhaps that gave Mr. Trump the idea that this was all about money.

He quoted the most fundamental promise of the Declaration, that all of us have “certain unalienable Rights” — among them “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

It seems strange that we must still agitate for these basic rights, or that Mr. Trump thinks he is being magnanimous when he offers them to us again as last-minute campaign promises — so long as we stay in our place.

for all the bitter lessons we have learned from Mr. Trump’s term in office, I can tell you that the wheel is turning again. That we have never had so many white allies, willing to stand together for freedom, for honor, for a justice that will free us all in the end, even those who are now most fearful and seething with denial.

e have learned exactly how much we had to lose — a lesson that has been inflicted upon Black people again and again in our history — and we will not be bought off by the empty promises of the flimflam man.

A corollary of the iron law is that institutions will tend to be controlled by the folks most focused on maximizing internal rather than external power — and already this month, progressives have scored several major victories

My former boss, James Bennet, resigned as a top editor at the New York Times over an op-ed he oversaw from Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) expressing an opinion that at least one poll suggested was shared by many and possibly most voters. A University of California at Los Angeles sociology professor was investigated for reading Martin Luther King Jr. aloud without bowdlerizing the n-word, and a political consultant no longer has a job after tweet-linking a paper — authored by a black professor — suggesting that violent protest may be politically counterproductive.

A few weeks ago, these were not firing offenses. Overnight, firing became necessary for the same reason that academia, the media and Hollywood have been offering more and more overtly political content recently: as a counterweight to the outrages of a Trumpish right..

Why, though, does fighting Trump necessitate destroying the moderate wing of your own side?

Our cause is under existential threat, and we cannot compromise with evil, so if you are not with us, you are against us.

conservatives saw tech employees being fired for opposing gay marriage, bakeries shut down by civil rights commissions, and their own employers “inviting” them to publicly declare themselves allies of various social justice causes, removing even the option of keeping tactfully quiet on the job.

they demanded to know what all that power was for, if not to protect them from this sort of thing.

Thus, instead of a moderate conservative who would defer to liberal sensibilities on touchy issues such as immigration, they chose a champion whose superpowers were reflexive belligerence and utter indifference to social mores.

The civil war that ensued saw Schwarz’s iron law working in both directions: Both the #NeverTrumpers and the Trumpists were willing to lose the election before they’d allow the other side to run the party.

It seems likely that the iron law will remain in force, because the purer your own side gets, the more terrifyingly alien are the people who remain outside your carefully constructed defensive perimeter

“The impression I got from her was that it was presumptuous for someone else to decide how and when you should end your judicial career,” says Margaret McKeown, a friend and a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. “That is such a personal decision. And when you have a mind as sharp as hers, why wouldn’t you continue?”

But a similar phenomenon is sending off alarms across Europe, where researchers from the World Health Organization estimate that about half of the population is experiencing “pandemic fatigue.”

“Citizens have made huge sacrifices,” said Dr. Hans Kluge, the W.H.O.’s regional director for Europe. “It has come at an extraordinary cost, which has exhausted all of us, regardless of where we live, or what we do.”

If the spring was characterized by horror, the fall has become an odd mix of resignation and heedlessness. People who once would not leave their homes are now considering dining indoors for the first time — some losing patience after so many months without, others slipping in a fancy meal before the looming winter months when the virus is expected to spread more readily

“In the spring, it was fear and a sense of, ‘We are all in it together,’” said Vaile Wright, a psychologist at the American Psychological Association who studies stress in the United States.“Things are different now,” she said. “Fear has really been replaced with fatigue.”

In some parts of the world, behavior has changed and containment efforts have been tough and effective

“We were doing sprints in the beginning, and now it’s a marathon. We’re a little tired.”

“We have very little backlash here against these types of measures,” said Siddharth Sridhar, an assistant professor of microbiology at the University of Hong Kong. “If anything, there’s a lot of pushback against governments for not doing enough to contain the virus.”

Infections have stayed relatively low for months in places like South Korea, Japan, New Zealand, Australia and China, where the virus first spread.

Sick people are telling contact tracers they picked up the virus while trying to return to ordinary life. Beth Martin, a retired school librarian who is working as a contact tracer in Marathon County, Wis., said she interviewed a family that had become sick through what is now a common situation — at a birthday party for a relative in early October.

Mark Harris, county executive for Winnebago County, Wis., said he had been frustrated by the “loud minority” in his county that had been successfully pushing back against any public health measures to be taken against the pandemic.They have a singular frame of mind, he said: “‘This has been inconveniencing me long enough and I’m done changing my behavior.’”

There are growing signs that the ongoing stress is taking a toll. In the United States, alcohol sales in stores are up 23 percent during the pandemic, according to Nielsen, a figure that could reflect the nation’s anxiety as well as the drop in drinks being sold at restaurants and bars.

Overdose deaths, too, are on the rise in many cities. In Cuyahoga County, Ohio, which includes Cleveland, there were recently 19 overdose deaths in a single week, far more than most weeks.

The response in the United States and much of Europe has been far different. While residents willingly banded together in the spring, time has given rise to frustration and revolt.

Dr. Michael Landrum, who treats coronavirus patients in Green Bay, Wis., said mask use is more widespread than in the spring, personal protective equipment is easier to come by for hospital workers and treatment of the virus is more sophisticated.

“The scary scenario is the number of patients who really just don’t know where they got it,” Dr. Landrum said. “That suggests to me that it’s out there spreading very easily.”

