Group items tagged

The dating system is based on measuring the length of chromosome segments of a particular ancestry that occur in a population. When people of two different populations intermarry, their children’s genomes carry large chunks of DNA of one parent’s ancestry interspersed with large chunks from the other’s.

Another mixing event is the injection of European-type DNA into the Kalash, a people of Pakistan, at some time between 990 and 210 B.C. This could reflect the invasion of India by Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. The Kalash claim to be descended from Alexander’s soldiers

Though all humans have the same set of genes, their genomes are studded with mutations, which are differences in the sequence of DNA units in the genome. These mutations occur in patterns because whole sets of mutations are passed down from parent to child and hence will be common in a particular population

The lowest amount of African admixture occurs in the Druse, a religious group of the Middle East that prohibited slavery and has been closed to converts since A.D. 1043.

from the average size of the chunks in a person’s genome, the geneticists can calculate the number of generations since the mixing event.

One of the most widespread events his group has detected is the injection of Mongol ancestry into populations within the Mongol empire, such as the Hazara of Afghanistan and the Uighur Turks of Central Asia.

the European colonization of America is recorded in the genomes of the Maya and Pima Indians. And Cambodian genomes mark the fall of the Khmer empire in the form of ancestral DNA from the invading Tai people.

They find among Northern Italians an insertion of Middle Eastern DNA that occurred between 776 B.C. and A.D. 550, and may represent the Etruscans, a mysterious people said by the ancient Greek historian Herodotus to have emigrated from Lydia in Turkey.

his method cannot yet detect genetic mixing between very similar populations, as was the case with the English and their invaders from Scandinavia and Northern Germany.

“In some sense we don’t want to talk to historians,” Dr. Falush said. “There’s a great virtue in being objective: You put the data in and get the history out. We do think this is a way of reconstructing history by just using DNA.”

He saved himself from larger losses by selling a big chunk of his Amazon shares in February, before the worldwide scale of the coronavirus crisis was fully acknowledged and before the stock market collapse

Bezos sold $3.4bn worth of Amazon shares in the first week of February, just before the stock price peaked.

his timing was near-perfect. The share sales, which represented about 3% of his total holding, were much greater than Bezos had made in previous months. The stock sold was as much as he had sold in the previous 12 months, according to analysis by the Wall Street Journal.

Other US executives that have been either lucky or smart by selling large chunks of their shareholdings in February include Larry Fink, the chief executive of fund manager BlackRock, who saved potential losses of $9m, and Lance Uggla, CEO of data firm IHS Markit, who sold $47m of shares on 19 February that would have dropped to $19m if he had held on to them.

In total US executives sold about $9.2bn in shares of the companies they run in the five weeks before the start of the stock market rout. Selling before the 30% collapse in the market saved them from paper loses of $1.9bn.

I suspect history will come to think of “social media” as one of history’s more Orwellian terms. What it really should be called is antisocial media. If it has brought people closer together in virtual space, it has also made it easier for them to remain alone and isolated in physical space.

There’s one part of this I’ve been really haunted by: social media. Perfectly happy to acknowledge all the great progress in bringing folks together and giving voices outside the mainstream a better chance to be heard.

I’m a pretty optimistic person, so I’m just not going to buy into the idea that things can’t be fixed. I grew up during the civil rights and antiwar movements. Families torn apart by politics. And if all the problems certainly weren’t solved, I think we came out of that era a better country.

If it has made it easier for people to find communities of like-minded people, it has also made them more hostile to anyone who thinks a little differently from them.

That said, she was right — and I was wrong — about the danger to our democracy posed by the extraordinary concentration of financial and political power in Silicon Valley. There are a few ironies here, not the least of which is that much of the tech industry tends to lean pretty far to the left.

There’s also a serious problem when the industry tries to blur the difference between being platforms that merely provide a vehicle for people to say whatever they want (and are therefore not subject to libel laws) and publishers that regulate the content of the speech they host on their site.

On the other hand, the G.O.P. incumbents Susan Collins and Martha McSally also look like political goners, though I’m having trouble squaring McSally’s lagging position in the race with Trump’s competitiveness in Arizona.

But the idea of having a president who actually wants to declare war on global warming seems so revolutionary now, we’re temporarily on the very same page. Temporarily. Until, say, the first State of the Union address.

