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Countries looking to take part in the programme will need to have the reduction in deforestation-linked emissions verified by a new, more rigorous standard assessed at the national level by an independent third party, the coalition said in a statement.With applications due by July 2021 and the aim of signing contracts before the end of the year, payments would be based on emissions reductions linked to reducing levels of deforestation or degradation, or by restoring forests, between 2022 and 2026.

Companies looking to take part in the project will only be allowed to join if they can show a commitment to "deep voluntary cuts" in their own emissions, in line with science-based targets and the Paris Agreement on climate.

Baby birds aren’t the only youngsters brought to Walden’s Puddle by concerned people like me. The problem is that it isn’t always easy to tell the difference between a baby animal that needs help and a baby animal whose worried parents are nearby, just waiting for the worried human to go away.

Fallen nestlings need help, for example, while fledglings are best left alone. Fledglings are babies too — still learning to fly, still being fed by their parents — but they don’t belong in a nest. “Fledgling songbirds often spend several days on the ground,” said Ms. Campbell. “To us they look tiny and helpless, but if they are fully feathered, then they are fine to be on the ground.”

And if a wild animal has moved into your own home — if a groundhog has burrowed under your foundation, say, or a raccoon has built a nursery in your attic — don’t hire an exterminator to trap and kill it, or even to relocate it: Animals evicted from their territories rarely survive, and this time of year they leave orphans behind.

The best option is just to wait a few weeks till the babies are ready to leave the nest, and then repair the hole where they entered. If giving them a little time isn’t feasible, humane forms of harassment can inspire the mother to move her family to a more hospitable location.

But others will adapt, and we will find ourselves living in ever closer proximity to one another. The least we can do is learn to recognize when a wild creature needs our help. And if we can make it less convenient for them to move into our homes while creating a healthier environment for them outdoors, we can all thrive. Together.

They believed that people should lead disciplined, orderly lives, but doubted that individuals have the ability to do this alone, unaided by social custom and by God. So they were intensely interested in creating the sort of social, economic and political order that would encourage people to work hard, fi

This conservative believes in prudence on the grounds that society is complicated and it’s generally best to reform it steadily but cautiously.

economic conservatives. These were people that anybody following contemporary Republican politics would be familiar with. They spent a lot of time worrying about the way government intrudes upon economic liberty. They upheld freedom as their highest political value. They admired risk-takers. They worried that excessive government would create a sclerotic nation with a dependent populace.

Ronald Reagan embodied both sides of this fusion

In the polarized political conflict with liberalism, shrinking government has become the organizing conservative principle. Economic conservatives have the money and the institutions. They have taken control. Traditional conservatism has gone into eclipse.

It’s not so much that today’s Republican politicians reject traditional, one-nation conservatism. They don’t even know it exists. There are few people on the conservative side who’d be willing to raise taxes on the affluent to fund mobility programs for the working class. There are very few willing to use government to actively intervene in chaotic neighborhoods, even when 40 percent of American kids are born out of wedlock. There are very few Republicans who protest against a House Republican budget proposal that cuts domestic discretionary spending to absurdly low levels.

Republicans repeat formulas — government support equals dependency — that make sense according to free-market ideology, but oversimplify the real world. Republicans like Romney often rely on an economic language that seems corporate and alien to people who do not define themselves in economic terms.

Conservatism has lost the balance between economic and traditional conservatism. The Republican Party has abandoned half of its intellectual ammunition. It appeals to people as potential business owners, but not as parents, neighbors and citizens.

Tuesday's bombing happened during the morning rush hour in Pul-e-Mahmud, a busy neighbourhood where homes, mosques, schools and businesses nestle close to the Ministry of Defence, other ministries and military compounds.

The blast shattered windows up to 1.6km (one mile) away.

"One of the suicide attackers blew up an explosives-laden truck in a public parking lot next to a government building,

"The second attacker engaged security forces in a gun battle before being gunned down,"

"It was as huge as in the morning," said Afghan MP Elay Ershad. "So everyone [is] scared of this situation."

Usually the Taliban does not say it is behind such attacks, which cause large numbers of civilian deaths. But today they did because the target was high-profile and it appears that, for them, hitting the target was worth the civilians killed and wounded.

The country has been at war for three decades, explosives are easily available and bomb-making skills are common.

"Such cowardly terrorist attacks will not weaken the will and determination of Afghan security forces to fight against terrorism."

They will expand the presence of low- and no-calorie drinks, as well as drinks sold in smaller portions, and use their promotional skills to educate consumers and encourage them to reduce the calories they are drinking.

The program will cover company-owned vending machines and coolers in convenience stores, as well as fountain soda dispensers like those found in fast-food restaurants and movie theaters. The companies control almost all of those machines, in addition to about one-third of vending machines and 80 percent of coolers.

