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n the international arena, the new president, Dilma Roussef, has pulled back from Luiz Inácio Lula Da Silva's many excesses (indifference to human rights abuses, support for Iran and its nuclear program, and rhetorical anti-Americanism) during his last year in office, and may even have a present for Obama.

South America is booming, as India and China swallow up its exports of iron, copper, soybeans, coffee, coal, oil, wheat, poultry, beef, and sugar. Its foreign trade and investment patterns are diversified and dynamic. With a few minor exceptions, migration is internal to the region, and a modus vivendi has been reached with the drug trade, mainly coca leaf and cocaine in Bolivia, Peru, and Colombia. Moreover, relations with the US, while important, are no longer paramount. South American governments can afford to disagree with the US, and often do. They have just elected a new president of the Union of South American Nations (Unasur), whose headquarters are being built in Quito, Ecuador. As its name suggests, Unasur's main raison d'être is to exclude Canada, the US, and Mexico (in contrast to the Organisation of American States).

None of this holds true for Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean islands – mainly the Dominican Republic, but eventually Cuba, too, and, in its own way, Haiti. These are not mineral-rich or bountiful agricultural nations: some coffee and bananas here, a little sugar and beef there, but nothing with which to sustain a boom. While Mexico is America's second-largest supplier of oil, this represents only 9 per cent of its total exports. Instead, these countries export low-value-added manufactured goods (Mexico does more, of course), and live off remittances, tourism, and drug-transshipment profits. All of this is overwhelmingly concentrated on the US: that is where the migrants are, where the towels and pajamas are shipped, where the tourists come from, and where the drugs are bought. For these countries, including Mexico, stable, close, and productive relations with America are essential.

The Republican party's resilient love of all things military and its elites' love of waging war at will anywhere in the world seem to me to be at odds with a core conservative insight. The critique of open-ended welfare was always that it perpetuated dependency and, in the long run, deepened poverty rather than alleviated it. But that logic never seems to be applied to the wars and nation-building effort

the "surge" in 2006 - 2007. It did not and could not achieve sectarian peace, which alone can be forged by the parties themselves. And any peace we did achieve remains premised on an American presence. Until that presence is removed, we will never know what has actually occurred beneath. And when that presence is removed, a different pattern will have to emerge, based on the actual facts on the ground, rather than those distorted by US intervention. Or else we have to stay for ever

When you see nation-building as a very expensive and usually counterproductive form of international welfare - you can see why its logic never ends. Intervention creates dependency which prevents departure.

Morris takes on theories which "suggest that there is something unique about western culture". His argument is simple: "from the Mediterranean to the Yellow Sea," there were philosophers wrestling with the same questions "and finding similar answers" as Socrates. "Socrates was part of a huge pattern, not a unique giant who sent the West down a superior path". What can I say? Does Morris, a specialized Professor of Classics, seriously believe that Indian and Chinese thinkers were reasoning in ways similar to Europeans? First of all, one of the exceptional qualities about the West is the continuous sequence of original thinkers in ancient Greece, in Rome, in Christian and in Modern Europe. The mere appearance of a Socrates at one point in time is not the issue. Find me in ancient Asia a continuous line of original thinkers

Morris brings up the Renaissance only to tell us that there were renaissances everywhere. The revivals ones sees in Asia history were always revivals of the same traditional ways of thinking; imagine Europeans for ever writing textual studies of Plato

Christianity? -- well, Morris says that all religions are the same. Christianity and Islam are fundamentally different religious traditions, and not only because the former has exhibited a far richer scholarly tradition, which is rather visible in the immediate fusion of Greek philosophy, Roman Law, and Christian theology in the first centuries AD, not to mention the Middle Ages, but because in Islam the idea that Allah has limits to his own powers, by making an everlasting covenant, with human beings, is unthinkable, in that Allah is viewed as absolutely transcendent; whereas for Christianity the authority of the earthly rulers is limited by God's law, which both grants rights to every person and holds that God is conterminous with Reason. There is no self-limitation to the sovereignty of Islamic rulers, and for this reason Islam has faced great difficulties producing a secular political order subject to constitutional checks and balances.

To Chinese viewers, however, “House of Cards” serves as a streaming-video CliffsNotes to the U.S. political system.

