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There are also paintings in the caves that are around 27,000 years old, which means that the inhabitants were painting for at least 13,000 years.

"The basis for this art was there 60,000 years ago; it may even have been there in Africa before 60,000 years ago and it spread with modern humans"

“It is disturbing,” Cummings said as he pulled out past Whitney’s gate. “But you know what else? It happened. It happened right here on this road.”

“If the Germans built a museum dedicated to American slavery before one about their own Holocaust, you’d think they were trying to hide something. As Americans, we haven’t yet figured out how to come to terms with slavery. To some, it’s ancient history. To others, it’s history that isn’t quite history.”

Next year, the National Museum of African American History and Culture is scheduled to be dedicated in Washington as part of the Smithsonian Institution, a project supported by $250 million in federal funding; exhibits on slavery will stand alongside those containing a trumpet played by Louis Armstrong and boxing gloves worn by Muhammad Ali.

“It has to be said that the end note in most of these museums is that civil rights triumphs and America is wonderful,” says Paul Finkelman, a historian who focuses on slavery and the law. “We are a nation that has always readily embraced the good of the past and discarded the bad. This does not always lead to the most productive of dialogues on matters that deserve and require them.”

What makes slavery so difficult to think about, from the vantage point of history, is that it was both at odds with America’s founding values — freedom, liberty, democracy — and critical to how they flourished.

created equal” was drafted by men who were afforded the time to debate its language because the land that enriched many of them was tended to by slaves. The White House and the Capitol were built, in part, by slaves. The economy of early America, responsible for the nation’s swift rise and sustained power, would not have been possible without slavery.

“Slavery gets understood as a kind of prehistory to freedom rather than what it really is: the foundation for a country where white supremacy was predicated upon African-American exploitation,” says Walter Johnson, a Harvard professor. “This is still, in many respects, the America of 2015.”

“If one word comes to mind to summarize what is in John’s head in doing this,” Seck said, “that word would be ‘reparations.’ Real reparations. He feels there is something to be done in this country to make changes.”

People have tried to do a museum like this for years, and I’m still stunned that this guy made it happen,” he said afterward. “There I was, coming down to talk about how in trying to tell the story, it’s often one step forward and two steps back, and boom, here’s the Whitney.” Holloway was particularly taken by the museum’s subversive approach. “Having been on a number of tours where the entire focus is on the Big House, the way they’ve turned the script inside out is a brilliant slipping of the skirt,” he said. “The mad genius of the whole thing is really resonant. Is it an art gallery? A plantation tour? A museum? It’s almost this astonishing piece of performance art, and as great art does, it makes you stop and wonder.”

My interest in juxtaposing hip-hop and Indo-Persian miniature painting, the primary medium through which I have told stories, is in taking these two disparate narrative forms and letting the dissonance find a detour.

Much in the way that hip-hop’s place in popular culture was diminishing by the time Nas took it up in the early 1990s, Indo-Persian miniature painting fell from relevance in Pakistani culture. The practice shifted so dramatically after the fall of the Mughal Empire and the rise of colonial rule in South Asia during the 19th century that when I began engaging with the miniature in my work in the late 1980s and early ’90s at the National College of Arts in Lahore, it was regarded as tourist kitsch and derided as a craft technique.

For years, the form had been ignored by many Pakistani artists. I found it ripe with potential — to change its status and its narrative and to deconstruct its stereotypes. What others saw as enslavement to tradition, I recognized as a path to expanding the medium from within, embracing the complexities of craft and rigor in order to open up possibilities for dialogue.

My work over the past 20 years has both borrowed and departed from traditional modes of miniature painting. One of these elements, the hair of Gopis — the female consorts of the Hindu god Krishna — appears in this painting, circling around the central axis. Over the past 15 years, I have been experimenting by divorcing their signature hairstyles from the rest of their bodies as a means of identifying them. The Gopi hair, in its many transformed and recontextualized iterations, takes on the appearance of bats, particles or elements of a moving mass. In this painting, the Gopis swirl around Africa and move outward. In their clusters around the central glowing orb of Africa, the Gopis coalesce and overlap, suggesting a symbol that became ubiquitous in 2014: the biohazard sign.