I suspect Biden will declare war on global warming the way past presidents declared war on cancer: By throwing a lot of money at it and hoping something works. He’ll bring America back into the Paris Climate Accord. He’ll spend more on renewables. Frankly, the most effective thing he could do is impose a carbon tax, which is something the Obama administration never had the political guts to do.

The most important of them is that he’s steered clear of fighting the election along cultural and ideological lines and instead made it about steadiness and decency. I’m not sure Warren or Bernie Sanders would have resisted the temptation to take the culture-war bait that Trump keeps throwing at them.

We’re just on the edge of getting rid of this man, after four years of total trauma. I think we deserve at least a couple of nights of cheer before we tackle the irreparable damage issue.

I’m not liking the numbers in Florida and particularly Iowa.

Absolutely true for African-Americans, women, and the gay and lesbian community. Less true in terms of social trust and shared values.

it’s made it so easy to declare war on various chunks of society that your chunk finds irritating, or evil for that matter.

I think it would be a much tighter race right now if Warren were the nominee. A liberal senator who comes in third in the Massachusetts Democratic primary is not the strongest contender to take down Trump.

Although “The McLaughlin Group” remains in syndication, its popularity began a slow and steady decline by the late 1990s. It was, in many ways, eaten by its own: Cable news networks, seeking cheap programming, filled hours with “McLaughlin”-style shoutfests involving compensated opinionistas.

McLaughlin’s children are everywhere. CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and Fox News Channel devote massive chunks of air time to animated, confrontational kibitzing. Add to this “The View,” Bill Maher’s show, and talk radio. Even hoary institutions such as “Meet the Press” contrive conversational scuffles.

Across rural America, the Rust Belt, Coal Country and other hotbeds of Trumpism, voters have repeatedly expressed frustration that the lazy and less deserving are getting a bigger chunk of government cheese.

More broadly, a recent YouGov/Huffington Post survey found that Trump voters are five times more likely to believe that “average Americans” have gotten less than they deserve in recent years than to believe that “blacks” have gotten less than they deserve. (African Americans don’t count as “average Americans,” apparently.)

We’ve known for a long time, through the work of Martin Gilens, Suzanne Mettler and other social scientists, that Americans (A) generally associate government spending with undeserving, nonworking, nonwhite people; and (B) are really bad at recognizing when they personally benefit from government programs.

Rhetoric this election cycle caricaturing our government as “rigged,” and anyone who pays into it as a chump, has only reinforced these misperceptions about who benefits from government programs and how much.

It’s no wonder then that Democrats’ emphasis on downwardly redistributive economic policies has been met with suspicion, even from those who would be on the receiving end of such redistribution. And likewise, it’s no wonder that Trump’s promises — to re-create millions of (technologically displaced) jobs and to punish all those non-self-sufficient moochers — seem much more enticing.

he simple story is that we've already pushed tariffs about as low as they can go, and all that's left is to negotiate over non-tariff trade barriers

NAFTA really did move a decent chunk of our manufacturing base south of the border

And granting China Permanent Normal Trade Relations status in 2000 really did seem to give companies the confidence they needed to shift production there on a far larger scale than they had before, since they no longer had to worry about the risk of tariffs rising.

the era of big trade deals is over. And that was true even before Trump announced his candidacy before a raucous crowd of paid actors.

that's not to say that all trade deals are economically irrelevant. They aren't.

the problem is that those sorts of things — say, rules about intellectual property or government procurement — are what we used to think of as the sole province of domestic policy.

Which is why they can feel like they're infringing on a country's sovereignty.

The result is that these new trade deals are more difficult politically and less useful economically than previous ones.

what's changing with Trump is that we aren't even trying to lead on trade anymore. He doesn't see these deals as a way to win friends and influence people, but rather to win manufacturing jobs and influence his approval rating.

That might sound like common sense to some people, but it does leave an opening for other countries — yes, China — to negotiate where we're not. The risk, then, is that globalization might not proceed on our terms or with our values.

there's a greater danger. It's not that Trump won't make further progress on trade, but rather will backtrack on where we are. New trade deals might not help much, but unraveling old ones would hurt. At that point, we wouldn't have the luxury of worrying about whose globalization we had. The answer would be nobody's. And the whole world would be a little bit poorer.

aqoob is believed to be in his early to mid-twenties, but is the son of perhaps the Taliban’s most important leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, who disappeared several years ago. The Taliban confirmed Omar’s death last summer.