The challenge ahead, he said, would be convincing people that they need to take significant steps — all over again — to slow down spread that could be even worse than before.

“We’re trying to get people to change their behavior back to being more socially distanced and more restrictive with their contacts,” Dr. Landrum said. “There’s been a false sense of complacency. And now it’s just a lot harder to do that.”

This shift has been occurring for years, but it could present Trump and Republicans with a perfect storm of problems at the same time that the state has become the center of the political universe with close races for president, Senate and governor.

"We realize that we have been infiltrated by other people that have more liberal views... than we do," Cheryl Miles, a Trump supporter,

Martin County, after twice voting for President Barack Obama, narrowly backed Trump in 2016, helping him cut into margins in the bigger metropolitan areas.

Christian conservatives who were somewhat skeptical of Trump four years ago are now fully behind the Republican leader.

"He stands for Christian values," Miles said. "I know that sometimes when he talks, he doesn't talk the way I would like for him to talk. But I like the stands that he takes. And sometimes you have to look beyond what the person is saying and (to) what he is doing."

The greater area around Raleigh, including college towns like Chapel Hill and Durham, is known as the research triangle, because of the topflight universities that are crammed into a relatively small area.

Those institutions have not only attracted hundreds of thousands of more liberal voters to North Carolina, but they have provided the intellectual capital to fuel a growing technology and health care industry that has led to thousands of new jobs just over the last few years.

The couple had been on green cards for decades, unable to vote in any election. But then Trump won, and the couple said shortly thereafter they became citizens almost expressly to vote against the President.

"I'll be honest with you: I really want to vote against Trump. That was the primary thing."

just two weeks before Election Day, North Carolina remains a toss-up, according to multiple recent polls that find Biden with the narrowest of margins.

Obama, the last Democrat to win the state in 2008, carried North Carolina because of overwhelming turnout from Black and young Americans. Biden's path, while similar, has some notable differences: In order to carry North Carolina next month, Biden will lean on a coalition that is Whiter, more suburban and older than the one that delivered the state to Obama 12 years ago.

"I've got a pretty good fix that most of the ones going to the Trump rally are probably voting for me," said Kidwell, whose signs tout him as the "most conservative" member of the North Carolina General Assembly.

"He is going to (need to) boost his numbers in rural counties to make up for what looks like an even bigger defeat in Raleigh, Charlotte," said Michael Bitzer, a professor at Catawba College and an expert on the state's politics. "I am just not sure how much more he can squeeze out of those rural areas."

Trump, on the other hand, can't solely count on the same turnout from Eastern and Western North Carolina, the two areas that propelled him to victory four years ago.

He is staunchly against wearing masks to combat the coronavirus and did not wear one when greeting voters in Washington.

"It worries me more on the statewide and national elections. ... But I think we are going to do well. North Carolina is, even if our metro areas are more liberal leaning, we still have a good number of people who are conservative."

Brian Buck said it is "concerning" that liberals are "coming from up north down to North Carolina" and he feared it would eventually "change us from a toss-up state to a blue state."

"The damn Democrats don't realize that he is just the President. He is not God," Brian Buck said. "What was he supposed to do? Go into the basement and go hocus pocus and make a damn treatment for it? No. So they blame him for it, but he had no more control over it getting here than I did."

"I believe he is more for the Christians than the Democrats," said Sawyer. "And that is one of the most important things."

"In 2016, President Trump brought out a lot of voters in the Eastern part of the state that previously voted for Barack Obama, or didn't vote, because he wasn't a stereotypical Republican," said Nick Trainer, Trump's director of battleground strategy. These voters "saw Barack Obama as a change agent and saw Donald Trump as a change agent."

"I really don't trust Donald Trump," he said, wearing a Desert Storm veteran hat, US Army mask and white veteran T-shirt. "It has been awhile since there has been this kind of unrest in politics in this country. ... It is best not to discuss politics because there is always going to be some friction involved."

One of those so-called Yankees would be Bridgette Hodges, an African-American grandmother who moved to the state from New Jersey around a year ago to be closer to her family, like Sanaa, her grandchild. The duo waited for over two hours on a recent rainy Friday so Hodges could not only vote for Biden, but register as a North Carolina voter for the first time.

"There are two groups we need to be focused on and that is turning out the African American vote and also suburban women," said Meredith Cuomo, the executive director of the North Carolina Democratic Party. "We have seen just a real shift in our demographics since 2016."

Turning out voters like Hodges and Puebla was the missing piece for Clinton in 2016, whose campaign went into Election Day believing she would win the state. But turnout was down among reliable Democratic voters and up with voters in Eastern and Western reaches of the state, delivering Trump the win.

"I don't think of myself as an anomaly, I think that younger Republican voters are more progressive... and it has now become a generational thing inside the party," said Plyler, his long red beard hanging out of his mask. "So, if Republicans are scared of these kinds of voters, then they are scared of Republicans. That's the shame of it."

The Washington Post ran an op-ed this weekend urging that the name of America’s first President be struck from Washington and Lee University.

together with literally thousands of others around the country they represent precisely what Mr. Trump describes—a left-wing cultural revolution against traditional American values of free speech and political tolerance

“We must demand that our children are taught once again to see America as did Reverend Martin Luther King, when he said that the Founders had signed ‘a promissory note’ to every future generation. Dr. King saw that the mission of justice required us to fully embrace our founding ideals. . . . He called on his fellow citizens not to rip down their heritage, but to live up to their heritage.”