My process is driven by my interest in exploring and rediscovering cultural and political boundaries, and using that space to create new frameworks for dialogue and visual narrative. Contemporaneity is about remaining relevant by challenging the status quo, not by clinging to past successes. This is at odds with the standards set up in the worlds of commercial art and music, which are more interested in branding and often hold an artist hostage to one idea or form.

The brainchild of experts associated with American museums, the concept was embraced by President Roosevelt, who established the American Commission for the Protection and Salvage of Artistic and Historic Monuments in War Areas.

The commission assisted the War Department by providing maps of European cities and towns where significant monuments and religious sites were highlighted, to be used by bombing crews and commanders when planning operations.

In Britain, Prime Minister Churchill approved a parallel committee in the spring of 1944. Like all sections of the Allied military government, the MFAA would be composed nearly equally of American and British officers.

The commission selected a few enlisted men to serve in Italy with the Allied armies—MFAA ranks would increase to more than 80 as the war progressed across Europe and reached France, Austria and Germany—and charged them to report on and bring first aid to damaged buildings and art treasures, and indoctrinate troops on the cultural heritage of Italy.

The Italian campaign, predicted to be swift by Allied commanders, turned into a 22-month slog. The whole of Italy became a battlefield.

In Sicily, Monuments Officers encountered utter destruction in the main coastal towns, while the interior of the island, and its ancient Greek temples, were unscathed.

In December 1943, after repeated reports of Allied soldiers’ vandalism reached Supreme Headquarters, General Eisenhower addressed a letter to all Allied commanders. He warned his men not to use “the term ‘military necessity’...where it would be more truthful to speak of military convenience or even personal convenience.” Military necessity, Eisenhower insisted, should not “cloak slackness or indifference.”

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr. Shkreli said he was confident that he would be cleared of all charges.

Mr. Shkreli has emerged as a symbol of pharmaceutical greed for acquiring a decades-old drug used to treat an infection that can be devastating for babies and people with AIDS and, overnight, raising the price to $750 a pill from $13.50. His only mistake, he later conceded, was not raising the price more.

Those price increases combined with Mr. Shkreli’s jeering response to his critics has made him a lightning rod for public outrage and fodder for the presidential campaign. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, and others, like Valeant Pharmaceuticals, have come under fire from lawmakers and consumers for profiting from steep price increases for old drugs.

But the criminal charges brought against him actually relate to something else entirely — his time as a hedge fund manager and when he ran his first biopharmaceutical company, Retrophin.

Still, for many of his critics, Mr. Shkreli’s arrest was a comeuppance for the brash executive who has seemed to enjoy — relish, even — his public notoriety. On Thursday, a satirical New Yorker column by the humorist Andy Borowitz said Mr. Shkreli’s lawyers had informed their client their hourly legal fees had increased by 5,000 percent.

Mr. Bowie earned admiration and emulation across the musical spectrum — from rockers, balladeers, punks, hip-hop acts, creators of pop spectacles and even classical composers like Philip Glass, who based two symphonies on Mr. Bowie’s albums “Low” and “ ‘Heroes’.”

Yet throughout Mr. Bowie’s metamorphoses, he was always recognizable. His voice was widely imitated but always his own; his message was that there was always empathy beyond difference.

He was Ziggy Stardust, the otherworldly pop star at the center of his 1972 album “The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars.”

he arrival of MTV in the 1980s was the perfect complement to Mr. Bowie’s sense of theatricality and fashion. “Ashes to Ashes,” the “Space Oddity” sequel that revealed “we know Major Tom’s a junkie,” and “Let’s Dance,” which offered, “Put on your red shoes and dance the blues,” gave him worldwide popularity.