The U.S. official told NBC News that intelligence agencies are now gathering more information about how the new team might change the already complicated dynamics in the region

The Taliban, which has its roots in northern Pakistan, controlled Afghanistan from 1996 until the U.S. invasion in 2001. It continues to operate in large chunks of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to launch deadly attacks on both civilian and military targets.

The U.S. State Department has listed Haqqani as a “specially designated global terrorist” who was instrumental in introducing suicide bombing to Afghanistan and for maintaining close ties with al Qaeda.

The U.S. official told NBC News that authorities are keenly interested in seeing if the new Taliban team, especially with Haqqani in a more visible position, signals an increasing focus on attacks against Western interests in Afghanistan and possibly elsewhere.

The U.S. government has offered a $5 million bounty for Haqqani, saying he is wanted for questioning in connection with a January 2008 attack on a Kabul hotel that killed an American citizen and five other people.

The Russian government also views Haqqani as a significant threat, with a top Russian diplomat saying before Wednesday’s announcement that there would be “hell to pay” if he had been picked as the new Taliban leader.

in the immediate aftermath of the attacks of September 11, Democrats effusively praised George Bush for doing nothing more than making a couple of serviceable statements about our collective resolve. The news media immediately filled with paeans to his wise and steadfast leadership, and his approval ratings rocketed past 90 percent, all before he had actually done much of anything. Could you imagine the same thing happening today? Does anyone believe that there is some combination of words Obama could speak now that would cause the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Donald Trump to say, “That was really terrific; I’ve had my disagreements with him in the past, but today my hat’s off to him”? The very idea is laughable.

The second and related reason that it is impossible for Obama to unify us after this tragedy is that it is tied up with race, and there are significant numbers of white people who will always believe that on issues of race, Obama is intentionally trying to set Americans against each other, no matter what he actually does or says.

Republicans have told themselves a story in which the nation was moving toward racial harmony until Barack Obama came into office and immediately began dividing us over race, pitting blacks against whites and tearing the country asunder. And they have been telling their constituents this from the moment he took office.

Republicans have come to believe that they’re the real victims of racial discrimination — or as Bill O’Reilly, the highest-rated host on cable news, puts it, “If you’re a Christian or a white man in the USA, it’s open season on you.” According to a recent poll from the Public Religion Research Institute, 72 percent of Republicans and 81 percent of Trump supporters say that discrimination against whites is as big a problem in America today as discrimination against blacks and other minorities.

The final reason that President Obama can’t bring us all together is that today’s complex media environment makes it so difficult.

There was a time in which something important or tragic would happen, people would gather around their televisions, and everyone in the country would watch as the president (or maybe Walter Cronkite) told us how to interpret what had just occurred. We had only a few streams of information about national affairs, and that created a common text out of which we could come to understand what had happened.

Consider Yahoo. The company bought back shares worth $6.6 billion from 2008 to 2014, according to Robert L. Colby, a retired investment professional and developer of Corequity, an equity valuation service used by institutional investors. These purchases helped increase Yahoo’s earnings per share about 16 percent annually, on average.

a company’s overall profit growth is unaffected by share buybacks. And comparing increases in earnings per share with real profit growth reveals the impact that buybacks have on that particular measure. Call it the buyback mirage.

Those who run companies like buybacks because they make their earnings look better on a per-share basis. When fewer shares are outstanding, each one technically earns more.

But Mr. Colby pointed out that buybacks provide only a one-time benefit, while smart investments in a company’s operations can generate years of gains.

Given these figures, Mr. Colby reckoned that Yahoo, if it had invested that same amount of money in its operations, would have had to generate only a 3.2 percent after-tax return to produce overall net profit growth of 16 percent annually over those years.

But a good bit of that performance was the buyback mirage. Growth in Yahoo’s overall net profits came in at about 11 percent annually

Mr. Colby said his research “confirms my suspicion that while buybacks are not universally bad, they are being practiced far more broadly and without as much analysis as there should be.”

Perhaps the crucial flaw in buybacks is that they reward sellers of a company’s stock over its long-term holders. That’s because a company announcing a repurchase program usually sees its stock price pop in the short term. But passive investors, such as index funds, and other long-term holders gain little from the programs.

