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to understand the ways in which Donald Trump’s presidency is systematically corrupting the American mind

The book is Peter Pomerantsev’s “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible.”

at its heart it’s the tale of the substitution of reality with “reality,” of factual truth with interpretive possibility.

labor leaders are proclaiming Joseph R. Biden Jr. to be the most union-friendly president of their lifetime — and “maybe ever,” as Steve Rosenthal, a former political director for the A.F.L.-C.I.O., said in an interview.

He has pushed through legislation sending hundreds of billions of dollars to cities and states, aid that public-sector unions consider essential, and tens of billions to shore up union pension plans.

Yet Mr. Rosenthal and other labor advocates confess to a gnawing anxiety: Despite Mr. Biden’s remarkable support for their movement, unions may not be much better off when he leaves office than when he entered it.

Illinois would become the first state to bar the police from using deceptive tactics when interrogating young people under legislation that passed the General Assembly with near-unanimous support from Republicans and Democrats on Sunday.

The bill, which is headed to Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s desk, is intended to stop the police from lying during interrogations, a technique that is legal but that the bill’s supporters say often leads to false confessions.

It would make Illinois the first state to prohibit law enforcement officers from knowingly communicating false facts about evidence — like claiming to have found a young person’s fingerprints on a gun — or making unauthorized promises about leniency when interrogating people under 18, according to the Innocence Project.

The next few days are going to be long, but by the end of Wednesday, we expect that President Donald Trump will be impeached a second time.

The US Capitol has become a fortress in Washington as Democrats -- keenly aware that a new President will be inaugurated in just eight days -- grapple with how to curtail the damage that could be done by the outgoing man in the White House.

there is no stopping impeachment now.

Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.

without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year

The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

In April 1998, President Bill Clinton read a Richard Preston novel, "The Cobra Event," about a biological attack on the U.S. using a lethal virus that spreads like the common cold.

the result was the first federal government effort to marshal resources in preparation for a pandemic, including the creation of the National Emergency Medical Stockpile, which stowed vaccines and medical gear in secret locations around the country. Bernard was appointed as the first official on the National Security Council whose sole job was to focus on health threats.

Instead, it kicked off a boom-and-bust cycle of pandemic preparedness that persisted into the Trump administration. By many accounts, Trump fell on the bust side of the equation when he fired his top biosecurity adviser, allowed the disbanding of his global health unit, and initially downplayed the coronavirus as it spread across the world.

I first read Lord of the Flies as a teenager. I remember feeling disillusioned afterwards, but not for a second did I think to doubt Golding’s view of human nature.

That didn’t happen until years later when I began delving into the author’s life. I learned what an unhappy individual he had been: an alcoholic, prone to depression; a man who beat his kids. “I have always understood the Nazis,” Golding confessed, “because I am of that sort by nature.” And it was “partly out of that sad self-knowledge” that he wrote Lord of the Flies.

had anyone ever studied what real children would do if they found themselves alone on a deserted island

Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working. (“Not all of human history,” he corrected me once. “Just the last 10,000 years.”)

He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest and carnage worse than most Americans have experienced. In 2010, he predicted that the unrest would get serious around 2020, and that it wouldn’t let up until those social and political trends reversed. Havoc at the level of the late 1960s and early ’70s is the best-case scenario; all-out civil war is the worst.

The fundamental problems, he says, are a dark triad of social maladies: a bloated elite class, with too few elite jobs to go around; declining living standards among the general population; and a government that can’t cover its financial positions.

While loudly and proudly proclaiming that their goal is to nurture nest eggs for the working class, lawmakers have constructed a complex of tax shelters for the well-to-do. The lopsided result is that as of 2019, nearly 29,000 taxpayers had amassed “mega-IRAs” — individual retirement accounts with balances of $5 million or more — while half of American households had no retirement accounts at all.

according to the Congressional Budget Office, the top 10th of households reap a larger share of the income tax subsidy for retirement savings than the bottom 80 percent.

It’s working out just fine for the financial institutions that manage assets in IRAs and 401(k)s. The combined amount in those vehicles reached $21.6 trillion at the end of 2021 — up fivefold since 2000 — and the more money that pours in, the more that managers collect in fees

The last time there was a major slowdown in the mighty network of ocean currents that shapes the climate around the North Atlantic, it seems to have plunged Europe into a deep cold for over a millennium.

That was roughly 12,800 years ago, when not many people were around to experience it. But in recent decades, human-driven warming could be causing the currents to slow once more, and scientists have been working to determine whether and when they might undergo another great weakening, which would have ripple effects for weather patterns across a swath of the globe.

A pair of researchers in Denmark this week put forth a bold answer: A sharp weakening of the currents, or even a shutdown, could be upon us by century’s end.

Mr. Andreessen outlines a vision of technologists as the authors of a future in which the “techno-capital machine” produces everything that is good in the world.