He also pushed the limits of “Fashion” and “Fame,” writing songs with those titles and also thinking deeply about the possibilities and strictures of pop renown.

Mr. Bowie largely left the spotlight after a heart attack in 2004 brought an abrupt end to a tour supporting his album “Reality.” The singer experienced pain during a performance at a German festival and sought treatment for what he believed was a shoulder injury; doctors then discovered a blocked artery.

And he collaborated with musicians like Brian Eno in the Berlin years and, in his final recordings, with the jazz musicians Maria Schneider and Donny McCaslin, introducing them to many new listeners.

Insurance plans are not tied to employers. Services are funded through progressive taxation, so access is based on need, not ability to pay, and financial contributions are based on wealth, not health.

Contributions to sickness funds are centrally pooled and then allocated to individual insurers using a per-beneficiary formula that factors in differences in health risks.

Editors’ PicksYou Know the Lorena Bobbitt

The United States has the foundation for this kind of system. Its Social Security and Medicare systems use taxation to pay for social insurance policies, and the health care exchanges created by the Affordable Care Act provide marketplaces for insurance policies.

In Germany, for example, insurers can charge only small out-of-pocket fees limited to 2 percent or less of household income annually

Compared with the mostly fee-for-service, single-payer arrangements in Canada or the Medicare system, enrolling Americans in managed care plans paid on a per-patient basis would offer greater incentives to increase efficiency, improve quality of care and promote coordination of care.

Under a German-style plan, states could still be given flexibility in regulating nonprofit insurers to reflect regional priorities, similar to the flexibility offered to states in managing Medicaid and the A.C.A. exchanges.

Germany, Austria, the Netherlands and other countries with similar systems vastly underspend the United States.

Americans may be concerned that lower spending reflects rationing of care, but research has consistently found that not to be the case

Administrative and governance costs in multipayer systems are higher than in single-payer systems — 5 percent of health spending in Germany compared with 3 percent in Canada.

While recent polls indicate that a majority of Americans support so-called Medicare for all, approval diminishes when the plan is explained or clarified.

Americans have long valued choice and competition in their health care. The German model offers both: Patients choose private insurers that compete for enrollees, in the process driving innovation and improving quality.

Advocates and policymakers should pick carefully among these paths, choosing one that strikes a balance between what is possible and what is ideal for the United States health system

While the single-payer model serves Canada well, transitioning the United States to a multipayer model like Germany’s would require a far smaller leap. And that might encourage Americans to finally make the jump

“It’s almost like when you’re doing your homework, you’re halfway through a math work sheet, you’re really in it right there. You can’t hear anything, you can’t see anything,” she said. “Or if you’re watching a movie and you’re so zoned in you don’t even remember what real life is. You just think you’re in the movie. That’s exactly how it is, but times five. I’m so zoned in. I have this weird mind-set where it’s me quickly analyzing every five seconds, ‘Is this boring, is this stupid, can I cut this? Yes. No. Yes. No. Yes. No.’”

In June 2018, Chamberlain left the Bay Area to live alone in L.A. and fully immerse herself in YouTubeland.

I created this kind of style that was super cool to me and super exciting for me, and now that other people are doing it, now all of a sudden I’m unoriginal, which is something that I’ve always really tried to be. That’s what makes me feel good creatively. So when people started to say that, I kind of had a full, you know, not like mental breakdown, but we could also say that. Not a mental breakdown! But I definitely freaked out.”

Chamberlain’s parents have supported her unconventional choices, like dropping out of school in the beginning of her junior year and moving to Los Angeles to live by herself while still a teenager. She says that they were and are her best friends.

Over these two years, Chamberlain invented the way people talk on YouTube now, particularly the way they communicate authenticity. Her editing tricks and her mannerisms are ubiquitous. There is an entire subgenre of videos that mimic her style, and a host of YouTubers who talk, or edit, just like her. The Atlantic recently noted this and declared she is “the most important YouTuber” working today.