Another hazard: companies that spend billions to repurchase stock without substantially shrinking the number of shares outstanding. That’s because in these circumstances, prized corporate cash is used to buy back shares that offset stock grants bestowed on company executives in rich compensation plans.

And there are plenty of companies whose buybacks have simply left them with less money to invest in more promising opportunities. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “By throwing away money on buybacks, companies are giving up on the ability to grow in the future,”

proposals ask the companies to adopt a policy of excluding the effect of stock buybacks from any performance metrics they use to determine executive pay packages.

At 3M, for example, research and development expenditures plus strategic acquisitions have totaled $22 billion over the last five years, Mr. Kanzer said. In the meantime, the company’s buyback program has cost $21 billion.

“You really have to ask why a company’s board decides to return a big chunk of capital instead of replacing managers with ones who can figure out how to develop the operations,”

“If the board doesn’t think it’s worth investing in the company’s future,” Mr. Lutin added, “how can a shareholder justify continuing to hold the stock, or voting for directors who’ve given up?”

I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own. It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable. But this column is going to try to do that

We’ll probably need a new national story. Up until now, America’s story has been some version of the rags-to-riches story, the lone individual who rises from the bottom through pluck and work. But that story isn’t working for people anymore, especially for people who think the system is rigged.

I don’t know what the new national story will be, but maybe it will be less individualistic and more redemptive.

We’ll probably need a new definition of masculinity, too. There are many groups in society who have lost an empire but not yet found a role. Men are the largest of those groups. The traditional masculine ideal isn’t working anymore. It leads to high dropout rates, high incarceration rates, low labor force participation rates. This is an economy that rewards emotional connection and verbal expressiveness. Everywhere you see men imprisoned by the old reticent, stoical ideal.

We’ll also need to rebuild the sense that we’re all in this together. The author R. R. Reno has argued that what we’re really facing these days is a “crisis of solidarity.” Many people, as the writers David and Amber Lapp note, feel pervasively betrayed: by for-profit job-training outfits that left them awash in debt, by spouses and stepparents, by people who collect federal benefits but don’t work. They’ve stopped even expecting loyalty from their employers. The big flashing lights say: NO TRUST. That leads to an everyone-out-for-himself mentality and Trump’s politics of suspicion. We’ll need a communitarianism.

at the community level we can listen to those already helping.

Then solidarity can be rekindled nationally. Over the course of American history, national projects like the railroad legislation, the W.P.A. and the NASA project have bound this diverse nation. Of course, such projects can happen again — maybe though a national service program, or something else.

Never mind that Congress is unlikely to approve the full amount. Or that it is not clear if the Pentagon, which views Russia as the biggest threat, and the new president, who is mainly focused on defeating the Islamic State, agree on the priorities.

“In the end, I think the budget caps will be adjusted upward again,” he said, “and we might get an uneven deal where the caps are higher for defense than for the domestic programs.”

The question is not so much about his results but his methods. He has a reputation for being merciless and brutal, and as the accolades have stacked up, he has cracked down on his own people and covertly supported murderous rebel groups in neighboring Congo

Though Rwanda has made tremendous strides, the country is still a demographic time bomb. It’s already one of the most densely populated in Africa — its 11 million people squeezed into a space smaller than Maryland — and despite a recent free vasectomy program, Rwanda still has an alarmingly high birthrate. Most Rwandans are peasants, their lives inexorably yoked to the land, and just about every inch of that land, from the papyrus swamps to the cloud-shrouded mountaintops, is spoken for.

why has the West — and the United States in particular — been so eager to embrace Kagame, despite his authoritarian tendencies?

Kagame has become a rare symbol of progress on a continent that has an abundance of failed states and a record of paralyzing corruption. Kagame was burnishing the image of the entire billion-dollar aid industry. “You put your money in, and you get results out,” said the diplomat, who insisted he could not talk candidly if he was identified. Yes, Kagame was “utterly ruthless,” the diplomat said, but there was a mutual interest in supporting him, because Kagame was proving that aid to Africa was not a hopeless waste and that poor and broken countries could be fixed with the right leadership.