Contrast that with the New York Times’s 1619 project, which derides America’s founding in 1776 and replaces it with a history that distills the country into a slave-owning enterprise that remains racist to the core. Who is really stoking division and a culture war?

liberal elites have created this opening for him by failing to stand up against the radicals who are using the justified anger at the killing of George Floyd as a cudgel to hijack America’s liberal institutions and impose their intolerant political views on everyone else.

whatever the result in November, Mr. Trump’s Mount Rushmore theme isn’t going away. Progressive elites are courting a backlash that will have more than one champion.

However, "police often react towards the crowd as a whole" - and if people feel that the police use of force against them is unjustified, this increases their "us versus them" mentality.

Experts highlight a series of police tactics that were seen as heavy-handed - including the firing of large amounts of tear gas at young protesters - as moves that galvanised protesters and made them more confrontational.

Moral psychology can help explain why some protests turn violent, says Marloon Moojiman, an assistant professor in organisational behaviour at Rice University.

Looting and vandalism can be more targeted than you think

In the US, hundreds of businesses have been damaged, and there has been widespread looting in LA and Minneapolis over the weekend.

He says there is "a long history of targeting, or selectivity", in vandalism and looting. "In the LA uprisings, you'd often see 'minority owned' spray painted on minority businesses, so that people would bypass those."

Public order experts say that for the police, being seen as legitimate and able to engage protesters in dialogue is key.

Prof Hunt says this week's US riots are the most serious ones since 1968 - after Martin Luther King was assassinated.

if I type “educate yourself race” into my Google search bar, I am met with book lists compiled by Hello magazine, Variety and Glamour. They include titles like White Fragility, How to Be an Antiracist and Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race. There is no acknowledgement of the fact that these authors’ anti-racist projects run directly up against each other, nor that many of history’s most important anti-racists would strongly disagree with their recommendations.

The message seems to be that there is a set of uncontested facts about race, and anyone can find them with the help of a how-to guide. So long as you are willing to follow a preordained path, you can walk a straight line from A to B, coming to understand both your unearned privilege and how to make up for it.

But even a cursory glance at America’s intellectual history makes clear how false this presumption is

The disagreements between American anti-racists go back centuries: there were angry letters between William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass. Furious exchanges between W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington. Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin exchanged critical essays. Martin Luther King, Robert F. Williams, Bayard Rustin and Malcolm X engaged in vigorous debates.

All these heroes explicitly disagreed with each other about how to move America towards a better racial future. Their work ought to be a reminder that any attempt to educate oneself about racism must involve understanding the conflicts between those who have sought to eradicate it.

Education is not re-education. It is, at least in part, figuring out why we think the way we do, and examining the inevitable contradictions in our thought

And there are many black sociologists—from Orlando Patterson to Karen E. Fields—who vehemently disagree about what an anti-racist America would look like.

There is an irony in the fact that many of those who claim to be suspicious of grand narratives and objective truths have such faith in a stringent, absolutist picture of racial education.

it is tragically ironic that they use their adopted slogan to corrupt the essence of independent learning.

Among contemporary intellectuals and activists, you have to look a little harder for disagreement, if only because an orthodoxy is quickly taking hold of many of our mainstream institutions. But even today, there are black economists—from Thomas Sowell to Roland Fryer—who strongly disagree with the depiction of our current reality laid out on those reading lists.

That means understanding why 54% of black people in America don’t think hiring decisions should take skin color into account, and why 81% don’t want reduced police presence in their local areas.

It also means understanding how racial attitudes have changed over time, and critically assessing the ideas and policies that even the most well-intentioned anti-racists take for granted. It does not mean fighting for a world in which everyone looks different but thinks the same.

A national conversation about racism that isn’t just an empty cliché—one that actually debates the different types of racial or post-racial worlds we want to live in, and the different ways in which we might get there—could propel that work to greater heights.

But telling people that there is only one right way to think about a question is a guaranteed way to convince them not to think at all. The current conversation is dominated by the pernicious use of a phrase that is doing more to erase that work than to bolster it.

Paul's letters, which comprise 21 of 27 books in the New Testament, were addressed to "Greek speakers in Greek places." While the roots of Christianity are in Galilee and Jerusalem, the seeds were planted in Corin, Ephesus, and Rome. And if the Greek language underlies early Christian thought, then so do the philosophy and rituals.

"Would you study the Torah with somebody who didn't know Hebrew? Would you study the Quran with somebody who didn't know Arabic? It's really hard to make a left turn into Christianity and divorce everything that came before, which is not what happened, obviously."

Muraresku was drawn into this research due to the mystical concept of dying before dying, as expressed during the Mysteries of Eleusis. He uncovered parallel narratives while conducting research with God's librarian in the Vatican Secret Archives

"This is something preserved in St. Paul's monastery, for example: if you die before you die, you won't die when you die. That's the key. It's not psychedelics; it's not drugs. It's this concept of navigating the liminal space between what you and I are doing right now, and dreaming, and death. In that state, the mystics tell us, is the potential to grasp a very different view of reality."

Muraresku, who has never taken a psychedelic drug, read about terminally-ill patients having a similar revelation after ingesting psilocybin. "Dying before dying" succinctly describes what they felt; the overwhelming sensations prepared them to actually die with confidence and grace. Could this be the same experience discovered by initiates at Eleusis and, later, early Christians?

The key to immortality might be dying before dying, and psychedelics appear to be one method for unlocking this mystery.

