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Bernanke’s 80-page assessment, the result of more than seven months’ work, is the most comprehensive independent analysis of a big central bank’s performance since an inflationary crisis hit the world economy in early 2022. He offers a dozen recommendations for change at the Bank, the strongest of which is for the MPC to begin publishing “alternative scenarios” that show how its inflation forecasts stand up in extreme situations, for example in the face of an energy price shock.

The review lays bare how the Bank and its international peers all failed to model the impact of the huge energy price shock that followed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in early 2022, the disruption in global trade during the pandemic after 2020 and how workers and companies would respond to significant price changes.

In choosing Bernanke, one of the most respected central bankers of his generation, to lead the review, the Bank has ensured that his findings will be difficult to ignore. The former Fed chairman carried out more than 60 face-to-face interviews with Bank staff and market participants and sat in on the MPC’s November 2023 forecasting round to assess where the Bank’s forecasts and communication were failing short, from the use of computer models to the role played by “human judgment”.

Blame spread, accountability avoided.And the net result was year after year of stasis, the initial injustice made all the worse by a collective unwillingness to acknowledge it, let alone address it.

Mr, now Lord, Cameron said the government was “deeply sorry” after a public inquiry unequivocally blamed the British Army for one of the most controversial days in Northern Ireland's history, when 13 civil rights marchers were shot dead and 15 others were wounded.For 38 years, so many had waited for those words.Obfuscation, delay and denials until finally the truth emerged.

So you can be secretary of state, of all things, and still be misled?“It’s incredible. Most serious questions should be asked of Whitehall departments

Around half of all U.S. adults under 30 have used a dating site or app at some point in their lives, and one in 10 adults with partners say they met their significant other by dating online

Online-dating growth has been slowing. Paying users declined 6% in the first quarter of the year at Match Group, whose portfolio includes the League, Tinder and Hinge, compared with a 3% dip in the first quarter of 2023. The Bumble app grew paying users 18% in the first quarter, compared with 31% growth in the period a year earlier. 

Nearly half of all online daters and more than half of female daters say their experiences have been negative, according to Pew, and a growing tide of users are sharing their dissatisfaction

There's now a disturbingly quick acceptance of the argument that "both sides are to blame." It was and remains the Republicans and Trump who have labeled the media as enemies of the people, politicians and refugees as vermin, and have spoken of bloodshed should Trump lose again in the next election. This discourse sharply contrasts with that of Democratic elites and Biden, who critique President Trump based on his policies (see Project 2025), labeling him a potential dictator and a threat to democracy. This critique remains within the bounds of normal political discourse and does not dehumanize political opponents or other demographic groups, as Trump's rhetoric frequently does. Such rhetoric has become "normal" and mainstream within the Republican Party but remains either non-existent or exceptionally rare among Democrats. This clearly indicates an asymmetric radicalization of our political discourse.

The ideological positioning of the two parties also reflects this asymmetry. Empirical analyses by notable U.S. political scientists show that the Republicans have moved significantly further to the right ideologically compared to the leftward shift of the Democrats. In certain segments, the ideological positions of MAGA representatives in Congress no longer fit within this spectrum, having departed from democratic norms.

Republicans have successfully shifted the discourse to place equal blame on both sides for polarization and radicalization, but this narrative does not reflect reality and must be addressed. It is the right-wing political spectrum and its associated media network that questions fundamental pillars of democracy and the rule of law. Similar challenges are not found within the left-wing political spectrum

In more than two dozen interviews, lawmakers, strategists and officials offered a litany of explanations for Vice President Kamala Harris’s failure — and just about all of them fit neatly into their preconceived notions of how to win in politics.

Democrats quickly falling into the ideological rifts that have defined their party for much of the Trump era.

The results showed that the Harris campaign, and Democrats more broadly, had failed to find an effective message against Mr. Trump and his down-ballot allies or to address voters’ unhappiness about the direction of the nation under Mr. Biden. The issues the party chose to emphasize — abortion rights and the protection of democracy — did not resonate as much as the economy and immigration, which Americans often highlighted as among their most pressing concerns.

A friend of mine recently ran a climate education session with a local university. The workshop guided the students through the science of the changing climate and the findings of the IPCC reports and, apparently, empowered them to take action.

Empowerment was not the reaction the students responded with.

Instead, they rebuffed with arguments blaming corporations for causing climate change, asking why they had to give up stuff when big businesses are allowed to freely fuck it all up; declaring their lives are hard enough already!

Strategists affiliated with the Obama and Romney campaigns say they have access to information about the personal lives of voters at a scale never before imagined. And they are using that data to try to influence voting habits — in effect, to train voters to go to the polls through subtle cues, rewards and threats in a manner akin to the marketing efforts of credit card companies and big-box retailers.

In the weeks before Election Day, millions of voters will hear from callers with surprisingly detailed knowledge of their lives. These callers — friends of friends or long-lost work colleagues — will identify themselves as volunteers for the campaigns or independent political groups. The callers will be guided by scripts and call lists compiled by people — or computers — with access to details like whether voters may have visited pornography Web sites, have homes in foreclosure, are more prone to drink Michelob Ultra than Corona or have gay friends or enjoy expensive vacations.

