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Richard Wrangham, who has come up with some of the boldest and best new ideas about human evolution

he enters a debate staked out centuries ago by Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (among other philosophers), and still very much alive today: how to understand the conjunction of fierce aggression and cooperative behavior in humans.

Why are we so much less violent day-to-day within our communities (in pretty much all cultures) than our closest primate relatives, chimpanzees, are within theirs? At the same time, how is it that human violence directed toward perceived enemy groups has been so destructive?

In this small story, we see something of the maladies that shape our brutal cultural moment. You see how zealotry is often fueled by people working out their psychological wounds. You see that when denunciation is done through social media, you can destroy people without even knowing them. There’s no personal connection that allows apology and forgiveness.

You also see how once you adopt a binary tribal mentality — us/them, punk/non-punk, victim/abuser — you’ve immediately depersonalized everything. You’ve reduced complex human beings to simple good versus evil

You’ve eliminated any sense of proportion. Suddenly there’s no distinction between R. Kelly and a high school girl sending a mean emoji.

Politics is downstream of culture. Trump’s election would never have been possible without systemic cultural shifts, enabled by reality TV and social media, that increased the premium average Americans place on celebrity for celebrity’s sake.

What’s changed is that celebrity is no longer a dirty word in politics. In 2008, John McCain ran a brutal attack ad against Barack Obama that melded footage of him greeting huge crowds with b-roll of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world,” a narrator noted. “But is he ready to lead?” The Obama team saw this as a potent line of attack and ran a response ad that described McCain as a “Washington celebrity.”

the heir to the throne fighting alongside his father during the early years of a brutal civil war that tore the nation apart

Charles’ chief protector Lord Wilmot

the Penderel family, who risked their lives when the penalty for concealing the king was death

The Trump era is such a whirlwind of cruelty that it can be hard to keep track.

This week alone, the news broke that the Trump administration was seeking to ethnically cleanse more than 193,000 American children of immigrants whose temporary protected status had been revoked by the administration, that the Department of Homeland Security had lied about creating a database of children that would make it possible to unite them with the families the Trump administration had arbitrarily destroyed, that the White House was considering a blanket ban on visas for Chinese students, and that it would deny visas to the same-sex partners of foreign officials.

Even those who believe that Ford fabricated her account, or was mistaken in its details, can see that the president’s mocking of her testimony renders all sexual-assault survivors collateral damage. Anyone afraid of coming forward, afraid that she would not be believed, can now look to the president to see her fears realized. Once malice is embraced as a virtue, it is impossible to contain.

There are few historical guides. It is hard to think of a precedent for a president who endorses violence against political foes, sees the Justice Department as his own personal prosecutor, calls the press “the enemy of the people,” tears children from parents, brags of multiple sexual assaults, threatens to lock up his opponents, enthuses about war crimes, “falls in love” with the foulest dictator on the planet, refuses to divest of personal holdings in office, lambastes allies, treats the Treasury as a casino, actively endorses the poisoning of the environment, destabilizes NATO, baits minorities, lies incessantly, and oversees a resurgence of the white nationalist right. Any single gesture in any one of these areas would have been political death for most previous presidents

White anxiety and discomfort in the face of mass immigration is not going to disappear. As I argued last week, it will likely intensify. The global pressures that suppress wages are not waning. The despair in so much of left-behind America cannot be blotted out indefinitely with fentanyl. The collapse of local communities is not going to turn around overnight, and automation is unstoppable. Fear of change is correlated to the pace of change, and the latter shows no sign of deceleration

this new alignment is organized less around policy or the role of government, than on the feelings of security and confidence in the modern world. And in our current crisis, the closed, fixed, fearful view of the world is, understandably, in the ascendant

far from marking a clear rejection of the fascist past, the Spanish election can just as easily be understood as a sign that the lessons of the postwar period have lost their hold over European politics. The past hasn’t lost, in other words; it’s just been forgotten.