Muraresku spends the bulk of 400 pages chasing down archaeological and scriptural evidence for spiked wine. The wine and wafer of today is a far cry from the kukeon of the ancient Greeks, drunk by pilgrims, who were given the title epoptes, "the one who has seen it all." That's a heavy ask for a grape.

the Greek language is descriptively rich and extensive, yet these philosophers somehow never invented a word for "alcohol." Their chalices weren't for wine alone.

But if you were to mix that grape with blue water lily (with its psychoactive compounds, apomorphine and nuciferin), henbane, lizards—ancestral food choices that put Brooklyn hipsters to shame—or ergot, the fungal disease that gives LSD its kick, you might just "see it all."

While he calls psychedelics "just one, perhaps very tiny piece" of early Christian rituals, it could be an essential one. Sadly, archaeochemistry isn't the most funded discipline,

"It's no mistake that the Eucharist is described as the 'drug of immortality' by the early Church fathers because there was this sense of really sophisticated botanical understanding that goes all the way back to Homer. Obviously, it goes back a lot further

part of the reason I wrote the book is to show people that within Western civilization—at its roots, in fact—is this very pharmacopoeia. This tradition was certainly there, and it begs the question of how prevalent and widespread it really was."

While in the Archives, Muraresku found evidence of at least 45,000 so-called witches being executed, with "countless more" tortured or imprisoned. The patriarchy initiated a pattern:"[The leadership] wasn't just trying to rid Christianity of folk healers. It was trying to erase a system of knowledge that had survived for centuries in the shadows."

The knowledge was the pharmacological expertise these women had amassed over untold generations. The two banes of the Church—mind-altering substances that afford the initiate a mindset comparable (or, perhaps exactly akin) to prophets and sages and women, the holders of the Secrets—were swept up in one millennia-long cover-up

Interestingly, this 12-year-long odyssey only deepened Muraresku's Catholicism, which is rooted in the Jesuit tradition. As he says, Christianity—a religion that was a cult for over 300 years before being catapulted onto the global stage—has always evolved. Could the Church possibly change again and offer the psychedelic sacrament that might lie at the heart of the religion?

As Muraresku concludes during our talk, each attempt to get back to the roots, beginning with Martin Luther and continuing right through to Pope Francis, is an analysis of the origins of the faith. To know your history is to understand where you're heading.

"When I look and see Hellenic Christianity that was very much at the roots of the Catholic Church, and the more I found that Greek influence underneath the Vatican—in some cases, literally, in the catacombs—the more I began to really love and appreciate what this was all about.

Traditionally, a scientist submits her paper to a journal, which sends it to a (surprisingly small) group of peers for (several rounds of usually anonymous) comments; if the paper passes this (typically months-long) peer-review gantlet, it is published (often behind an expensive paywall). Languid and opaque, this system is ill-suited to a fast-moving outbreak. But biomedical scientists can now upload preliminary versions of their papers, or “preprints,” to freely accessible websites, allowing others to immediately dissect and build upon their results. This practice had been slowly gaining popularity before 2020, but proved so vital for sharing information about COVID‑19 that it will likely become a mainstay of modern biomedical research. Preprints accelerate science, and the pandemic accelerated the use of preprints. At the start of the year, one repository, medRxiv (pronounced “med archive”), held about 1,000 preprints. By the end of October, it had more than 12,000.

The U.S. is now catching up. In April, the NIH launched a partnership called ACTIV, in which academic and industry scientists prioritized the most promising drugs and coordinated trial plans across the country. Since August, several such trials have started.

Researchers have begun to uncover how SARS‑CoV‑2 compares with other coronaviruses in wild bats, the likely reservoir; how it infiltrates and co-opts our cells; how the immune system overreacts to it, creating the symptoms of COVID‑19. “We’re learning about this virus faster than we’ve ever learned about any virus in history,” Sabeti said.

Similar triumphs occurred last year—in other countries. In March, taking advantage of the United Kingdom’s nationalized health system, British researchers launched a nationwide study called Recovery, which has since enrolled more than 17,600 COVID‑19 patients across 176 institutions. Recovery offered conclusive answers about dexamethasone and hydroxychloroquine and is set to weigh in on several other treatments. No other study has done more to shape the treatment of COVID‑19.

SARS‑CoV‑2’s genome was decoded and shared by Chinese scientists just 10 days after the first cases were reported. By November, more than 197,000 SARS‑CoV‑2 genomes had been sequenced. About 90 years ago, no one had even seen an individual virus; today, scientists have reconstructed the shape of SARS‑CoV‑2 down to the position of individual atoms

Respiratory viruses, though extremely common, are often neglected. Respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, bocaviruses, a quartet of other human coronaviruses—they mostly cause mild coldlike illnesses, but those can be severe. How often? Why? It’s hard to say, because, influenza aside, such viruses attract little funding or interest.

COVID‑19 has developed a terrifying mystique because it seems to behave in unusual ways. It causes mild symptoms in some but critical illness in others. It is a respiratory virus and yet seems to attack the heart, brain, kidneys, and other organs. It has reinfected a small number of people who had recently recovered. But many other viruses share similar abilities; they just don’t infect millions of people in a matter of months or grab the attention of the entire scientific community

Thanks to COVID‑19, more researchers are looking for these rarer sides of viral infections, and spotting them.

These factors pull researchers toward speed, short-termism, and hype at the expense of rigor—and the pandemic intensified that pull. With an anxious world crying out for information, any new paper could immediately draw international press coverage—and hundreds of citations.