It also will spill into grocery stores in end-of-aisle promotions and other marketing. “We’ll use the most critical levers we have at our disposal, and the focus really will be on transforming the beverage landscape in the U.S. over the next 10 years,”

“While they’re making this pledge, they are totally dug in, fighting soda tax initiatives in places like Berkeley and San Francisco that have exactly the same goal,” said Professor Nestle, who has just finished a book about the industry.

From 2000 to 2013, calories consumed through sugary drinks fell 12 percent, according to Beverage Digest, attributed to declining soda sales and increased consumption of water and low-calorie drinks.

“I suspect they’re promising what’s going to happen anyway,” said Kelly Brownell, an expert on obesity and dean of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. “All the trends are showing decreased consumption of high-calorie beverages, and so what better way to get a public relations boost than to promise to do what’s happening anyway?”

starting in late 1940, the Reimanns routinely took advantage of forced labor: men and women taken from their homes in Nazi-occupied territories, as well as prisoners of war, who were allocated by the Nazis to farms and industrial companies across Germany.

Mr. Harf noted that he lived in three places — New York, London and Milan — where nationalism and ethnic division were on the rise. For most of his long career, he said, he considered shareholder capitalism to be value neutral. No longer. In the age of Trump, Brexit and Matteo Salvini, he said, businesses can no longer pretend that they are operating in a “value-free space.”

“This is once again a time when everybody needs to take a stance,” Mr. Harf said. “I’m very scared of what’s happening.”

the men gave the company a makeover in keeping with Nazi principles. By the time Hitler took over, Benckiser already housed a Nationalist Socialist Company Organization — a worker council that sought to uphold Nazi ideology. It later became a “model NS plant.”

“Reimann Sr. and Reimann Jr. were not just opportunistic followers of the regime,” Mr. Harf said. “They were fully signed up to the Nazi project.”

In 1933, it employed 181 people. As an important supplier to the food industry, Benckiser benefited from the Nazi system, more than tripling sales over the next decade. Mr. Reimann Sr. served as president of the regional Chamber of Industry and Commerce, which helped orchestrate the Aryanization, expropriation and expulsion of Jewish businesses

Its employees — there are 180,000 around the world — have reported that customers accuse them of “working for Nazis

It was around this time that Emilie Landecker started working in the accounting department as a clerk

According to Mr. Harf, Benckiser’s use of forced laborers grew so fast that she would surely have been aware of the abuses.

By 1943, 175 people, or a third of the total work force, were forced laborers, most of them from France and Eastern Europe. Benckiser operated two labor camps, one of them overseen by a brutal foreman, Paul Werneburg, who had been with the company since 1910. On his watch, female workers were forced to stand at attention naked outside their barracks, and those who refused risked sexual abuse. Workers were kicked and beaten, among them a Ukrainian woman who also cleaned in the Reimanns’ private villa.

During a bomb raid on Jan. 7, 1945, Werneburg threw dozens of workers out of a camp bomb shelter. Thirty were injured, and one died. As word of Werneburg’s brutality spread, even the local Nazi office in charge of allocating forced laborers reprimanded the Reimanns for mistreating their workers.

Ms. Landecker would have witnessed it all, said her son, Wolfgang Reimann, in an email. “She lived through the horror show happening in our own company,” he said. “She probably sat in the very bunker when Werneburg threw out the workers.”

Mr. Reimann Jr. wrote a letter to the commanding officer on Sept. 22, dismissing allegations that he had been an “early and enthusiastic Nazi” as mere “denunciations” — and insisting that he was in fact a victim of the Nazis.

It worked. While the French initially barred Mr. Reimann Jr. from continuing his business activities, American officials overturned the judgment, classifying him as a “follower” of Nazism, rather than an active Nazi himself.

In 1947, the wealth of the Reimann family totaled 686,000 Reichsmark, or approximately $2.4 million in today’s money. Over the decades, the fortune grew in step with Benckiser and its successor companies, and today the family’s worth is estimated at €33 billion. On one recent list of the wealthiest families in Germany, the Reimanns ranked second.

Ms. Landecker was at work at Benckiser when the Gestapo came for her father.It was April 24, 1942

A few weeks later, one last letter arrived from Mr. Landecker, but only the envelope has survived. It shows that he was interned in block III 416/2 in Izbica, a ghetto serving as a transfer point for the deportation of Jews to the Belzec and Sobibor death camps in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Mr. Harf said it made him think that not enough voices in business were speaking up against the re-emergence of nationalism and populism in Europe and the United States.

“We fought for five years only to have an age like this,” he wrote, referring to World War I. “I hope you, my dear children, remain well-behaved and good, and keep loving me, even if you suffer because of me.”

he had a brother and sister-in-law. “Aunt Pauline has written from America,” he wrote that December. “She is trying for us, maybe things will work out.” But there wasn’t enough money. Mr. Landecker was not allowed to work, which meant that Emilie, still a teenager, became the family’s only earner.

he wrote his last letter to Bavaria.“My dear Gerdele,” he wrote. “As you can see, I’m still here, but not for long. Today I learned that my departure is on the 24th of the month — in two days. So this is the last letter that you receive from me from here or perhaps ever. We don’t know what is waiting for us.”