In some areas of the country, there are rules, enforced by village commissars, banning people from dressing in dirty clothes or sharing straws when drinking from a traditional pot of beer, even in their own homes, because the government considers it unhygienic. Many Rwandans told me that they feel as if their president is personally watching them. “It’s like there’s an invisible eye everywhere,” said Alice Muhirwa, a member of an opposition political party. “Kagame’s eye.”

much has improved under his stewardship. Rwandan life expectancy, for instance, has increased to 56 years, from 36 in 1994. Malaria used to be a huge killer, but Kagame’s government has embarked on a wide-scale spraying campaign and has distributed millions of nets to protect people when they are sleeping — malarial mosquitoes tend to feed at night — and malaria-related deaths plummeted 85 percent between 2005 and 2011.

Kagame hopes to make more money from coffee, tea and gorillas — Rwanda is home to some of the last remaining mountain gorillas, and each year throngs of Western tourists pay thousands of dollars to see them.

aid flows to Rwanda because Kagame is a celebrated manager. He’s a hands-on chief executive who is less interested in ideology than in making things work. He loves new technology — he’s an avid tweeter — and is very good at breaking sprawling, ambitious projects into manageable chunks. Rwanda jumped to 52nd last year, from 158th in 2005, on the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business annual rating, precisely because Kagame set up a special unit within his government, which broke down the World Bank’s ratings system, category by category, and figured out exactly what was needed to improve on each criterion.

Adam Smith argued forcefully that we would do better to trust in the pursuit of self-interest than in the good intentions of those who pursue the general interest. If everyone looked out for just himself, we would reach an equilibrium that was not just comfortable but also productive, in which the economy was fully efficient. To the morally uninspired, it’s an appealing idea: selfishness as the ultimate form of selflessness. (Elsewhere, in particular in his “Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith took a much more balanced view, though most of his latter-day adherents have not followed suit.)

Things didn’t turn out well for our economy or our society. As millions lost their homes during and after the crisis, median wealth declined nearly 40 percent in three years. Banks would have done badly, too, were it not for the Bush-Obama mega-bailouts.

This cascade of trust destruction was unrelenting. One of the reasons that the bubble’s bursting in 2007 led to such an enormous crisis was that no bank could trust another. Each bank knew the shenanigans it had been engaged in — the movement of liabilities off its balance sheets, the predatory and reckless lending — and so knew that it could not trust any other bank

bankers used their political influence to eviscerate regulations and install regulators who didn’t believe in them. Officials and academics assured lawmakers and the public that banks could self-regulate. But it all turned out to be a scam. We had created a system of rewards that encouraged shortsighted behavior and excessive risk-taking. In fact, we had entered an era in which moral values were given short shrift and trust itself was discounted.

THE banking industry is only one example of what amounts to a broad agenda, promoted by some politicians and theoreticians on the right, to undermine the role of trust in our economy. This movement promotes policies based on the view that trust should never be relied on as motivation, for any kind of behavior, in any context. Incentives, in this scheme, are all that matter.

So C.E.O.’s must be given stock options to induce them to work hard. I find this puzzling: If a firm pays someone $10 million to run a company, he should give his all to ensure its success. He shouldn’t do so only if he is promised a big chunk of any increase in the company’s stock market value

Similarly, teachers must be given incentive pay to induce them to exert themselves. But teachers already work hard for low wages because they are dedicated to improving the lives of their students. Do we really believe that giving them $50 more, or even $500 more, as incentive pay will induce them to work harder? What we should do is increase teacher salaries generally because we recognize the value of their contributions and trust in their professionalism. According to the advocates of an incentive-based culture, though, this would be akin to giving something for nothing.

Of course, incentives are an important component of human behavior. But the incentive movement has made them into a sort of religion, blind to all the other factors — social ties, moral impulses, compassion — that influence our conduct.

This is not just a coldhearted vision of human nature. It is also implausible. It is simply impossible to pay for trust every time it is required. Without trust, life would be absurdly expensive; good information would be nearly unobtainable; fraud would be even more rampant than it is; and transaction and litigation costs would soar.

When 1 percent of the population takes home more than 22 percent of the country’s income — and 95 percent of the increase in income in the post-crisis recovery — some pretty basic things are at stake. Reasonable people, even those ignorant of the maze of unfair policies that created this reality, can look at this absurd distribution and be pretty certain that the game is rigged.