“It basically confirms what Chinese think of their own government.”

Which explains the series’ usefulness to Chinese leaders: It helps level the political playing field.

What motivates our colleague to show up in an unwell state, and why should his presence in the office make the rest of us so edgy, sometimes to the point of anger? Perhaps we all share a common ailment of the workplace, a condition whose major symptom is the morbid fear of downtime.

If overwork can be taken as a sickness in itself, then America is a bastion of infirmity. We clock in some 1,788 hours a year, 120 more than our counterparts in Britain, 300 more than our counterparts in France and 400 more than our counterparts in Germany.

Americans have always had a tendency to work strange hours, late at night or over weekends, notes Daniel S. Hamermesh, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin. He thinks the pattern arises from our heavy-handed office culture: If you’re not overworked — or won’t go into the office sick — you seem to be a slouch.

Last year was the hottest in earth’s recorded history, scientists reported on Friday, underscoring scientific warnings about the risks of runaway emissions and undermining claims by climate-change contrarians that global warming had somehow stopped.

Of the large inhabited land areas, only the eastern half of the United States recorded below-average temperatures in 2014

Several scientists said the most remarkable thing about the 2014 record was that it occurred in a year that did not feature El Niño, a large-scale weather pattern in which the ocean dumps an enormous amount of heat into the atmosphere.

Larry Summers, who withdrew his candidacy for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve under pressure from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2013, has emerged as the party’s dominant economic policy strategist. The former Treasury secretary’s evolving message has won over many of his former critics.

Summers’s ascendance is a reflection of the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neo-liberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. alike.

Summers’s analysis of current economic conditions suggests that free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions. These distortions, in his view, have resulted in gains of $1 trillion annually to those at the top of the pyramid, and losses of $1 trillion every year to those in the bottom 80 percent.

differences on Iran policy correspond to answers to this one question: Whether the world of 2015 is fundamentally similar to, or different from, the world of 1938.

the idea of recurring historic episodes has a powerful effect on decision-making in the here and now. Disagreements over policy often come down to the search for the right historic pattern to apply.

the idea that Europe on the eve of the Holocaust is the most useful guide to the world in 2015 runs through arguments about Iran policy. And if that is the correct model to apply, the right "picture in our heads" as Walter Lippmann put it in Public Opinion, then these conclusions naturally follow:

One of America’s leading political scientists, Robert Putnam, has just come out with a book called “Our Kids” about the growing chasm between those who live in college-educated America and those who live in high-school-educated America

Roughly 10 percent of the children born to college grads grow up in single-parent households. Nearly 70 percent of children born to high school grads do. There are a bunch of charts that look like open scissors. In the 1960s or 1970s, college-educated and noncollege-educated families behaved roughly the same. But since then, behavior patterns have ever more sharply diverged. High-school-educated parents dine with their children less than college-educated parents, read to them less, talk to them less, take them to church less, encourage them less and spend less time engaging in developmental activity.

sympathy is not enough. It’s not only money and better policy that are missing in these circles; it’s norms.

The U.S. Army field manual defines "the rule of law" as follows: "The rule of law refers to a principle of governance in which all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself, are accountable to laws that are publicly promulgated, equally enforced, and independently adjudicated, and which are consistent with international human rights norms and standards. It requires, as well, measures to ensure adherence to the principles of supremacy of law, equality before the law, accountability to the law, fairness in the application of the law, separation of powers, participation in decision-making, legal certainty, avoidance of arbitrariness and procedural and legal transparency."

it would be difficult to conclude that US targeted strikes are consistent with core rule of law norms," they declared. "From the perspective of many around the world, the U.S. appears to claim, in effect, the legal right to kill any person it determines is a member of al-Qaida or its associated forces, in any state on Earth, at any time, based on secret criteria and secret evidence, evaluated in a secret process by unknown and largely anonymous individuals—with no public disclosure of which organizations are considered 'associated forces,' no means for anyone outside that secret process to raise questions about the criteria or validity of the evidence, and no means for anyone outside that process to identify or remedy mistakes or abuses."