“You won’t be able to marry here in Germany,” he continued. “Learn languages!! You have your future ahead of you — don’t waste it.”

No one knows when exactly their love affair started. But in 1951, their first child was born

Two more followed. Twice a week, every Sunday and Wednesday, Mr. Reimann Jr. would leave his wife and visit Ms. Landecker.

years later, she admitted in a letter to Mr. Reimann Jr. that she always missed not being his wife — and not having a regular family

Ms. Landecker was a quiet woman. She did not speak much. But her children say that despite everything, she loved their father. “I never understood why,” said Wolfgang Reimann. “He was not very lovable from my perspective.”

“My mother never said anything,” Wolfgang Reimann said. “For the longest time, I believed it was her personality.” But he has changed his mind. “If I had to live with the love of my life, as my mother did, and this person was also responsible for the terrible things that happened during the war, I would not have spoken much, either, I guess,

the Reimanns channeled much of their wealth into JAB. In recent years the holding company has spent billions to become a rival to the likes of Starbucks and Nestlé by buying chains including Panera Bread, Krispy Kreme and Pret A Manger. Last year, it also helped Keurig Green Mountain buy Dr Pepper Snapple for nearly $19 billion. JAB also controls the cosmetics giant Coty, the owner of Calvin Klein fragrances

“When I heard and read of the atrocities committed at Benckiser, sanctioned by my grandfather, I felt like throwing up,” said Martin Reimann, 30, who is a grandchild to Ms. Landecker and Mr. Reimann Jr. “I cannot claim that I was very interested in politics before. I was just living my life. But after what happened, I changed my mind. I have to do something. In our family council, the younger generation created a little bit of a rebellion.”

By renaming its foundation after Alfred Landecker, the Reimann family is bringing back one name from the millions killed by the Nazis. But it is also explicitly linking the memory of crimes past to today’s fight to preserve the values of liberal democracy.

“What we can learn from history and how we can learn from history is at the core of this foundation,”

“This is not just about researching and remembering the past,” he added. “It’s about stabilizing and maintaining democracy today.”

Mr. Harf, JAB’s chairman, agrees. He said he had recently read “The Order of the Day,” a historic novella by Éric Vuillard set in the years before World War II. One scene takes place in February 1933, when Hitler and the president of the Reichstag encourage 24 German industrialists to donate to the Nazi party. The businessmen — representing companies that are still prominent German corporate names, like Siemens, Bayer and Allianz — duly open their wallets.

Mr. Landecker did two things that would prove prescient. He made sure his children were baptized Catholic, like his late wife. And he officially transferred to them his main possessions, including the family apartment, so that they could not be expropriated.

Every time business leaders make decisions, he said, they should ask, “What does this mean for our children? What does it mean for the future?”

“In history, businesses have enabled populists,” he added. “We mustn’t make the same mistake today.” Then he quoted the Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal: “For evil to flourish, it only requires good men to do nothing.”

He added, “As the successors and descendants of people who committed horrendous acts, it is vital that our generation accepts what has happened, that we do whatever we can to bring tolerance and equality to the communities in which we live

Idlib's rugged karst geography makes it natural guerrilla territory, with perfect caves for rebel hideouts. Hermits too have long sought refuge in these caves. St Simeon Stylites, son a local farmer, was the most celebrated hermit of his day, moving from a cave to a pillar ("stylos" in Greek) to escape the crowds who pursued him.

The magnificent complex was badly damaged in May 2016 by Russian air strikes, carried out in support of the Syrian government against rebels, blowing what remained of St Simeon's pillar to pieces. Today the raised hilltop is the site of a Turkish observation post, set up as part of a deal to "de-escalate" the fighting.

“The prevailing story is that this is the best of all possible worlds — cheap food, widely available. If you don’t think about it too hard, it makes sense,”

A closer look, however, reveals a much different story, he said. “To put it in stark terms: The diet is killing us.”

Part of the problem, he added, is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food.

The prevalence of obesity has doubled in 73 countries since 1980, contributing to four million premature deaths, the study found.

The story is as much about economics as it is nutrition. As multinational companies push deeper into the developing world, they are transforming local agriculture, spurring farmers to abandon subsistence crops in favor of cash commodities like sugar cane, corn and soybeans — the building blocks for many industrial food products.

the rising clout of big food companies also translates into political influence, stymieing public health officials seeking soda taxes or legislation aimed at curbing the health impacts of processed food.