Trust between individuals is usually reciprocal. But if I think that you are cheating me, it is more likely that I will retaliate, and try to cheat you. (These notions have been well developed in a branch of economics called the “theory of repeated games.”) When Americans see a tax system that taxes the wealthiest at a fraction of what they pay, they feel that they are fools to play along.

a deeper rot takes hold: Attitudes and norms begin to change. When no one is trustworthy, it will be only fools who trust. The concept of fairness itself is eroded. A study published last year by the National Academy of Sciences suggests that the upper classes are more likely to engage in what has traditionally been considered unethical behavior. Perhaps this is the only way for some to reconcile their worldview with their outlandish financial success, often achieved through actions that reveal a kind of moral deprivation.

As always, it is the poor and the unconnected who suffer most from this, and who are the most repeatedly deceived. Nowhere was this more evident than in the foreclosure crisis.

The banks figured out how to get court affidavits signed by the thousands (in what came to be called robo-signing), certifying that they had examined their records and that these particular individuals owed money — and so should be booted out of their homes. The banks were lying on a grand scale, but they knew that if they didn’t get caught, they would walk off with huge profits, their officials’ pockets stuffed with bonuses. And if they did get caught, their shareholders would be left paying the tab

But perhaps even more than opportunity, Americans cherish equality before the law. Here, inequality has infected the heart of our ideals.

I suspect there is only one way to really get trust back. We need to pass strong regulations, embodying norms of good behavior, and appoint bold regulators to enforce them.

“Nearly 18 percent of all city personal income taxes were generated by this very small group of not even 1,200 taxpayers,” Ms. Lowenstein said. “That’s a huge contribution.”

Some 1,041 taxpayers reported making more than $10 million, and an additional 120 reported income over $50 million.

According to the city’s own more sophisticated measure, 46 percent of New Yorkers are living below 150 percent of the poverty line, which suggests that while they are not officially poor by the federal standard, they are struggling. Still, the poverty rate in New York is lower than in many other major cities.

they're a sign of a broad acceptance and appreciation of Jewish culture. Outside of New York City, Jews are generally rare in terms of numbers. Yet in spite of this, they've become seen as normal—and popular—by the population at large.

respondents were much more likely to report feeling "warmly" toward the religious group they were part of; Catholics were all about other Catholics, evangelicals were enthusiastic about evangelicals, etc.

There's generalized cultural cachet, which is a little hard to pin down, but from doting articles about deli food in The New York Times to Adam Sandler's famous ode to Hanukkah, staples of Jewish culture have become ubiquitous and adored. 

white evangelicals rated the faith more highly than respondents from other religions; they were more enthusiastic about Jews than anyone besides Jews themselves. This is not a coincidence; evangelicals have typically been strong supporters of Jews and Zionism, citing the group's status as God's "chosen people" in the Bible and the prophesied future of Israel as the site of Jesus's second coming. 

Buddhists and Hindus were given decidedly chillier ratings than their Jewish brethren, and Muslims ranked the lowest out of all religious groups, including the ever-despised atheists. People of these faiths are more likely to be first-, second-, or third-generation immigrants; they haven't been around as long as Jews. 

63" out of 100 was the mean rating for the most popular group in the survey (and I'll say it again, just because it brings me pleasure: that would be the Jews). Americans from all groups, it seems, feel pretty lukewarm about anyone who isn't like them.

The extreme reader, to coin a phrase, is a rare bird indeed. ("I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing," Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. "Can I go back to my books now?") Such people are born, not made, I think; or mostly born and only a little made.

It is more common to come across the person who has known the joys of reading but who can be distracted from them. But even those folks are a small percentage of the population.

American universities are largely populated by people who don't fit either of these categories—often really smart people for whom the prospect of several hours attending to words on pages (pages of a single text) is not attractive.

Steven Pinker once said that "Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on." The key here is "painstakingly": There can be many pains, in multiple senses of the word, for all parties involved, and it cannot be surprising that many of the recipients of the bolting aren't overly appreciative, and that even those who are appreciative don't find the procedure notably pleasant.

the printing press ushered in an age of information overload. In the 17th century, one French scholar cried out, "We have reason to fear that the multitude of books which grows every day in a prodigious fashion will make the following centuries fall into a state as barbarous as that of the centuries that followed the fall of the Roman Empire." Such will be our fate "unless we try to prevent this danger by separating those books which we must throw out or leave in oblivion from those which one should save and within the latter between what is useful and what is not."