Unfortunately, the U.S. government violates "rule of law" norms in other areas too. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court does not operate with "procedural and legal transparency." The Office of Legal Counsel adopts highly contestable yet totally secret interpretations of statutes that dramatically affect policy outcomes. Citizens and corporations are served with secret court orders and often feel confused about whether they are even permitted to consult with counsel. Laws against revealing classified information are not enforced equally—powerful actors routinely leak official secrets with impunity, while whistleblowers and dissidents are aggressively persecuted for the mere "mishandling" of state secrets. The director of national intelligence committed perjury without consequence. President Obama has blatantly violated a duly ratified, legally binding treaty that requires him to investigate and prosecute acts of torture. He also violated the War Powers Resolution by participating in the military overthrow of Muammar Qaddafi without securing the approval of Congress. And he won't even clarify exactly what groups he considers us to be at war with! That is only a partial list.

The reopening of these cases represents a shift for the government, the first acknowledgment that prosecutors are coming to terms with the limitations of how they punish bank misdeeds. Typically, when banks have repeatedly run afoul of the law, they have returned to business as usual with little or no additional penalty — a stark contrast to how prosecutors mete out justice for the average criminal.

The decision to revisit the cases also draws attention to consulting firms that helped shape the original settlements. When determining the extent of wrongdoing at a bank, the government often relies on assessments from consultants that are handpicked and paid by the same bank.

Even now that prosecutors are examining repeat offenses on Wall Street, they are likely to seek punishments more symbolic than sweeping. Top executives are not expected to land in prison, nor are any problem banks in jeopardy of shutting down.

Sweden spent the past week trying, unsuccessfully, to find a foreign submarine thought to be lurking in its waters. But on Friday, having scoured the coast, the Swedish military called off the search. So what's going on in the Baltic?

What it means is that they've been searching among the islands and skerries off Stockholm for a submarine that shouldn't be there, bringing back dormant memories of the Cold War. Back in the 1970s and 80s Sweden regularly scoured its territorial waters for Soviet subs, almost always without success.

Once a a nuclear-armed whiskey-class submarine ran aground near a Swedish naval base, causing a diplomatic incident that became known inevitably as Whiskey on the Rocks. Fast forward to today, and a time when countries around the Baltic Sea are casting nervous glances towards a newly assertive Russia

what about us "experts?" What have we learned? Are there really any significant new insights? Do we know much more today than we did a generation ago?

France uplifted the downtrodden people of Algeria and Indo-China

My generation was deeply influenced half a century ago by economists and mathematicians. We scholars all wanted to be - and particularly to show -- that we had mastered all the techniques of our professions as social scientists, that we could build models, make graphs, juxtapose trends, etc. After all, we were writing our learned books and essays for our academic colleagues and our paymasters, not for those we were describing. So, at least those who were paid by our government and its proxy think tanks often became, as the English say, "too clever by half." They and their counterparts in universities, after all, had to prove their "smarts" in order to get funded, promoted or kept on

There is, however, one group of Americans with whom the Republican contenders and Mrs. Clinton, the likely Democratic front-runner, are generally in step: the wealthy.

more than 80 wealthy Chicago-area residents and found that 62 percent felt “differences in income in America are too large” — a figure generally in line with public opinion.

Only 13 percent of wealthy interview subjects said the government should “reduce the differences in income between people with high incomes and those with low incomes.” Only 17 percent said the government should “redistribute wealth by heavy taxes on the rich.

Why would the death rate for middle-aged non-Hispanic whites be increasing after decades of decline while rates for middle-aged blacks and Hispanics continue to fall? And why didn’t other rich countries have the same mortality rate increase for people in midlife?

if the death rate among middle-aged whites had continued to decline at the rate it fell between 1979 and 1998, half a million deaths would have been avoided over the years from 1999 through 2013. That, they note, is about the same number of deaths as those caused by AIDS through 2015.

The major causes of the excess deaths are suicides, drug abuse and alcoholism.

Even more striking are the proximate causes of rising mortality. Basically, white Americans are, in increasing numbers, killing themselves, directly or indirectly. Suicide is way up, and so are deaths from drug poisoning and the chronic liver disease that excessive drinking can caus

what’s causing this epidemic of self-destructive behavior?

If you believe the usual suspects on the right, it’s all the fault of liberals. Generous social programs, they insist, have created a culture of dependency and despair, while secular humanists have undermined traditional values. But (surprise!) this view is very much at odds with the evidence.

The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.”

In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.”

Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.