For a growing number of nutritionists, the obesity epidemic is inextricably linked to the sales of packaged foods, which grew 25 percent worldwide from 2011 to 2016, compared with 10 percent in the United States,

The same trends are mirrored with fast food, which grew 30 percent worldwide from 2011 to 2016, compared with 21 percent in the United States

For some companies, that can mean specifically focusing on young people, as Ahmet Bozer, president of Coca-Cola International, described to investors in 2014. “Half the world’s population has not had a Coke in the last 30 days,” he said. “There’s 600 million teenagers who have not had a Coke in the last week. So the opportunity for that is huge.”

, Brazil is a microcosm of how growing incomes and government policies have led to longer, better lives and largely eradicated hunger.

now the country faces a stark new nutrition challenge: over the last decade, the country’s obesity rate has nearly doubled to 20 percent, and the portion of people who are overweight has nearly tripled to 58 percent. Each year, 300,000 people are diagnosed with Type II diabetes, a condition with strong links to obesity.

These conditions may be particularly prevalent in communities of color, who are likewise disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

Several people I know packed on quite a few pounds of health-robbing body fat this past year, and not because they lacked the ability to purchase and consume a more nutritious plant-based diet or to exercise regularly within or outside their homes. One male friend in his 50s unexpectedly qualified for the Covid vaccine by having an underlying health condition when his doctor found he’d become obese since the pandemic began.

The government subsidizes the production of both soybeans and corn, most of which is used to feed livestock.

Early in the pandemic, when most businesses and entertainment venues were forced to close, toilet paper was not the only commodity stripped from market shelves. The country was suddenly faced with a shortage of flour and yeast as millions of Americans “stuck” at home went on a baking frenzy. While I understood their need to relieve stress, feel productive and perhaps help others less able or so inclined, bread, muffins and cookies were not the most wholesome products that might have emerged from pandemic kitchens.

Not only is alcohol a source of nutritionally empty calories, its wanton consumption can result in reckless behavior that further raises susceptibility to Covid.

“you can’t eat just one.” (Example: Corn on the cob is unprocessed, canned corn is minimally processed, but Doritos are ultra-processed).

As Marion Nestle, professor emerita of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, says, “This is not rocket science.” She does not preach deprivation, only moderation (except perhaps for a total ban on soda). “We need a national policy aimed at preventing obesity,” she told me, “a national campaign to help all Americans get healthier.”

They were incredibly efficient.

they often followed a remarkably straight trail across the countryside

weary travelers could guide themselves by a detailed collection of mile markers.

their design always employed multiple layers for durability and flatness.

Roads were built with a crown and adjacent ditches to ensure easy water drainage, and in some rainy regions they were even nestled on raised berms known as “aggers” to prevent flooding.

They were easy to navigate.

They were expertly engineered.

Roman roads were also lined with state-run hotels and way stations.

They included a sophisticated network of post houses and roadside inns.

“all roads lead to Rome,”

horse changing stations, or “mutationes,” which were located every ten miles along most routes.

Switching horses was especially important for imperial couriers, who were tasked with carrying communications and tax revenues around the Empire at breakneck speed.

They were well-protected and patrolled.

most Roman roads were patrolled by special detachments of imperial army troops known as “stationarii” and “beneficiarii.”

hey also doubled as toll collectors.

They allowed the Romans to fully map their growing empire.

the Peutinger Table is a 13th century copy of an actual Roman map created sometime around the 4th century A.D.

They were built to last.

Roman roads remained technologically unequaled until as recently as the 19th century.

Many Roman roads were used as major thoroughfares until only recently,

Rome’s enduring engineering legacy can also be seen in the dozens of ancient bridges, tunnels and aqueducts still in use today.

the obstacles to prosecuting such cases more aggressively point to another problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: Infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating.

In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer in a case that woke many Germans to the threat of far-right terrorism.

The region where they live is nestled between the former Iron Curtain and the Polish border. Members had grown up in the former East Germany.

There were two criteria for joining, Mr. Moll recalled: “The right skills and the right attitude.”Mr. Gross and another police officer in the group were members of what was then an emerging far-right party, the Alternative for Germany, now the third largest force in the national Parliament. At least two others in the group had visited the Thule Seminar, an organization whose leaders had a portrait of Hitler on their wall and preach white supremacy.

Over time, Nordkreuz members recalled, their group morphed into a close-knit brotherhood with a shared ambition that would come to dominate their lives: preparing for Day X.

The group identified a “safe house,” where members would decamp with their families on Day X: a former Communist vacation village deep in the woods.

“This movement has its fingertips in lots of places,” he said. “All this talk of Day X can seem like pure fantasy. But if you look closer, you can see how quickly it turns into serious planning — and plotting.”

“Under Communism, everything was scarce,’’ Mr. Moll explained. ‘‘You had to get creative getting things through certain channels. You could not rely on things being in the supermarket. You could say we’re used to prepping.’’

“The scenario was that something bad would happen,” Mr. Gross told me. “We asked ourselves, what did we want to prepare for? And we decided that if we were going to do this, we would go all the way.”