“You don’t want your analytical efforts to be obvious because voters get creeped out,” said a Romney campaign official who was not authorized to speak to a reporter. “A lot of what we’re doing is behind the scenes.”

In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers

Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”

By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

e proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a ba

chelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

observers are reaching the conclusion that the American system of government is broken. But almost no one blames the culprit: our insistence on obedience to the Constitution, with all its archaic, idiosyncratic and downright evil provisions.

As someone who has taught constitutional law for almost 40 years, I am ashamed it took me so long to see how bizarre all this is. Imagine that after careful study a government official — say, the president or one of the party leaders in Congress — reaches a considered judgment that a particular course of action is best for the country. Suddenly, someone bursts into the room with new information: a group of white propertied men who have been dead for two centuries, knew nothing of our present situation, acted illegally under existing law and thought it was fine to own slaves might have disagreed with this course of action. Is it even remotely rational that the official should change his or her mind because of this divination?

Constitutional disobedience may seem radical, but it is as old as the Republic. In fact, the Constitution itself was born of constitutional disobedience.

social networking sites create pressure to put time and effort into tending weak ties, and how it can be impossible to keep up with them all. Personally, I also find it difficult to keep up with my strong ties. I’m a great “pick up where we left off” friend, as are most of the people closest to me (makes sense, right?). I’m decidedly sub-awesome, however, at being in constant contact with more than a few people at a time.

the devolution of friendship. As I explain over the course of this essay, I link the devolution of friendship to—but do not “blame” it on—the affordances of various social networking platforms, especially (but not exclusively) so-called “frictionless sharing” features.

I’m using the word here in the same way that people use it to talk about the devolution of health care. One example of devolution of health care is some outpatient surgeries: patients are allowed to go home after their operations, but they still require a good deal of post-operative care such as changing bandages, irrigating wounds, administering medications, etc. Whereas before these patients would stay in the hospital and nurses would perform the care-labor necessary for their recoveries, patients must now find their own caregivers (usually family members or friends; sometimes themselves) to perform free care-labor. In this context, devolution marks the shift of labor and responsibility away from the medical establishment and onto the patient; within the patient-medical establishment collaboration, the patient must now provide a greater portion of the necessary work. Similarly, in some ways, we now expect our friends to do a greater portion of the work of being friends with us.

The Republicans’ current position makes things harder still, because Boehner’s party has much more power in Washington than it has support in the nation as a whole. Republicans are a minority party nationally, but thanks to redistricting they control the House despite Democrats’ 2012 successes. This mismatch leaves the base spoiling for fights that can’t actually be won: House Republicans have just enough real power to raise conservative expectations but not nearly enough to bend a liberal president and a Democratic Senate to their will.

You might say that this is no way to run a government. I’d agree. But the nation’s polarization and his party’s dysfunction are beyond a speaker’s ability to undo. As Democrats learned across the 1970s and ’80s, the House is a poor base from which to rebuild a national party. Nobody blames Tip O’Neill or Jim Wright for failing to do what Bill Clinton and Barack Obama ultimately achieved.

the way out of our predicament is through the ballot box, not the speaker’s office. Either Democrats need to consolidate their advantages and win back the House or Republicans need to find a way to start winning national elections again, at which point the current impasse will be broken and policy will tilt more clearly toward the left or right.

No other country looms so large in the Russian psyche. To Kremlin ideologists, the very concept of Russia’s sovereignty depends on being free of America’s influence.

Anti-Americanism has long been a staple of Vladimir Putin, but it has undergone an important shift. Gone are the days when the Kremlin craved recognition and lashed out at the West for not recognising Russia as one of its own

, it wants to exorcise all traces of American influence.

When you do it once, it’s just a victory. When you do it twice, it’s a realignment.The coalition that Barack Obama put together to win the presidency handily in 2008 looked a lot like the emerging Democratic majority that optimistic liberals had been discerning on the political horizon since the 1990s. It was the late George McGovern’s losing coalition from 1972 finally come of age: Young voters, the unmarried, African-Americans, Hispanics, the liberal professional class – and then more than enough of the party’s old blue collar base to hold the Rust Belt for the Democrats.But 2008 was also a unique political moment, when George W. Bush’s immense unpopularity was compounded by a financial collapse, and when the possibility of electing the country’s first black president fired the imagination of the nation (and the nation’s press corps). So it was still possible to regard the Obama majority of ’08 as more flukish than transformative – or at the very least, to see it as a fragile thing, easily shattered by poor choices and adverse developments.

the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.Such understanding eluded the Republicans this year.

In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who mostly ran as a kind of vanilla Republican instead of showing the imagination necessary to reinvent his party for a new era.