Rarely has education been about teaching children, adolescents, or young adults how to read lengthy and complicated texts with sustained, deep, appreciative attention—at least, not since the invention of the printing press. When books were scarce, the situation was different:

Bacon tells such worried folks that they can't read them all, and so should develop strategies of discernment that enable them to make wise decisions about how to invest their time. I think Bacon would have applauded Clay Shirky's comment that we suffer not from "information overload" but from "filter failure."

especially noteworthy is Bacon's acknowledgment that there is a place for what Katherine Hayles would call "hyper attention" as well as "deep attention." Some books don't need to be read with patience and care; at times it's OK, even necessary, to skim (merely to "taste" rather than to ruminate). And as Shreeharsh Kelkar, a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has pointed out, "To be successful today, it not only becomes necessary to skim, but it becomes essential to skim well."

Except in those cultures in which books have been scarce, like Augustine's Roman North Africa, the aims of education have often focused, though rarely explicitly so, on the skills of skimming well. Peter Norvig says: "When the only information on the topic is a handful of essays or books, the best strategy is to read these works with total concentration. But when you have access to thousands of articles, blogs, videos, and people with expertise on the topic, a good strategy is to skim first to get an overview. Skimming and concentrating can and should coexist."

education, especially in its "liberal arts" embodiments, has been devoted to providing students with navigational tools—with enough knowledge to find their way through situations that they might confront later in life.

All this is to say that the idea that many teachers hold today, that one of the purposes of education is to teach students to love reading—or at least to appreciate and enjoy whole books—is largely alien to the history of education.

Rose's book is largely a celebration of autodidacticism, of people whose reading—and especially the reading of classic texts, from Homer to Dante to Shakespeare to the great Romantic poets—wasn't imposed on them by anyone, and who often had to overcome significant social obstacles in order to read. "The autodidacts' mission statement," Rose writes, was "to be more than passive consumers of literature, to be active thinkers and writers. Those who proclaimed that 'knowledge is power' meant that the only true education is self-education, and they often regarded the expansion of formal educational opportunities with suspicion."

Over the past 150 years, it has become increasingly difficult to extricate reading from academic expectations; but I believe that such extrication is necessary. Education is and should be primarily about intellectual navigation, about—I scruple not to say it—skimming well, and reading carefully for information in order to upload content. Slow and patient reading, by contrast, properly belongs to our leisure hours.

There is a kind of attentiveness proper to school, to purposeful learning of all kinds, but in general it is closer to "hyper attention" than to "deep attention." I would argue that even reading for information—reading textbooks and the like—does not require extended unbroken focus. It requires discipline but not raptness, I think: The crammer chains himself to the textbook because of time pressures, not because the book itself requires unbroken concentration. Given world enough and time, the harried student could read for a while, do something else, come back and refresh his memory, take another break ... but the reader of even the most intellectually demanding work of literary art would lose a great deal by following such tactics. No novel or play or long poem will offer its full rewards to someone who consumes it in small chunks and crumbs. The attention it demands is the deep kind.

for people like Erasmus (with his "cry of thankful joy" on spying a fragment of print) or Lynne Sharon Schwartz ("Can I get back to my books now?"), books are the natural and inevitable and permanent means of being absorbed in something other than the self.

But then there are the people Nicholas Carr writes about in The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, and Carr himself: people who know what it is like to be lost in a book, who value that experience, but who have misplaced it—who can't get back,

Where does the money go? Americans for Prosperity obviously spends a lot on television, but it also maintains offices in 35 states with 600 paid staff members. The group funds phone banks, big-ticket events and many other details like beer cozies and water bottles. Its biggest chapter is in Florida, where its 50 paid staff members work out of 10 offices and constitute a year-round organization that rivals that of the state Republican Party.

the Koch brothers, whose own group, Americans for Prosperity, already has political operations in every state that Steyer is contesting, along with 28 others. The group says it will spend at least $125 million this year.

