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Asian-Americans have built this political coalition not in spite of identities, but because of identities. Their success is a rebuke to those who denigrate “identity politics” and call for emphasizing class over race or identity.

The cultural theorist Stuart Hall’s insight is evergreen: “Race is the modality in which class is lived.” The creation of race and the exploitation of racial difference has always been a part of capitalism. This is why any call for privileging class over race is fundamentally mistaken at best and dishonest at worst.

the problem is not necessarily with identity politics per se. The problem lies in Mr. Trump’s conjoining of white identity politics with economic policies that favor the wealthy and a political strategy that includes demonizing other races

No Republican has held statewide office in more than a decade.

reflected the state’s recent progress against the coronavirus pandemic, which has claimed more than 67,000 lives in California

The state has one of the nation’s highest vaccination rates and one of its lowest rates of new virus cases

President Biden will announce on Wednesday that the Port of Los Angeles will begin operating around the clock as his administration struggles to relieve growing backlogs in the global supply chains that deliver critical goods to the United States.

Mr. Biden is set to give a speech on Wednesday addressing the problems in ports, factories and shipping lanes that have helped produce shortages, long delivery times and rapid price increases for food, televisions, automobiles and much more.

The resulting inflation has chilled consumer confidence and weighed on Mr. Biden’s approval ratings. The Labor Department is set to release a new reading of monthly inflation on Wednesday morning.

“Real development is not leaving things behind, as on a road,” G.K. Chesterton said, “but drawing life from them, like a root.”

Wheatcroft seems like a single Lilliputian attempting to tie down Gulliver with a single thread. As with Jefferson, the thread will not hold. Such historical figures are more than bit players in our own morality play

This is a historical case in which “other than that” doesn’t work. You cannot justifiably say: He was a racist — other than saving Western civilization from an endless night of racist tyranny

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

(in 2016, the six largest Hollywood studios alone accounted for more than half of global box office sales)

Americans, too, stick to the U.S. The list of the 500 highest-grossing films of all time in the U.S., for example, doesn’t contain a single foreign film (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon comes in at 505th, slightly higher than Jerry Seinfeld’s less-than-classic Bee Movie but about a hundred below Paul Blart: Mall Cop).

Compared to 66 percent of Canadians and 76 percent of U.K. citizens, only about four in 10 Americans have a passport and can therefore travel abroad.

China may be the land of her ancestors, but Taiwan is where she was born and raised, a home she defines as much by its verdant mountains and bustling night markets as by its robust democracy.

Beijing’s strident authoritarianism — and its claim over Taiwan — has only solidified the island’s identity, now central to a dispute that has turned the Taiwan Strait into one of Asia’s biggest potential flash points.

Most of Taiwan’s residents are not interested in becoming absorbed by a Communist-ruled China. But they are not pushing for formal independence for the island, either, preferring to avoid the risk of war.

North Korea said on Friday that it would not participate in the Beijing Winter Olympics because of the coronavirus pandemic and moves by “hostile forces.”

Its no-show at the Beijing ​Games would deprive South Korea of a rare opportunity to establish official contact with the ​North.

the country’s Olympic Committee and its ministry of sports wished Beijing a successful Games even though “the U.S. and its vassal forces are getting evermore undisguised in their moves against China aimed at preventing the successful opening of the Olympics,”

The call to action urged people to start posting at noon Pacific time, attach their favorite graphics, and like and retweet other Buttar supporters’ contributions.

Confronted with campaigns to make certain ideas seem more widespread than they really are, many researchers and media commentators have taken to using labels such as “misinformation” and “disinformation.” But those terms have fallen victim to scope creep. They imply that a narrative or claim has deviated from a stable or canonical truth; whether Pelosi should go is simply a matter of opinion.

In fact, we have a very old word for persuasive communication with an agenda: propaganda.

The Biden administration released several reports Thursday on climate change and national security, laying out in stark terms the ways in which the warming world is beginning to pose significant challenges to stability worldwide.

the first such document to look exclusively at the issue of climate, said that risks to American national security will grow in the years to come. After 2030, key countries will face growing risks of instability and need for humanitarian assistance, the report said.

The document makes three key judgments. Global tensions will rise as countries argue about how to accelerate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; climate change will exacerbate cross-border flash points and amplify strategic competition in the Arctic; and the effects of climate change will be felt most acutely in developing countries that are least equipped to adapt.

North Korea fired two ballistic missiles on Friday, its third missile test this month, hours after it warned of “stronger and certain reaction” if the United States helped impose more sanctions on the North in response to its recent series of missile tests.

​Two short-range ballistic missiles took off from Uiju, a county near the northwestern corner of North Korea, and flew 267 miles before crashing into waters off the country’s east coast, the South Korean military said. It added that its analysts were studying the trajectory and other flight data from the launch to learn more.

The escalation also comes at a time when the Biden administration is struggling in its diplomacy to stave off a potential Russian invasion in Ukraine.

Glib treatments of World War II have done real harm, she says, distorting our understanding of the past and consequently shaping how we approach the future. As “the last American military action about which there is anything like a positive consensus,” World War II is “the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones.”

Like the cadets she teaches at West Point, civilians would do well to see World War II as something other than a buoyant tale of American goodness trouncing Nazi evil. Yes, she says up front, American involvement in the war was necessary. But she maintains that it’s been a national fantasy to presume that “necessary” has to mean the same thing as “good.”

The United States only entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor — and even then, Samet says, contemporary observers remarked on “a general American indifference to the fact that the world was on fire.”

“It feels like we’re definitively in a new era,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser in the Obama White House. “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us. And we’re not sure what’s next.”

The attack by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on his neighbor has become a prism through which nearly all American foreign policy decisions will be cast for the foreseeable future, experts and officials said.

In the near term, Russia’s aggression is sure to invigorate Mr. Biden’s global fight for democracy against autocracies like Moscow

The war in Ukraine is far from over, but a consensus is forming in Chinese policy circles that one country stands to emerge victorious from the turmoil: China.

China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has avoided criticizing President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, but he has also tried to distance China from the carnage.

His government has denounced the international sanctions imposed on Russia but, so far at least, has hinted that Chinese companies may comply with them, to protect China’s economic interests in the West.

BRANDON TERRY: Well, there’s this puzzle when we think about somebody like Martin Luther King Jr. And it’s that on the one hand, we have a national holiday devoted to him, an imposing monument on the hallowed space of the National Mall; he’s invoked in all manner of political speeches from across the political spectrum, probably the most famous African American of the 20th century.

But at the same time, if you ask even really well-educated people, they often don’t know that he’d written five major books, that he’s a systematic theologian with sustained interest in political philosophy who’s written lots and lots of things, incisive things, on some of the most pressing political and ethical matters.

King wants to say something different, I think. He wants to say that we are both of these things. We are a society with what he called the congenital deformity of racism — that it’s shot through many of our deepest institutions and structural arrangements, and because it has not been redressed on the scale that it would have to be to achieve true justice, it festers. It’s a rot. It’s a challenge that every generation is called on to pick up and try to do better than their forebears.