In this vision, wealthy technologists are not just leaders of their business but keepers of the social order, unencumbered by what Mr. Andreessen labels “enemies”: social responsibility, trust and safety, tech ethics, to name a few.

this view is already enshrined in our culture. Major tent-poles of public policy support it.

“In a way,” he said, “it’s like Trump chose Steve Bannon to be his running mate.”

He has suggested that Republicans should stack the Department of Justice with appointees who “actually take a side in the culture war, the side of the people who elected us, and not just pretend we don’t have to take sides at all.”

“Whether it’s the incentives that you put into place, funding decisions that are made and the curricula that are developed, you really can use politics to influence culture,” Mr. Vance said earlier this year. “And we should be doing more of that on the American Right.”

perhaps Vance’s most millennial trait is just how geeky he is about Lord of the Rings.

The trilogy of novels has been a longstanding nerd favorite for decades, but it became the center of culture during Vance’s high school years thanks to Peter Jackson’s movies.

Rep. Jim Banks of Indiana, who sat next to Vance in Trump’s friends and family box at the convention Tuesday evening, asked Vance to name his favorite author.

Although Russians know more about Stalin’s crimes than they did ever before, many politicians and historians want to pull him out of the shadows and celebrate him for his role in the industrialization of the young Soviet state and the victory over Nazi Germany.

For the 60th anniversary of Stalin’s death, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace conducted another Stalin poll. It found that Stalin is the uncontested No.1 on the Russians’ list of great historical figures, ahead of Lenin, Marx and Peter the Great. In 1989, only 12 percent of Russians felt that way. Today it’s 50 percent.

In 1994, 27 percent of Russians had a positive view of Stalin. In 2011 it was 45 percent. Fifty percent of the respondents thought that Stalin was a wise leader who brought might and prosperity to the Soviet Union. Yet at the same time, 68 percent agreed that he was a cruel tyrant guilty of the death of millions of innocent citizens. Sixty percent also said it was more important that under his leadership the Soviet people won World War II.

physicists admit that it will take more work and analysis before they will have the cold numbers that clinch the case that the new particle announced on July 4 last year is in fact the exact boson first predicted by Peter Higgs and others in 1964 to be the arbiter of mass and cosmic diversity

What happened in the first instant of the Big Bang? What happens at the middle of a black hole where matter and time blink in or out of existence? What is the dark matter whose gravitational influence, astronomers say, shapes the structures of galaxies, or the dark energy that is forcing the universe apart? Why is the universe full of matter but not antimatter? And what, finally, is the fate of the universe? These are all questions that the Standard Model, the vanilla-sounding set of equations that ruled physics for the last half century, does not answer

Some of them could be answered by the unproven theory called supersymmetry, which among other things is needed to explain why whatever mass the Higgs has is low enough to be discovered in the first place and not almost infinite. It predicts a whole new population of elementary particles — called superpartners to the particles physicists already know about — one of which could be the dark matter that pervades the universe. If such particles exist, they would affect the rate at which Higgs bosons decay into other particles, but the CERN teams have yet to record what they consider a convincing deviation from the Standard Model predictions for those decays. Supersymmetry is still at best a beautiful idea.

From Ireland to Turkey, Europeans are all related, sharing a link with ancestors who were alive just 1,000 years ago, according to a new genetic study.

Peter Ralph and Graham Coop of the University of California used genomic data for 2,257 Europeans to conduct the first such study of an entire continent.

A separate study, based on DNA recovered from ancient skeletons, revealed last month that the genetic makeup of modern Europe was established by a wave of newcomers to the continent 6,500 years ago, more recently than previously thought.

Sacks makes three points: that “new” atheists lack the gravitas of old ones, that religion is the only reliable source of morality, so that without faith the world would crumble, and that a plurality of faiths is a bulwark against religious “fundamentalists,” whom he sees as not religious at all.

it’s simply not true that we haven’t grappled with those “real issues.” It’s just that they don’t upset most of us as much as Sacks thinks they should

Holocaust? Really? And did the Christian ethic prevent that? Indeed, much of the Holocaust was the inevitable working-out of a Christian animus against Jews, a reflection of the eternal Jewish status as killers of Christ.

For advice on building Mr. Trump’s national security team, his inner circle has been relying on three hawkish current and former American officials: Representative Devin Nunes, Republican of California, who is chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; Peter Hoekstra, a former Republican congressman and former chairman of the Intelligence Committee;

Frank Gaffney, a Pentagon official during the Reagan administration and a founder of the Center for Security Policy.

Mr. Gaffney has long advanced baseless conspiracy theories, including that President Obama might be a closet Muslim. The Southern Poverty Law Center described him as “one of America’s most notorious Islamophobes.”

According to exit polling, about 80 percent of evangelical Christians voted for President-elect Donald Trump, a man who personifies none of the values evangelical Christian leaders say they embrace. 

“To clarify, 80% of white people who voted and call themselves ‘evangelical’ or ‘born again’ voted for Trump,”

“This is a sociological category more than a theological one. Consider that just 56% of voters who said they attend religious services ‘weekly or more’ voted for Trump.'”