In 2012, it raised $115 million. It is impossible to know the identities of the donors, though the group’s annual closed-door conferences are regularly attended by many of the biggest conservative donors in the country, including the hedge-fund executive Foster Friess and the casino magnate Sheldon Adelson.

we have Michael Bloomberg, who has committed to spending $50 million to support gun-control legislation; his Independence USA PAC, meanwhile, is spending $25 million this fall to elect “centrists.” We have the TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts and his group Ending Spending, which has spent roughly $10 million so far this year to elect fiscal conservatives to Congress, an effort that has drawn support from the billionaire hedge-fund executive Paul E. Singer, who has also devoted tens of millions to Republican candidates who share his views on Israel. We have Mark Zuckerberg and his FWD.us, with a budget of about $50 million to push an immigration overhaul. In 2014, as of early October, when the campaigns had yet to do their big final pushes, overall spending was already more than $444 million, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Roughly $231 million was from the parties and their congressional committees, the rest from outside spending. The biggest chunk of that by far came from super PACs — more than $196 million.

the most important factor is the growth of the volunteer base of Americans for Prosperity, which it now numbers into the tens of thousands. The first lesson of party politics is that winning elections means getting out the vote, and getting out the vote means signing up volunteers. Phillips spends a lot of time thinking about what will keep them happy.

The movement is independent of the party, which is the way Phillips wants it. When Rick Scott said he would support an expansion of Medicaid under Obamacare, Americans for Prosperity let him know about its displeasure through a deluge of phone calls and letters and even a protest at the State Capitol. Scott ultimately made no effort to push it through the Legislature, many of whose Republican members have been supported by the group as well. “I think he started hearing from some other voices, A.F.P. and some of the other organizations,” Chris Hudson, the group’s Florida director, had said, “and I think they sort of superseded what was going on in his own staff.”

Phillips said the group’s volunteers would have it no other way. “They have to feel like the organization is genuinely a principled outfit,” he said. “If they think you’re just an appendage of the party, they can go to the party. Why do they need you?”Continue reading the main story

In 2012, though, Steyer read an essay in Rolling Stone (“Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math”), in which Bill McKibben, the writer and climate activist, suggested that fossil-fuel interests had too much money at stake to let the political system do anything about carbon emissions. The only alternative, McKibben wrote, was a mass movement, and the only way to start a mass movement was to articulate a consistent, fact-based moral argument for change. At that moment, Taylor said, “Tom realized that the climate threat was near, present, imminent, massive — and aggravates every other crisis, whether it’s hunger or civil rights.” He had to do something different. So a few months later he and Taylor invited McKibben to the ranch for a war council.

NextGen’s campaign largess was itself a capitulation to the post-Citizens United world. Steyer was applying pressure to the political system in a way no average American could. It seemed undemocratic. But Steyer saw it as simple pragmatism; the other side was “playing multiples,” he said, and he had to operate “in the real world the way the real world works.”

“Israel did not traditionally represent that kind of emotional focus for any element of the Republican Party,” he said. “But the feeling now is that it is a winning issue, as it helps them to appear strong on foreign policy.”

the most significant contributor by far to Republican supporters of Israel has been Sheldon Adelson, the casino magnate, who with his wife has invested at least $100 million in conservative causes over the last four years. A large chunk was spent on the 2012 presidential campaign, but Senate Republicans also benefited, and could soon again, particularly those considering a run for president.

The shift has also meant the Republican Party today accepts little dissent on the topic of Israel, said Scott McConnell, a founding editor of The American Conservative, an outcome he believes is in part driven by the demands of financial supporters.“Republicans interested in foreign policy used to understand that it was not in America’s national interest to ignore entirely Arab claims against Israel,” he said. “Now, there is a fanatical feeling of one-sidedness.”

But four years after the support of women re-elected Barack Obama, the general electorate may be different

Women voters, who are, as a whole, slightly less likely to pick Republicans in a presidential election, could be motivated to turn out for Hillary Clinton, particularly if they are women of color, the backbone of the Democratic party.

Trump’s sexist remarks, compounded with his demands for Obama’s birth certificate and desire to build a wall between Mexico and the United States, could be motivation enough. 

Though national polls only give a limited picture in a country that doesn’t elect presidents by a popular vote, recent surveys that pit Clinton against Trump show a marked gender gap

Trump’s pronouncements make Akin look like a diplomat. But the very audacity and vulgarity that seems to delight Republican voters could disgust in a national race.

Conversely, Trump’s conditional support of Planned Parenthood – which he has repeatedly said is good for women but should not get federal funding because its affiliates also provide abortions – may be an attempt to reach those same general election female voters

Planned Parenthood, whose PAC has endorsed Hillary Clinton, has flatly resisted Trump’s advances. 

“Women would lose access to birth control, could be charged more than men for health insurance, could have domestic violence and pregnancy disqualify them from health insurance coverage, would no longer be able to turn to Planned Parenthood for care, and would be banned from accessing abortion safely or legally,