Professional YouTubers are the children of reality television. The dramas of their videos are often inextricable from their lives. When Jake Paul and Tana Mongeau, two famous YouTubers, said they were engaged last month, it was impossible for fans to parse whether they were telling the truth. It barely mattered

YouTubers tend to bond and/or feud with one another constantly, because this is social media as much as it is performance art. They recreate the overheated dynamics of the high school environment that Chamberlain wanted to escape.

Chamberlain has now decided upon a new approach. “I’m just going to not stick to one thing so strictly,” she said.Her recent videos are less jittery, less edited. She has been trying to let her narrative and her scripts speak, with fewer interruptions than before.

Recently, she has tried anthologies and also stunts, like spending 24 hours on the balcony of her house

“I’m trying to make the stuff that I’m filming more dynamic so that when I’m editing there’s less pressure on me to kind of create something that’s not there,”

I’m starting to realize that editing is very personal, and 90 percent of the editing is just so that I’m not bored. So I don’t have to overdo it. I’m trying to find that balance right now, so that I don’t overwork myself

Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo.

Finally the polarization is electronic and digital, as Americans increasingly inhabit the filter bubbles of news and social media that correspond to their ideological affinities. We no longer just have our own opinions. We also have our separate “facts,” often the result of what different media outlets consider newsworthy

the more we do it, the worse we’re at it. Our disagreements may frequently hoarsen our voices, but they rarely sharpen our thinking, much less change our minds.

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Most importantly, they are never based on a misunderstanding. On the contrary, the disagreements arise from perfect comprehension; from having chewed over the ideas of your intellectual opponent so thoroughly that you can properly spit them out.

What was it that one learned through a great books curriculum?

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.

To listen and understand; to question and disagree; to treat no proposition as sacred and no objection as impious; to be willing to entertain unpopular ideas and cultivate the habits of an open mind — this is what I was encouraged to do by my teachers at the University of Chicago.

It’s what used to be called a liberal education.

The University of Chicago showed us something else: that every great idea is really just a spectacular disagreement with some other great idea.

These quarrels are never personal. Nor are they particularly political, at least in the ordinary sense of politics. Sometimes they take place over the distance of decades, even centuries.

I got the gist — and the gist was that I’d better enroll in the University of Chicago and read the great books. That is what I did.

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say.

Since the 1960s it had been the vogue in American universities to treat the so-called “Dead White European Males” of the Western canon as agents of social and political oppression. Allan Bloom insisted that, to the contrary, they were the best possible instruments of spiritual liberation.

He also insisted that to sustain liberal democracy you needed liberally educated people.

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does.

What’s clear is that the mis-education begins early. I was raised on the old-fashioned view that sticks and stones could break my bones but words would never hurt me. But today there’s a belief that since words can cause stress, and stress can have physiological effects, stressful words are tantamount to a form of violence. This is the age of protected feelings purchased at the cost of permanent infantilization.

Then we get to college, where the dominant mode of politics is identity politics, and in which the primary test of an argument isn’t the quality of the thinking but the cultural, racial, or sexual standing of the person making it.

In recent years, identity politics have become the moated castles from which we safeguard our feelings from hurt and our opinions from challenge. It is our “safe space.” But it is a safe space of a uniquely pernicious kind — a safe space from thought, rather than a safe space for thought, to borrow a line I recently heard from Salman Rushdie.

Another consequence of identity politics is that it has made the distance between making an argument and causing offense terrifyingly short. Any argument that can be cast as insensitive or offensive to a given group of people isn’t treated as being merely wrong. Instead it is seen as immoral, and therefore unworthy of discussion or rebuttal.

The result is that the disagreements we need to have — and to have vigorously — are banished from the public square before they’re settled.

One final point about identity politics: It’s a game at which two can play.

One of the more dismaying features of last year’s election was the extent to which “white working class” became a catchall identity for people whose travails we were supposed to pity but whose habits or beliefs we were not supposed to criticize. The result was to give the Trump base a moral pass it did little to earn.