Seventy-five years after World War II, the German taboo against far-right politics has been breached.

Vox gained 10 percent of the vote on Sunday, proving that it has significant national appeal. Though Vox did not “win” the elections, its ascent was the day’s most significant development—more than the PSOE’s victory—one that marks a true turning point in Spain’s, and Europe’s, attitude toward the past.

Fascism, it appeared, was dead.To guard against a recurrence, the survivors of war and the Holocaust joined forces to create the United Nations, forge global financial institutions and — through the Universal Declaration of Human Rights — strengthen the rule of law.

fascism — and the tendencies that lead toward fascism — pose a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II.

He tried to undermine faith in America’s electoral process through a bogus advisory commission on voter integrity.

white America’s habit of needlessly calling the police on black people is not just a Starbucks culture problem. It’s an American culture problem

Black people in this country have long known that disturbing white Americans in white spaces can mean death.

“In the early decades of the 20th century,” author Isabel Wilkerson noted in the New York Times, “a caste system ruled the South with such repression that every four days an African-American was lynched for some perceived breach or mundane accusation — having stolen 75 cents or made off with a mule.” Indeed, between 1877 and 1950, almost 4,000 black people died this way, mostly in Southern states.

For at least 1500 years, the nation of Tibet has had a complex relationship with its large and powerful neighbor to the east, China. The political history of Tibet and China reveals that the relationship has not always been as one-sided as it now appears.

Indeed, as with China’s relations with the Mongols and the Japanese, the balance of power between China and Tibet has shifted back and forth over the centuries.

The first known interaction between the two states came in 640 A.D., when the Tibetan King Songtsan Gampo married the Princess Wencheng, a niece of the Tang Emperor Taizong. He also married a Nepalese princess.

Recy Taylor died 10 days ago, just shy of her 98th birthday. She lived as we all have lived, too many years in a culture broken by brutally powerful men. For too long, women have not been heard or believed if they dare speak the truth to the power of those men. But their time is up. Their time is up.

If we know that enslaved women were used for their productive and reproductive labor—if they were raped with impunity in the system of slavery—then what happened after Emancipation? Did those practices and the institutions that upheld those practices—the men and their sons and their cousins—end those practices just because of Emancipation?

So I started looking for cases, which were hard to find because marginalized people are hard to find in the archives. Their stories are not remembered, they’re not saved, and they’re not considered worthy of being archived so often. Those stories were hard to find, but the black press actually printed a lot of black women’s testimonies about sexual violence at the time.

West calls his struggle the right to be a “free thinker,” and he is, indeed, championing a kind of freedom—a white freedom, freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

West lending  his imprimatur, as well as his Twitter platform of some 28 million people, to the racist rhetoric of the conservative movement. West’s thoughts are not original—the apocryphal Harriet Tubman quote and the notion that slavery was a “choice” echoes the ancient trope that slavery wasn’t that bad; the myth that blacks do not protest crime in their community is pure Giulianism; and West’s desire to “go to Charlottesville and talk to people on both sides” is an extension of Trump’s response to the catastrophe. These are not stray thoughts. They are the propaganda that justifies voter suppression, and feeds police brutality, and minimizes the murder of Heather Heyer. And Kanye West is now a mouthpiece for it.

It is the young people among the despised classes of America who will pay a price for this—the children parted from their parents at the border, the women warring to control the reproductive organs of their own bodies, the transgender soldier fighting for his job, the students who dare not return home for fear of a “travel ban,” which West is free to have never heard of

The treaty of marriage between Henry V of England and Catherine of France, daughter of Charles VI, sworn in the Cathedral of Troyes on May 21st, 1420, marks the darkest hours of the French monarchy in the fifteenth century. In thirty-one short articles, the treaty made Henry the son of Charles VI and heir, with Henry's own heirs, to the Crown of France. It also made Henry regent until the king's death and gave him the government of the kingdom of France. The 'so-called' dauphin, Charles, was thought to be definitively isolated, having already forfeited his rights after he had had John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, assassinated at Montereau on September 10th, 1419