“There’s a perception that they’re just colds and there’s nothing much to learn,” says Emily Martin of the University of Michigan, who has long struggled to get funding to study them. Such reasoning is shortsighted folly. Respiratory viruses are the pathogens most likely to cause pandemics, and those outbreaks could potentially be far worse than COVID‑19’s.

Their movements through the air have been poorly studied, too. “There’s this very entrenched idea,” says Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, that viruses mostly spread through droplets (short-range globs of snot and spit) rather than aerosols (smaller, dustlike flecks that travel farther). That idea dates back to the 1930s, when scientists were upending outdated notions that disease was caused by “bad air,” or miasma. But the evidence that SARS‑CoV‑2 can spread through aerosols “is now overwhelming,”

Another pandemic is inevitable, but it will find a very different community of scientists than COVID‑19 did. They will immediately work to determine whether the pathogen—most likely another respiratory virus—moves through aerosols, and whether it spreads from infected people before causing symptoms. They might call for masks and better ventilation from the earliest moments, not after months of debate

They will anticipate the possibility of an imminent wave of long-haul symptoms, and hopefully discover ways of preventing them. They might set up research groups to prioritize the most promising drugs and coordinate large clinical trials. They might take vaccine platforms that worked best against COVID‑19, slot in the genetic material of the new pathogen, and have a vaccine ready within months

the single-minded focus on COVID‑19 will also leave a slew of negative legacies. Science is mostly a zero-sum game, and when one topic monopolizes attention and money, others lose out.

Long-term studies that monitored bird migrations or the changing climate will forever have holes in their data because field research had to be canceled.

negligence has left COVID‑19 long-haulers with few answers or options, and they initially endured the same dismissal as the larger ME community. But their sheer numbers have forced a degree of recognition. They started researching, cataloging their own symptoms. They gained audiences with the NIH and the World Health Organization. Patients who are themselves experts in infectious disease or public health published their stories in top journals. “Long COVID” is being taken seriously, and Brea hopes it might drag all post-infection illnesses into the spotlight. ME never experienced a pivot. COVID‑19 might inadvertently create one

Other epistemic trespassers spent their time reinventing the wheel. One new study, published in NEJM, used lasers to show that when people speak, they release aerosols. But as the authors themselves note, the same result—sans lasers—was published in 1946, Marr says. I asked her whether any papers from the 2020 batch had taught her something new. After an uncomfortably long pause, she mentioned just one.

The incentives to trespass are substantial. Academia is a pyramid scheme: Each biomedical professor trains an average of six doctoral students across her career, but only 16 percent of the students get tenure-track positions. Competition is ferocious, and success hinges on getting published

Conservationists who worked to protect monkeys and apes kept their distance for fear of passing COVID‑19 to already endangered species.

Among scientists, as in other fields, women do more child care, domestic work, and teaching than men, and are more often asked for emotional support by their students. These burdens increased as the pandemic took hold, leaving women scientists “less able to commit their time to learning about a new area of study, and less able to start a whole new research project,

published COVID‑19 papers had 19 percent fewer women as first authors compared with papers from the same journals in the previous year. Men led more than 80 percent of national COVID‑19 task forces in 87 countries. Male scientists were quoted four times as frequently as female scientists in American news stories about the pandemic.

American scientists of color also found it harder to pivot than their white peers, because of unique challenges that sapped their time and energy.

Science suffers from the so-called Matthew effect, whereby small successes snowball into ever greater advantages, irrespective of merit. Similarly, early hindrances linger. Young researchers who could not pivot because they were too busy caring or grieving for others might suffer lasting consequences from an unproductive year. COVID‑19 “has really put the clock back in terms of closing the gap for women and underrepresented minorities,”

In 1848, the Prussian government sent a young physician named Rudolf Virchow to investigate a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia. Virchow didn’t know what caused the devastating disease, but he realized its spread was possible because of malnutrition, hazardous working conditions, crowded housing, poor sanitation, and the inattention of civil servants and aristocrats—problems that require social and political reforms. “Medicine is a social science,” Virchow said, “and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale.”

entists discovered the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, plague, cholera, dysentery, and syphilis, most fixated on these newly identified nemeses. Societal factors were seen as overly political distractions for researchers who sought to “be as ‘objective’ as possible,” says Elaine Hernandez, a medical sociologist at Indiana University. In the U.S., medicine fractured.

New departments of sociology and cultural anthropology kept their eye on the societal side of health, while the nation’s first schools of public health focused instead on fights between germs and individuals. This rift widened as improvements in hygiene, living standards, nutrition, and sanitation lengthened life spans: The more social conditions improved, the more readily they could be ignored.

The ideological pivot away from social medicine began to reverse in the second half of the 20th century.

Politicians initially described COVID‑19 as a “great equalizer,” but when states began releasing demographic data, it was immediately clear that the disease was disproportionately infecting and killing people of color.

These disparities aren’t biological. They stem from decades of discrimination and segregation that left minority communities in poorer neighborhoods with low-paying jobs, more health problems, and less access to health care—the same kind of problems that Virchow identified more than 170 years ago.

In March, when the U.S. started shutting down, one of the biggest questions on the mind of Whitney Robinson of UNC at Chapel Hill was: Are our kids going to be out of school for two years? While biomedical scientists tend to focus on sickness and recovery, social epidemiologists like her “think about critical periods that can affect the trajectory of your life,” she told me. Disrupting a child’s schooling at the wrong time can affect their entire career, so scientists should have prioritized research to figure out whether and how schools could reopen safely. But most studies on the spread of COVID‑19 in schools were neither large in scope nor well-designed enough to be conclusive. No federal agency funded a large, nationwide study, even though the federal government had months to do so. The NIH received billions for COVID‑19 research, but the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development—one of its 27 constituent institutes and centers—got nothing.