The president was stammering and hesitant, and frequently looked out of his depth. Romney's performance wasn't brilliant, just good, but that made it brilliant relative to expectations. The greater shock, amplifying Romney's success, was that Obama was so bad.

Again and again, he missed open goals. He let Romney say that he, Romney, would take better care of entitlements than Obama would. Incredible. He watched as his attack on Romney's tax proposal kept bouncing off, until he looked feeble for repeating it. Why on earth didn't he force Romney to say which deductions would be removed to pay for the lower rates? He let Romney boast about his Massachusetts health care plan and in the same breath denounce Obamacare (to all intents and purposes, the same policy). Romney's argument about letting states be laboratories is tactically clever, and there's something to it, but surely Obama could have asked why Romney doesn't at least advocate Romneycare to the rest of the country. The president remembered to criticize insurance companies but (unless I missed it) forgot to mention that Obamacare is mainly about covering 50 million people who, you know, don't have health insurance. He let Romney attack him for failing to cut deals with the GOP, as though Republicans would have compromised if only they'd been talked to politely. In response, Obama meekly referred to Republican intransigence, but threw the comment away. That was a chance to lay the blame for paralysis in Washington on Romney's party, where it mostly belongs. And what about the 47 percent--about moochers, dependents, people whom Romney won't ever convince to be responsible, this nation of parasites? Hardly worth mentioning, I suppose.

All debates should be moderated this way. Step back and let the candidates argue with each other. It's revealing, much as Obama on this occasion may regret it.

Not only has France apologized for some past actions, it has also stopped boasting of others. in 2005, the government of Jacques Chirac quietly but firmly refused to mark in any but the most restrained way the bicentennial of the Battle of Austerlitz—arguably, the greatest French military victory of all time, carried out by Napoleon Bonaparte against Austria and Russia. Modern France, it was explained, had no business celebrating a bloodbath carried out by a repressive, undemocratic ruler as part of a campaign of naked imperial expansionism.

in the past quarter-century, conservatives have successfully cast any attempt to discuss the country’s historical record impartially in the political realm as a species of heresy—“blaming America first,” as Jeanne Kirkpatrick put it as far back as 1984. A turning point of sorts came in 1994, when the Smithsonian Institution planned an exhibit of the aircraft that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, accompanied by material that highlighted the human toll of the bombing,  inviting debate on its morality.  The outcry from conservatives and veterans groups was deafening, and few politicians dared to defend the Smithsonian, which eventually canceled the exhibit.

It would be wrong to say that the French have moved away from sentiments of patriotism and national pride. But the country’s cultural and political elites now tend, overwhelmingly, to phrase their patriotism in terms of “ideals” and “values” to which, they readily admit, the country has often failed to live up.

Islamic State has moved hundreds of civilians from villages around the city to use as human shields,

United Nations said the militants may have killed nearly 200 people.

hit a Shiite mosque in northern Iraq, killing more than a dozen women and children.

The Clinton campaign has refused to confirm or deny the authenticity of any of the hacked emails and, along with top U.S. intelligence officials, blamed Russia for stealing them from the account of Mrs. Clinton campaign manager John Podesta.

The charitable arm of Gems has given the Clinton Foundation between $1 million and $5 million. The for-profit education company has paid Bill Clinton about $6.2 million since 2010 for consulting work, according to tax returns released by the campaign of Mrs. Clinton.

Germany Inc. Sits on $500 Billion in Cash Amid Weak Outlook

German companies are sitting on a half-trillion dollars of cash but are reluctant to invest it in their own country, potentially threatening the country’s competitive edge and European economic growth.

Germany’s nonfinancial businesses have saved more than they have invested for the past seven years, piling up about €455 billion ($500.4 billion) in cash and deposits, German central bank data show.

Standing in his front office before the State of the Union, Rhodes quickly does the political math on the breaking Iran story. “Now they’ll show scary pictures of people praying to the supreme leader,” he predicts, looking at the screen. Three beats more, and his brain has spun a story line to stanch the bleeding. He turns to Price. “We’re resolving this, because we have relationships,” he says.

Price turns to his computer and begins tapping away at the administration’s well-cultivated network of officials, talking heads, columnists and newspaper reporters, web jockeys and outside advocates who can tweet at critics and tweak their stories backed up by quotations from “senior White House officials” and “spokespeople.” I watch the message bounce from Rhodes’s brain to Price’s keyboard to the three big briefing podiums — the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon — and across the Twitterverse, where it springs to life in dozens of insta-stories, which over the next five hours don formal dress for mainstream outlets. It’s a tutorial in the making of a digital news microclimate — a storm that is easy to mistake these days for a fact of nature, but whose author is sitting next to me right now.

Watching Rhodes work, I remember that he is still, chiefly, a writer, who is using a new set of tools — along with the traditional arts of narrative and spin — to create stories of great consequence on the biggest page imaginable. The narratives he frames, the voices of senior officials, the columnists and reporters whose work he skillfully shapes and ventriloquizes, and even the president’s own speeches and talking points, are the only dots of color in a much larger vision about who Americans are and where we are going