But at least one member of the group portrays a more ominous story.“People were to be gathered and murdered,” Horst Schelski told investigators in 2017, according to transcripts of his statement shared with The New York Times.

Jan Henrik H. was described by other members as particularly fervent and hateful. On his birthdays, he held a shooting contest on a field behind his house in Rostock, a nearby city on Germany’s northern coast, Nordkreuz members recalled.The winner got a trophy named for Mehmet Turgut, a Turkish street vendor killed in Rostock in 2004 by the National Socialist Underground, a far-right terrorist group.

As they drank coffee at the truck stop, Jan Henrik H. turned the conversation to “the people in the file,” who he said were “harmful” to the state and needed to be “done away with,” Mr. Schelski later told the police.Jan Henrik H. wanted advice on how best to transport their captives once they had been rounded up. He asked Mr. Schelski, a major in the state reservist unit, how they could get them past any checkpoints that might be created in a time of unrest. Would uniforms help? Army trucks?

“They showed me a handmade sketch of my home,” Mr. Böhringer said. “‘Do you recognize this?’ they had asked.”“It was the exact same sketch that those officers had made in my home,” he said.“I had to swallow pretty hard,” he recalled. “The very people who said they wanted to protect me then passed this on to people who wanted to harm me.”“They didn’t just want to survive Day X, they wanted to kill their enemies,” he said. “It was concrete, what they were planning.”

Chancellor Angela Merkel belongs “in the dock,” he said. The multicultural cities in western Germany are “the caliphate.” The best way to escape creeping migration was to move to the East German countryside, “where people are still called Schmidt, Schneider and Müller.”A copy of Compact, a prominent far-right magazine, with President Trump’s face on the cover, lay on a shelf. A selection of the president’s speeches had been translated into German in the issue. “I like Trump,” Mr. Gross said.

As far back as 2009, some fellow police officers had voiced concerns about Mr. Gross’s far-right views, noting that he had brought books about the Nazis to work. But no one intervened, and he was even groomed for promotion.“There is no danger from the far right,” he insisted. “I don’t know a single neo-Nazi.”Soldiers and police officers are “frustrated,” he told me the third time we met, ticking off complaints about migrants, crime and the mainstream media. He likens the coverage of coronavirus to the censored state broadcaster during Communism. Instead, he says, he has a YouTube subscription to RT, the Russian state-controlled channel and other alternative media.In that parallel universe of disinformation, he learns that the government is secretly flying in refugees after midnight. That coronavirus is a ploy to deprive citizens of their rights. That Ms. Merkel works for what he calls the “deep state.”“The deep state is global,” Mr. Gross said. “It’s big capital, the big banks, Bill Gates.”

He still expects Day X, sooner or later. Riots linked to an economic meltdown. Or a blackout, because the German government is shuttering coal plants.Nordkreuz members never told me, nor the authorities, the location of the disused vacation village that was their safe house for Day X.The safe house is still active, said Mr. Gross, who at the height of Nordkreuz’s planning had boasted to a fellow member that his network contained 2,000 like-minded people in Germany and beyond.“The network is still there,” he said.

The claim plaintiffs bring alleges something horrific: that locaters in Mali sold them as children to an Ivorian farm where overseers forced them to work,” Mr. Katyal said

A 2004 Supreme Court decision, Sosa v. Álvarez-Machain, left the door open to some claims under the law, as long as they involved violations of international norms with “definite content and acceptance among civilized nations.”

Those questions suggested that the court could rule for the companies without making a broad statement about corporate immunity

“Even where the claims touch and concern the territory of the United States,” he wrote, “they must do so with sufficient force to displace the presumption against extraterritorial application.”

The court said foreign corporations may not be sued under the 1789 law, but it left open the question of the status of domestic corporations.

In Tuesday’s case, Nestlé USA v. Doe, No. 19-416, the companies sought to expand both sorts of limitations. They said the 1789 law did not allow suits even when some of the defendants’ conduct was said to have taken place in the United States, and they urged the court to bar suits under the law against all corporations, whether foreign or domestic.

They sued Nestlé USA and Cargill, saying the firms had aided and profited from the practice of forced child labor.

Mr. Katyal said there were ways to hold such a corporation accountable. But he said the 1789 law was not one of them

that’s what I felt back in those days,” he said, “that everything was for sale — it was all about distraction, it didn’t seem serious. It all felt foolish and headed for a crash.”