The horrors that Rudolf Virchow saw in Upper Silesia radicalized him, pushing the future “father of modern pathology” to advocate for social reforms. The current pandemic has affected scientists in the same way

COVID‑19 could be the catalyst that fully reunifies the social and biological sides of medicine, bridging disciplines that have been separated for too long.

“To study COVID‑19 is not only to study the disease itself as a biological entity,” says Alondra Nelson, the president of the Social Science Research Council. “What looks like a single problem is actually all things, all at once. So what we’re actually studying is literally everything in society, at every scale, from supply chains to individual relationships.”

ucing snowfall in the northern Plains and the Upper Midwest, with heavy snow in parts of Minnesota and Iowa coming down at rates of one to two inches per hour

In a weekend forecast, NBC’s "TODAY" weather anchor Al Roker said the storm system could bring 6 to 12 inches of snow stretching from the Dakotas down to Missouri.

Snow is also expected to develop over parts of the central and southern Appalachians, with pockets of rain and freezing rain potentially developing over the Carolinas and the southern Appalachians overnight Saturday into Sunday morning.

Roker said the system was expected to move south before making its way up the Eastern coast into Sunday and Monday, bringing heavy wind and rain if it continues along its expected track. On Sunday, a wintry mix is expected to hit parts of the Southeast, including Atlanta, as a significant ice storm unfolds across the Carolinas.

conservative activists and business leaders designed an opposite idea of American freedom to protect their own interests

Realtors had big incentives for maintaining segregation. Having invented it in the early 1900s as a marketing tool for selling homes, they had made segregation central to their business practices. They created racial covenants to exclude members of minority groups from new developments, existing neighborhoods, and entire cities and shaped federal redlining maps, all premised on the idea that anyone selling to minority families was destroying the future of all the neighbors.

Despite the Supreme Court outlawing court enforcement of racial covenants in 1948, Realtors used racial steering—such as lying to minority prospective buyers that a home had just been sold and controlling newspaper real-estate listings—so effectively that by the early ’60s, Black Americans were excluded from 98 percent of new homes and 95 percent of neighborhoods.

in asking voters to constitutionally authorize residential discrimination in Proposition 14, Realtors had a fundamental problem. How, at the height of the civil-rights movement, could they publicly campaign for sanctioning discrimination in California?

Victory would depend, realized Spike Wilson, the president of the California Real Estate Association, on convincing the large majority of white voters—who did not want to see themselves as racially prejudiced in any way—that the Realtors were campaigning not for discrimination but for American freedom.

Realtors would need to secretly and systematically redefine American freedom as the freedom to discriminate—to challenge the idea at the heart of the civil-rights movement itself.

the national Realtors’ organization created a secret action kit to oppose fair housing everywhere.

The kit’s detailed scripts instructed Realtors to “focus on freedom” and avoid “discussion of emotionally charged subjects,” such as “inferiority of races.”

Freedom, the kit explained, meant each owner’s right to discriminate, and Realtors were in favor of “freedom for all”: the equal rights of all owners to choose whom to sell to. Realtors claimed that they, unlike civil-rights advocates, were color-blind.

Wilson drafted a Property Owners’ Bill of Rights that Realtors advertised in newspapers nationwide, emphasizing owners’ absolute right to dispose of their property—never mentioning anyone’s right to buy or rent a home in the first place

This was not always the case. In the early 1960s, civil-rights activists invoked freedom as the purpose of their struggle. Martin Luther King Jr. used the word equality once at the March on Washington, but he used the word freedom 20 times.

Realtors thus made government the enemy, not minority groups

Thus, the more disparate the issues on which this idea of freedom was invoked—abortion, guns, public schools, gender rights, campaign finance, climate change—the more powerful the message became.

By making state bureaucrats the enemy, Realtors could be on the side of the underdog, the individual owner. Proposition 14, Realtors claimed, was not about race but about “the rights of the individual.”

To discriminate simply means to choose, Realtors insisted. Freedom of choice required the right to discriminate.

To be in favor of Proposition 14, to limit where millions of fellow Americans could live, did not mean that you were prejudiced but that you believed in individual freedom.

Wilson cited Abraham Lincoln: “We are involved in a great battle for liberty and freedom. We have prepared a final resting place for the drive to destroy individual freedom.”

King’s terms evoked his speech at the March on Washington, but he was now defending shared freedom not against southern diehards but against northern salesmen promoting color-blind “freedom of choice.”

Proposition 14’s sweeping passage stunned politicians in both parties. The Realtors’ victory was overwhelming, with 65 percent of the total votes in favor, including 75 percent of the white vote and 80 percent of the white union vote.

Color-blind freedom meant that government must be oblivious to, must forever allow, organized private discrimination.

Reagan and other conservatives saw that the Realtors had zeroed in on something extremely powerful—something whose full force would not be limited to housing segregation but could be used on virtually any issue.

Realtors had shown how conservatives could succeed. If this idea of freedom could triumph in California, it could work anywhere.

though Realtors have disavowed their past arguments, the vision of freedom they created has had lasting effects on American politics as a whole.

This vision of freedom proved so enduring because it solved three structural problems for American conservatism.

First, Realtors used the language of individual freedom, of libertarianism, to justify its seeming opposite, community conformity.