On the borders of the territories where he strove to impose his authority as regent and heir to France, the Dukes of Brittany (John V) and of Burgundy (Philip the Good), contrived to safeguard their de facto independence

The unexpected death of Henry V on August 31st, 1422, and the long-awaited death of Charles VI (October 21st, 1422), the brutal regency of the Duke of Bedford, and the Amiens alliance of April 1423 between the three dukes (Bedford, Brittany, Burgundy), all contributed, to different extents, to aggravate the political conflict

the idea persists that there is something wrong and oppressive about people of one background adopting and adapting the artifacts of another.

A Canadian university cancelled its yoga classes as culturally appropriating—notwithstanding that most of the strenuous moves taught in a modern class actually originate in Danish gymnastics and British army calisthenics, which were in turn appropriated by Indian entrepreneurs seeking to update yoga from a meditative to an active practice for the body-conscious modern age.

The cultural appropriation police answer the yoga and banh mi objections with a familiar counter-argument: it’s about power. It’s fine for colonized Indians to incorporate European fitness regimes into their yoga; wrong for Canadians of European origin to incorporate yoga into their fitness regimes.

Originally dedicated to the Hindu god Vishnu, Angkor Wat became a Buddhist temple by the end of the 12th century.

Although it is no longer an active temple, it serves as an important tourist attraction in Cambodia, despite the fact it sustained significant damage during the autocratic rule of the Khmer Rouge regime in the 1970s and in earlier regional conflicts.

However, when it was built, it served as the capital of the Khmer empire, which ruled the region at the time. The word “Angkor” means “capital city” in the Khmer language, while the word “Wat” means “temple.”

In explaining what he’d do if he proved to be mistaken about his big bet this week on the integrity of Kim Jong Un, Trump said: “I may stand before you in six months and say, ‘Hey, I was wrong.’” Then he caught himself and added: “I don’t know that I’ll ever admit that, but I’ll find some kind of an excuse.”

Trump did not simply overlook the astonishing brutality of North Korea’s regime. He heaped praise on Kim as someone “very open,” “very honorable,” “very smart,” “very worthy” and “very talented” who “wants to do the right thing.” Most appallingly, Trump, fresh off nasty rebukes of the leader of friendly and democratic Canada, told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos of Kim: “His country does love him. His people, you see the fervor.” Yes, fear of a gulag can produce a lot of “fervor.”

Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) summarized the case against Trump nicely: “We’re not against diplomacy. We’re just against bad diplomacy, and this was really bad diplomacy.”

The past 10 years have seen the global application of the institutional reforms that Mrs. Clinton and the tech companies pushed for — with a few notable exceptions, like China. Universal connectivity has been achieved faster than anyone thought possible. About one in three people on earth is a monthly active Facebook user.

We can now evaluate how this technology affects politics and the public sphere. More information has been flowing, circumventing traditional media, political and cultural establishments. But the result hasn’t been more democracy, stronger communities or a world that’s closer together.

Countries with weaker social institutions felt the effects of social media most violently and immediately

Serwer is stating with particular force something that most liberals seem to believe: That populism in all its forms, but maybe religious conservatism especially, is best understood as the illiberal rage of the formerly privileged, the longtime white-male-Christian winners of our history, at discovering that under conditions of equality they don’t get to be the rulers anymore.

I want to complicate the first argument, and challenge the second one

The complication has to do with the history of black emancipation and black politics

China finds altering course especially difficult, mainly because of how its domestic political system functions. As an authoritarian regime—and one that is more and more centered on a personal cult surrounding Xi Jinping—admitting fault is perceived as a threat to credibility.

instead of compromising, Beijing trots out a couple of standard tactics to try to get its way. First, it throws money at the problem.

Then, Beijing mixes in coercion