Younger viewers do not have to fear Chase’s wrath, because they are not so obviously its object. They are also able to watch the show for hours on end, which makes the subtext and themes more apparent. Perhaps all of this has offered clarity that was not possible when the show aired. Perhaps it is easier now to see exactly who — or what — Chase was angry at.

it is easily one of the most written-about TV shows in the medium’s short history. But more than the shows that have emerged in its wake, which are subjected to close readings and recaps in nearly every major publication, “The Sopranos” has a novelistic quality that actually withstands this level of scrutiny. It’s not uncommon to hear from people who have watched the series several times, or who do so on a routine basis — people who say it reveals new charms at different points in life

Perhaps the greatest mystery of all, looking back on “The Sopranos” all these years later, is this: What was Chase seeing in the mid-’90s — a period when the United States’ chief geopolitical foe was Serbia, when the line-item veto and school uniforms were front-page news, when “Macarena” topped the charts — that compelled him to make a show that was so thoroughly pessimistic about this country?

“I don’t think I felt like it was a good time,” he told me. He is 76 now, and speaks deliberately and thoughtfully. “I felt that things were going downhill.” He’d become convinced America was, as Neil Postman’s 1985 polemic put it, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” not an easy thing for a journeyman TV writer to accept.

“There was nothing but crap out there. Crap in every sense. I was beginning to feel that people’s predictions about the dumbing-down of society had happened and were happening, and I started to see everything getting tawdry and cheap.”

Expanded access to credit had cut into what mobsters call the shylock business; there’s no need to go to a loan shark when the payday lender will offer you similarly competitive rates. Gambling was legalized in many states and flourishes on many reservations; nearly every state in the Union has a lottery, which decimated the numbers racket. Italian American neighborhoods have emptied out — as Jacobs writes, “radically diminishing the pool of tough teenagers with Cosa Nostra potential”; this is dramatized brilliantly in the final episode of the series, when a mobster from a New York family hurries through Little Italy on an important phone call and, when the call ends, looks around to see he’s wandered into an encroaching and vibrant Chinatown. And, Jacobs notes, union membership has been decimated. “In the mid-1950s, about 35 percent of U.S. workers belonged to a union,” he writes. “In recent years, only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers have been union members.”

I was about to change the subject when he hit on something. “Have you noticed — or maybe you haven’t noticed — how nobody does what they say they’re going to do?” he said, suddenly animated. “If your sink gets jammed up, and a guy says he’s going to be out there at 5:30 — no. Very few people do what they say they’re going to do. There is a decline in goods and services that is enormous.”

Chase told me the real joke of the show was not “What if a mobster went to therapy?” The comedic engine, for him, was this: What if things had become so selfish and narcissistic in America that even the mob couldn’t take it? “That was the whole thing,” he said. “America was so off the rails that everything that the Mafia had done was nothing compared to what was going on around them.”

In “The Mafia: A Cultural History,” Roberto M. Dainotto, a professor of literature at Duke, writes that one thing our cinematic Mafiosi have that we admire, against our better judgment, is access to structures of meaning outside of market forces: the church, family, honor. The Mafia movie often pits these traditional values against the corrosive and homogenizing effects of American life.

What “The Sopranos” shows us, Dainotto argues, is what happens when all that ballast is gone, and the Mafia is revealed to be as ignoble as anything else. “Life is what it is,” he writes, “and repeats as such.”

The show puts all this American social and cultural rot in front of characters wholly incapable of articulating it, if they even notice it.

What is, for me, one of the show’s most memorable scenes has no dialogue at all. Tony and his crew have just returned from a business trip to Italy, during which they were delighted with the Old Country but also confronted with the degree of their alienation from their own heritage. They’re off the plane, and in a car traveling through Essex County. As the camera pans by the detritus of their disenchanted world — overpasses, warehouses — Tony, Paulie and Christopher are seeing their home with fresh eyes, and maybe wondering if their ancestors made a bad trade or if, somewhere along the line, something has gone horribly wrong. But we don’t know: For once, these arrogant, stupid and loquacious men are completely silent.

Around the time “The Sopranos” premiered, the N.Y.U. Law professor James B. Jacobs wrote a paper, along with a student, arguing that the Mafia, though weakened by decades of prosecutions, could come roaring back. By 2019, though, he had published a new paper called “The Rise and Fall of Organized Crime in the United States,” declaring the Mafia all but finished. “The world in which the Cosa Nostra became powerful is largely gone,” he wrote. And he cites a litany of factors that aided its collapse, a mix of technological advances, deregulation and financialization — many of the same forces that have created the stratified economy of today.

In his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, Tony tries to explain why he thinks he has panic attacks, why he suffers from stress. “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi tells him that many Americans feel that way. Tony presses on: “I think about my father: He never reached the heights like me, but in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, they had their pride. Today, what do we got?”

You can see this world — one in which no one can be squeezed because everyone is being squeezed — starting to take shape from the very beginning of the show. In the pilot, Tony is fending off competition from a new waste-hauling business undercutting his company’s extortionate fees, and trying to figure out how he can get a piece of the similarly extortionate costs his health insurer paid for his M.R.I. — a procedure he had because the stress in his life had given him a panic attack.