Here was a way to unite the two separate and competing strands of conservatism, to link libertarians and social conservatives in defense of American freedom—and create the way many, if not most, Americans understand freedom today.

Reagan, running for governor, adopted the Realtors’ cause and their message as his own: “If an individual wants to discriminate against Negroes or others in selling or renting his house, he has a right to do so.”

a unifying idea: freedom of choice.

Second, by defining as freedom what government seemed to be taking away from “ordinary Americans,” Realtors helped create a polarizing, transcendent view of what was at stake in our politics

This picture of government taking away your rights would provide a compelling reason, far beyond economics, for millions of union members, Catholics, and white Americans who had long been part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s coalition to see, in issue after issue, why they should define themselves as conservatives.

Timeliest of all, the Realtors’ redefinition of freedom offered a common ideology for something new in modern America: a national conservative political party

The Realtors’ color-blind freedom, which had proved so successful in California, could unite southerners, working-class northern Democrats, and conservative and moderate Republicans in a new national majority party—one very different from the Republican Party whose congressmen had voted 80 percent in favor of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

Over time, the internal dynamics of a national conservative party would only push it further and further toward those who most ardently embraced the Realtors’ vision of freedom as the only meaning of American freedom. This dynamic has produced today’s Republican Party.

Republican politicians now view every issue through this single lens: that American freedom means placing one’s own absolute rights over those of others.

To go against that credo, to view freedom as belonging to the country itself and, as such, to everyone equally, threatens the party’s most basic tenet.

This idea of freedom is based on a technique that the Realtors perfected. They identified a single, narrow, obscure right, an owner’s right to choose a buyer—which Realtors themselves had restricted for decades with racial covenants—as American freedom itself.

Elevating as absolute a right rarely mentioned before, so government cannot limit it or protect the rights of others, became the model for the conservative movement

The concept can be and has been used regarding virtually any issue.

Everything that is not one of these carefully selected rights becomes, by definition, a privilege that government cannot protect, no matter how fundamental.

Since January 6, two-thirds of Republicans—more than 40 percent of all Americans—now see voting not as a basic right, an essential part of our freedom, but as a privilege for those who deserve it.

This picture of freedom has a purpose: to effectively prioritize the freedoms of certain Americans over the freedoms of others—without directly saying so

Friedman worried that students also saw themselves as fragile, and seemed to believe that coming into contact with offensive or challenging information was psychologically detrimental. In asking for more robust warnings about potentially upsetting classroom material, the students seemed to be saying: This could hurt us, and this institution owes us protection from distress.

My own doubts about all of this came, ironically, from reporting on trauma. I’ve interviewed women around the world about the worst things human beings do to one another. I started to notice a concerning dissonance between what researchers understand about trauma and resilience, and the ways in which the concepts were being wielded in progressive institutions. And I began to question my own role in all of it.

as the mental health of adolescent girls and college students crumbles, and as activist organizations, including feminist ones, find themselves repeatedly embroiled in internecine debates over power and language, a question nags: In giving greater weight to claims of individual hurt and victimization, have we inadvertently raised a generation that has fewer tools to manage hardship and transform adversity into agency?

Since my days as a feminist blogger, mental health among teenagers has plummeted. From 2007 to 2019, the suicide rate for children ages 10 to 14 tripled; for girls in that age group, it nearly quadrupled. A 2021 CDC report found that 57 percent of female high-school students reported “persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness,” up from 36 percent in 2011. Though the pandemic undoubtedly contributed to a crash in adolescent mental health, the downturn began well before COVID hit.

Part of the issue may be a social-media ecosystem that lets teens live within a bubble of like-minded peers and tends to privilege the loudest, most aggrieved voices; this kind of insularity can encourage teenagers to understand distressing experiences as traumatizing. “I think it’s easier for them to artificially curate environments that are comfortable,” Shaili Jain, a physician and PTSD specialist, told me. “And I think that is backfiring. Because then when they’re in a situation where they’re not comfortable, it feels really alarming to them.”

The CDC study suggests that, over the past decade, bullying among high schoolers has actually decreased in certain respects. Today’s teenagers are also less likely to drink or use illicit drugs than they were 10 years ago. And even before pandemic-relief funds slashed the child-poverty rate, the percentage of children living in poverty fell precipitously after 2012. American public high schoolers are more likely to graduate than at any other time in our country’s history, and girls are significantly more likely to graduate than boys.

So what has changed for the worse for teenage girls since roughly 2010? The forces behind their deteriorating mental health are opaque and complex, but one big shift has been a decline in the time teenagers spend with their friends in person, dipping by 11 hours a week—a decline that began before the pandemic, but was badly exacerbated by it

Since 2014, the proportion of teens with smartphones has risen by 22 percent, and the proportion who say they use the internet “almost constantly” has doubled

this idea—that to develop resilience, we must tough out hard situations—places a heavier burden on some people than others.

Applying the language of trauma to an event changes the way we process it. That may be a good thing, allowing a person to face a moment that truly cleaved their life into a before and an after, and to seek help and begin healing. Or it may amplify feelings of helplessness and hopelessness, elevating those feelings above a sense of competence and control.

“We have this saying in the mental-health world: ‘Perception is reality,’ ” Jain said. “So if someone is adamant that they felt something was traumatizing, that is their reality, and there’s probably going to be mental-health consequences of that.”