So here’s where we stand: Intelligent disagreement is the lifeblood of any thriving society. Yet we in the United States are raising a younger generation who have never been taught either the how or the why of disagreement, and who seem to think that free speech is a one-way right: Namely, their right to disinvite, shout down or abuse anyone they dislike, lest they run the risk of listening to that person — or even allowing someone else to listen. The results are evident in the parlous state of our universities, and the frayed edges of our democracies.

Yes, we disagree constantly. But what makes our disagreements so toxic is that we refuse to make eye contact with our opponents, or try to see things as they might, or find some middle ground.

Instead, we fight each other from the safe distance of our separate islands of ideology and identity and listen intently to echoes of ourselves

The crucial prerequisite of intelligent disagreement — namely: shut up; listen up; pause and reconsider; and only then speak — is absent.

Perhaps the reason for this is that we have few obvious models for disagreeing well, and those we do have — such as the Intelligence Squared debates in New York and London or Fareed Zakaria’s show on CNN — cater to a sliver of elite tastes, like classical music.

Fox News and other partisan networks have demonstrated that the quickest route to huge profitability is to serve up a steady diet of high-carb, low-protein populist pap. Reasoned disagreement of the kind that could serve democracy well fails the market test

I do think there’s such a thing as private ownership in the public interest, and of fiduciary duties not only to shareholders but also to citizens

Journalism is not just any other business, like trucking or food services. Nations can have lousy food and exemplary government, as Great Britain demonstrated for most of the last century. They can also have great food and lousy government, as France has always demonstrated.

But no country can have good government, or a healthy public square, without high-quality journalism — journalism that can distinguish a fact from a belief and again from an opinion; that understands that the purpose of opinion isn’t to depart from facts but to use them as a bridge to a larger idea called “truth”; and that appreciates that truth is a large enough destination that, like Manhattan, it can be reached by many bridges of radically different designs.

In other words, journalism that is grounded in facts while abounding in disagreements.

that requires proprietors and publishers who understand that their role ought not to be to push a party line, or be a slave to Google hits and Facebook ads, or provide a titillating kind of news entertainment, or help out a president or prime minister who they favor or who’s in trouble.

Their role is to clarify the terms of debate by championing aggressive and objective news reporting, and improve the quality of debate with commentary that opens minds and challenges assumptions rather than merely confirming them.

This is journalism in defense of liberalism

From this vantage, proponents argue that the student debt crisis incurs social costs even in the case of better-off borrowers, like lawyers who have to go into corporate law instead of becoming public defenders because they have $200,000 in law school loans to pay off. And then there are borrowers for whom “affording” payments means being saddled with the depressing obligation to delay or forgo major life milestones like having children, owning a home and saving for retirement.

Virtually everyone in this debate agrees that cancellation would only treat the symptoms of the student debt crisis, not cure its causes. Some say it could make the problem even worse by, in effect, bailing out schools whose value has outstripped their cost, causing tuitions to rise even higher and incentivizing people to take out loans they can’t afford with the expectation they will be forgiven.

Some political artists view the Times’s decision to end daily political cartoons as a repudiation of the art form.

“It is their clarity and pointedness, the sharpness of their satire, that make them such powerful vehicles for expressing opinion,”

“There is no ‘on the other hand’ in an editorial cartoon,” the AAEC continued. “This power, understandably, makes editors nervous, but to completely discontinue their use is letting anxiety slide into cowardice.”

“The collapsing space for political cartoons and satirical commentary because editors don’t have the spine to stand up to social-media outrage campaigns is bad for free speech, and bad because political debate benefits from a little humor now and again."

“By choosing not to print editorial cartoons in the future, the Times can be sure that their editors will never again make a poor cartoon choice,” Cagle said. “Editors at the Times have also made poor choices of words in the past. I would suggest that the Times should also choose not to print words in the future — just to be on the safe side.”