The bien-pensant line on Tony remains that he’s a sociopath, and only used therapy to become a better criminal. This is an idea spoon-fed to the viewer in the final episodes by a contrite Dr. Melfi, in a show that spoon-feeds almost nothing to the viewer. Melfi herself might call this a coping mechanism to avoid the messier reality, which is that Tony lives in an immoral world nestled within another immoral world, both of which have only grown more chaotic because of forces outside his control.

Because of this, you can see how he reasons himself into more and more heinous crimes, justifying each and every one of them to himself. Perhaps to you too — at least, up to a point. That sympathy for Tony led contemporaneous critics to ask if people were watching the show in the wrong way, or if our enjoyment pointed to a deficiency of the heart.

t is this quality of Tony’s — this combination of privilege and self-loathing — that I suspect resonates with a younger generation, whether we want to admit it or not. He’s not so different from us, after all. He has an anxiety disorder. He goes to therapy and takes S.S.R.I.s, but never really improves — not for long, anyway. He has a mild case of impostor syndrome, having skipped some key steps to becoming boss, and he knows that people who hold it against him are sort of right. He’s still proud of his accomplishments in high school. He does psychedelics in the desert, and they change his perspective on things. He often repeats stuff he half-remembers someone smarter than him saying. He’s arguably in an open marriage with Carmela, if a rather lopsided one. He liked listening to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in 2007. He’s impulsive and selfish and does not go to church, though he does seem open to vaguer notions of spirituality. He wishes his career provided him with meaning, but once he had the career, he discovered that someone had pulled the rug out at some point, and an institution that had been a lodestar to him for his whole life was revealed to be a means of making money and nothing more. Does this sound at all familiar to you?

Like many young people, Tony is a world-historically spoiled man who is nevertheless cursed, thanks to timing, to live out the end of an enterprise he knows on some level to be immoral.

It gives him panic attacks, but he’s powerless to find a way out. Thus trapped — and depressed — it’s not so hard for him to allow himself a few passes, to refuse to become better because the world is so rotten anyway.

Tony’s predicament was once his to suffer alone, but history has unfolded in such a way as to render his condition nearly universal.

That the people in power truly had insulated themselves in a fantasy environment — not just in the realm of foreign policy, but also, more concretely, in the endless faux-bucolic subdivisions that would crater the economy. We were living in a sort of irreality, one whose totality would humiliate and delegitimize nearly every important institution in American life when it ended, leaving — of all people — the Meadows and A.J.s of the world to make sense of things.

if people still see a monster in Tony, then the monster is themselves: a twisted reflection of a generation whose awakening to the structures that control them came in tandem with a growing aversion to personal accountability in the face of these systems.

Whether that’s true or not, it offers us all permission to become little Tonys, lamenting the sad state of affairs while doing almost exactly nothing to improve ourselves, or anything at all.

This tendency is perhaps most pronounced online, where we are all in therapy all day, and where you can find median generational opinions perfectly priced by the marketplace of ideas — where we bemoan the wrongs of the world and tell ourselves that we can continue being who we are, and enjoy the comforts we’ve grown accustomed to.

In the show’s finale, as the extended Soprano family gathers to mourn the death of Bobby Baccalieri, we find Paulie Walnuts stuck at the kids’ table, where A.J., newly politically awakened, charges into a rant. You people are screwed, he says. “You’re living in a dream.” Bush let Al Qaeda escape, he tells them, and then made us invade some other country? Someone at the table tells him that if he really cares, he should join up. A.J. responds: “It’s more noble than watching these jackoff fantasies on TV of how we’re kicking their ass. It’s like: America.” Again, he’s interrupted: What in the world does he mean? He explains: “This is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling? And come-ons for [expletive] they don’t need and can’t afford?”

However inartfully, A.J. was gesturing at something that would have been hard for someone his age to see at the time, which is that the ’00s were a sort of fever dream, a tragic farce built on cheap money and propaganda.

The notion that individual action might help us avoid any coming or ongoing crises is now seen as hopelessly naïve, the stuff of Obama-era liberalism.

. The “leftist ‘Sopranos’ fan” is now such a well-known type that it is rounding the corner to being an object of scorn and mockery online.

One oddity that can’t be ignored in this “Sopranos” resurgence is that, somewhat atypically for a TV fandom, there is an openly left-wing subcurrent within it

Some executives like Mr. Haeusgen are embracing transformation, testing new strategies and markets. Other businesses, however, are wary of abandoning a model that for decades enabled Germany to thrive but defied change.

Hawe’s handling of international affairs is not just a concern for its 2,700 employees. The economies of some German towns depend on it.

In Kaufbeuren, a brightly painted Bavarian town nestled below the Alps, Hawe is a top employer. In the tiny village of Sachsenkam, 60 miles to the west, Hawe provides 250 jobs — the next largest employer is the local brewery, with a staff of 17.

“It’s like we were successful for too long,” said Stefan Bosse, the mayor of Kaufbeuren, who is keen to attract other businesses to diversify the employers his town relies on. “Now, gradually, we see: ‘Uh oh — this is not a given. This can also be endangered.’