Martin Seligman, the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania, has spent the past 50 years researching resilience. One study he co-authored looked at the U.S. Army, to see if there was a way to predict PTSD. Unsurprisingly, he and his fellow researchers found a link to the severity of the combat to which soldiers were exposed

But the preexisting disposition that soldiers brought to their battlefield experiences also mattered. “If you’re a catastrophizer, in the worst 10 or 20 percent, you’re more than three times as likely to come down with PTSD if you face severe combat,” Seligman told me. “And this is true at every level of severity of combat—the percentage goes down, but it’s still about twice as high, even with mild combat or no obvious combat.”

In other words, a person’s sense of themselves as either capable of persevering through hardship or unable to manage it can be self-fulfilling. “To the extent we overcome and cope with the adversities and traumas in our life, we develop more mastery, more resilience, more ability to fend off bad events in the future,”

Teenage girls report troublingly high rates of sexual violence and bullying, as well as concern for their own physical safety at school. But it’s not clear that their material circumstances have taken a plunge steep enough to explain their mental-health decline

soldiers who experienced severe trauma could not only survive, but actually turn their suffering into a source of strength. “About as many people who showed PTSD showed something called post-traumatic growth, which means they have an awful time during the event, but a year later they’re stronger physically and psychologically than they were to begin with,” he said. But that empowering message has yet to take hold in society.

what would be a more productive way to approach adversity

physical exercise. “It’s like any form of strength training,” he told me. “People have no hesitation about going to the gym and suffering, you know, muscle pain in the service of being stronger and looking a way that they want to look. And they wake up the next day and they say, ‘Oh my God, that’s so painful. I’m so achy.’ That’s not traumatic. And yet when you bring that to the emotional world, it’s suddenly very adverse.”

“But conversely, to the extent that we have an ideology or a belief that when traumatic events occur, we are the helpless victims of them—that feeds on itself.”

he exercise metaphor rankled Michael Ungar, the director of the Resilience Research Centre at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada. “Chronic exposure to a stressor like racism, misogyny, being constantly stigmatized or excluded, ableism—all of those factors do wear us down; they make us more susceptible to feelings that will be very overwhelming,” he told me. There are, after all, only so many times a person can convince themselves that they can persevere when it feels like everyone around them is telling them the opposite.

“the resiliency trap.” Black women in particular, she told me, have long been praised for their toughness and perseverance, but individual resiliency can’t solve structural problems

From Dent’s perspective, young people aren’t rejecting the concept of inner strength; they are rejecting the demand that they navigate systemic injustice with individual grit alone. When they talk about harm and trauma, they aren’t exhibiting weakness; they’re saying, Yes, I am vulnerable, and that’s human.

patients are being more “transparent about what they need to feel comfortable, to feel safe, to feel valued in this world,” she said. “Is that a bad thing?”

Most of the experts I spoke with were careful to distinguish between an individual student asking a professor for a specific accommodation to help them manage a past trauma, and a cultural inclination to avoid challenging or upsetting situations entirely

Thriving requires working through discomfort and hardship. But creating the conditions where that kind of resilience is possible is as much a collective responsibility as an individual one.

to replace our culture of trauma with a culture of resilience, we’ll have to relearn how to support one another—something we’ve lost as our society has moved toward viewing “wellness” as an individual pursuit, a state of mind accessed via self-work.

“If everything is traumatic and we have no capacity to cope with these moments, what does that say about our capacity to cope when something more extreme happens?”

“Resilience is partly about putting in place the resources for the next stressor.” Those resources have to be both internal and external

Social change is necessary if we want to improve well-being, but social change becomes possible only if our movements are made up of people who believe that the adversities they have faced are surmountable, that injustice does not have to be permanent, that the world can change for the better, and that they have the ability to make that change.

we need to provide material aid to meet basic needs. We need to repair broken community ties so fewer among us feel like they’re struggling alone. And we need to encourage the cultivation of a sense of purpose beyond the self. We also know what stands in the way of resilience: avoiding difficult ideas and imperfect people, catastrophizing, isolating ourselves inside our own heads.

In my interviews with women who have experienced sexual violence, I try not to put the traumatic event at the center of our conversations. My aim instead is to learn as much as I can about them as people—their families, their work, their interests, what makes them happy, and where they feel the most themselves. And I always end our conversations by asking them to reflect on how far they’ve come, and what they are proudest of.

Germany’s top court ruled just last year against the removal of a medieval, antisemitic sculpture in the very church where Martin Luther had preached. Despite debates, some swastikas from the Third Reich have been left on church bells.

This propensity for what Ms. Schneidewind calls “historical hoarding” means that many Soviet memorials in East Germany contain Stalin’s name nearly 70 years after the dictator was largely purged from public spaces in Russia itself.

Officials say their duty to care for such memorials dates to the so-called Good Neighbor agreement between Germany and the Soviet Union in 1990. Under that measure, each nation committed itself to the upkeep of the other’s war graves on its territory.

Most of the Red Army monuments in Germany are believed to have been built above the graves of Soviet soldiers or prisoners of war. The Russian Embassy has used the pact to draw the German government’s attention to Soviet monuments, including the one in Lützen, that have been damaged or neglected.

“Instead of tearing them down, you should redefine these memorials,” Mr. Nagel said. “You need to explain why they are here, and why you have a different view of them now.”

In Lützen, local residents say they want to keep their Red Army memorial as it is, a tribute to the central place occupied by the pyramid in the town’s public life during Communist rule. Some remember playing around it while attending the nearby kindergarten, and they say they will fight plans to move it to accommodate a proposed new supermarket.

“This is our history, no matter what is going on in world politics,” said the town’s mayor, Uwe Weiss. “We have to take care of it, because it is part of us.”