The archetypal Mittelstand company is based in a rural German town, making a piece of equipment few have heard of, but that is crucial for goods worldwide — like a screw needed for every airplane or passenger car.

The government, too, has a poor record in shedding outdated practices — like its labyrinth, paperwork-based bureaucracy. In 2017, it vowed by 2022 to digitalize its 575 most used services, like company registrations. A year past that deadline, said Mr. Bianchi, only 22 percent of those services are online.

“The German business model, particularly Mittelstand, is being extremely good at doing one thing: Slowly but steadily perfecting one product,” said Mathias Bianchi, spokesman for the German Mittelstand Association. “Because that worked so well for years, they had no need to adapt to changes. But now, they need to adjust to the new economic reality.”

Even as the tech revolution and climate change added strain in recent decades, Germany’s model plodded profitably along.

But the pillars it relied on to do that — cheap Russian natural gas and the Chinese market — are collapsing.

Staking out a socioeconomic transformation for the country, pledged by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government, has become a source of national anxiety.

Like its population, Germany’s business owners and entrepreneurs are aging — the average Mittelstand association member is 55.

Some are resistant to adapting to new technologies and cling to a loyalty-based system that created lifetime employees — and customers

How Hawe and other midsize German companies navigate these new global forces will be critical to the country’s future prosperity. Though Germany’s 20th century success as the economic powerhouse of Europe is often seen through its biggest brands — like Volkswagen, Mercedes and Siemens — it is small and medium enterprises that are the backbone of its economy.

Such failures makes businesses wary of transformation plans the government says will be costly now, but will make Germany a diversified, digitized and climate neutral economy.

Over half the companies polled did not want to expand in Germany, and a quarter were considering relocating.

Marita Riesner, inspecting parts, said her heating costs spiked to 740 euros ($803) a month from 120 euros ($130). She and her neighbors are growing vegetable gardens to ease the pain of inflation as the country dips into recession.

“I was a very positive thinker before,” she said. “But these days, I’m sweating it. It seems a lot is going wrong.”

Should geopolitical events disrupt business with China, Mr. Haeusgen said, the consequences could eliminate more than half of Hawe’s jobs in Kaufbeuren. Currently, he said, 20 percent of Hawe’s business comes from China.

Some business groups raised alarm in recent years over Germany’s vast exposure to China — before the risks were taken seriously by former chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, which had heavily encouraged German-Chinese trade.

Today, some policymakers privately worry that an event like a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be an inescapable disaster for Germany’s economy. The government is now pushing “de-risking” by finding alternatives to trade with China.

But major brands like Volkswagen and BASF insist that China, as the world’s second-largest economy, is too important a market to give up. Such German-based multinationals are responsible for a 20 percent rise in foreign direct investment in China this year.

German officials say their strategy will maintain ties to China, but will counterbalance that by strengthening relationships with other nations, like India or Vietnam

The Mittelstand is doing the same: Hawe is investing heavily in India, where it plans to build a new plant, and other companies are looking to North America.

“It used to be that we made a majority of sales with three customers from China,” he said. “Now we have many, many smaller customers scattered all over the globe.

Instead of making a few parts at a huge scale, as cheaply as possible, Hawe must make a wide variety of parts for an array of customers, as quickly as possible.

The new socioeconomic model for Germany may be less about erecting pillars than managing an ever more intricate, international juggling act.

“Being able to live with and manage uncertainty and to handle complexity becomes, in my opinion, a core strength,” Mr. Haeusgen said. “The way my grandpa did it won’t work today.”

the many sins of empire, from draining India of its resources and destroying its industry, to the manner in which the British implemented a policy of divide-and-rule, giving rise to conflict between Hindus and Muslims, which ultimately led to the partition of India and Pakistan

As for the railways, post and industrialisation, he asks, “Why would India, which throughout its history had created some of the greatest (and most modern for their time) civilisations the world has ever known, not have acquired all the trappings of developed or advanced nations today, had it been left to itself to do so?”

Mumbai is in many ways unlike the rest of India: it is far richer, less caste-bound and a lot more easy-going. Yet it is also all of India in a single place

As the country’s commercial capital, it has long attracted migrants from all over the country. Most of India’s communities, languages and cuisines are represented here, if not all of its pathologies. The cliché about Mumbai is that it is a place of extreme contrasts: sprawling shantytowns nestled in the shadows of multi-million-dollar homes

He explains with great clarity the links between big Indian business and politics, and the implications for India’s industrial economy. Even so, India is no post-Soviet Russia. The historical analogy Mr Crabtree uses instead is America in the era of the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts. In America, it gave way to a progressive era of greater prosperity for all, he writes. The fate of nearly 1.4bn people hangs on whether India makes a similar journey.■

It’s a puzzle. What do you get the country that has it all, and could have it all taken away?