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it is time acknowledge that the two-state idea, as presently conceived, is dead.

Today, there is little enthusiasm for territorial concessions to the Palestinians. Even those who believe that Israel should withdraw from the West Bank do not believe that it can be done so long as there is no evidence the Palestinians are interested in peace.

For some time, I believed that the Palestinian people wanted peace but were denied the opportunity by their leaders. But decades of incitement and educational brainwashing regarding the evils of Jews and Israel have had an impact, and now poll after poll has found opposition to peace among Palestinians

radical Muslims will not rest until the descendants of apes and pigs are driven from holy Islamic soil

the same week John Kerry was extolling the virtues of the two-state solution and skewering Israel for allegedly creating obstacles to peace through settlement construction, the ruling Fatah party celebrated the 20 most outstanding terrorist operations of all time

Why Kerry or anyone else would expect Israelis to make concessions to people who commemorate the murder of Jews is a psychiatric rather than a political question.

One problem is that the Palestinians will continue their delegitimization campaign aimed at turning Israel into a pariah, and convincing the international community to dismantle the Jewish State.

Another concern with the status quo is that Palestinian terrorism fueled by hopelessness, incitement and radical Islam.

Put simply, the majority of Palestinians have no interest in peace with Israel under any circumstances. This view is reinforced daily by their leaders’ pronouncements, the incessant terror and incitement, and an education system that teaches intolerance, denies the Jewish connection to the land of Israel and extols the virtue of martyrdom.

Even when Israel agreed to Obama’s demand for a 10-month settlement freeze and the Palestinians responded by refusing to negotiate, Obama did not change his view. I’m not sure whether to call that naiveté or just stupidity

Today’s Palestinians are no more interested in compromise than their predecessors. As the poll data above indicates, the only acceptable solution is to have one state called Palestine that encompasses the West Bank, Gaza and what is currently known as Israel.

A wholesale change in attitudes and leadership will have to occur if there is to be any prospect of negotiating a peace agreement. Even then, it is difficult to imagine a reversal of the Islamization of the conflict — and there can be no compromise with jihadists.

Despite the ease with which it is possible to prove that settlements are not the obstacle to peace (e.g., did the Arabs agree to peace during the 19 years Jordan occupied the West Bank and Egypt occupied Gaza and not a single Jewish settlement existed?), President Obama never figured this out; but he is not alone. The obsession with settlements will not go away.

For the last eight years, the Palestinians have refused to negotiate altogether, and their position has not changed in 80 years

, his failure to learn anything in eight years was apparent in his last minute UN tantrum

the incoming Trump officials seem to understand reality and are prepared to act accordingly by rejecting the specious notion that settlements, rather than Palestinian implacability, are the obstacle to peace.

Israel has evacuated approximately 94% of the territory it captured in 1967, which, it could be argued, has already satisfied UN Security Council Resolution 242’s expectation that Israel withdraw from territory

Most people, including all Arab leaders, ignore that resolution 242 also required that the Arab states guarantee the peace and security of Israel in exchange for withdrawal

ank and 100% of Gaza, and this did not bring peace; it brought more terror and should have forever buried the myth that if Israel cedes land, it will receive peace in return

If a Palestinian Zionist emerges tomorrow, it will still be risky for Israel to make a deal because 5, 10, or 20 years down the road, a radical Islamist or other hostile leader may emerge.

Advocates of the two-state solution on the Israeli side talk about a demilitarized Palestinian state, but this is not acceptable to the Palestinians because it would be a significant limitation on their sovereignty. This is another reason why the “solution” is flawed.

While the international community insists the settlements are an obstacle to peace, they actually can serve as a catalyst for peace.

to defeat the Palestinians Israel would have to apply the Powell Doctrine, which says that “every resource and tool should be used to achieve decisive force against the enemy…and ending the conflict quickly by forcing the weaker force to capitulate.”

Israel would have to be prepared to kill every terrorist with little regard for collateral damage; the Air Force would have to bomb refugee camps and other targets that would result in thousands of casualties rather than hundreds.

The United States did not flinch from killing tens of thousands of Iraqis to defeat Saddam Hussein and is unapologetic when bystanders are killed in drone strikes (never mind examples such as the Allied bombing of Dresden or the US use of the atomic bomb). Israel would have to be equally callous to “defeat” the Palestinians.

Israel has been unwilling to follow Powell’s guidance because the public would see the action as disproportionate and immoral, the international community would condemn Israel and the United States would force Israel to cease military operations before total victory out of moral indignation and fear of Arab/Muslim reaction.

Israel has learned the hard way in battles with the Palestinians and Hezbollah that it does not have the same freedom as a superpower to use decisive force, and therefore cannot militarily defeat the Palestinians.

The reason that none of these men annexed the West Bank is well known: Israel cannot remain a democratic, Jewish state if it assimilates 2.7 million Palestinians

Meanwhile, the Jewish birthrate has increased, Aliyah will accelerate as global antisemitism worsens and the Palestinians will not become a majority in Greater Israel

Hamas is also allied with the Muslim Brotherhood, and this would strengthen the Islamist threat to the government, which would not be in Israel’s interest.

“The Palestinians now realize,” Bethlehem Mayor Elias Freij said in 1991, “that time is now on the side of Israel, which can build settlements and create facts, and that the only way out of this dilemma is face-to-face negotiations.”

The Palestinians continued to talk until President Obama took office, and gave them the false impression that he would force Israel to stop building settlements without their having to make any concessions in return

Obama’s refusal to veto the latest Security Council Resolution calling settlements illegal and labeling Judaism’s holiest places in Jerusalem “occupied territory” kept Abbas’ strategy in play, but the election of Donald Trump should derail this approach for at least the next four years.

the Palestinians will not accept any compromise that involves coexisting with a Jewish state

The current leadership will remain obstinate and continue to seek international help in destroying Israel.

President Trump can make an important contribution to disabusing the Palestinians of the idea that Israel can be forced to capitulate to their demands by fulfilling the promise to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and moving the US embassy.

This would send a clear message that the Palestinians have no legitimate claim to the city and will never have a capital in Eastern Jerusalem.

To further hammer home the point that Jerusalem will not be divided, Israel should complete the long-delayed E1 project to connect Ma’ale Adumim with the capital.

The aim of this step would be to force the world to accept the reality that Israel will never relinquish these areas, and to increase pressure on the Palestinians to negotiate.

If the Palestinians refuse to talk or recognize the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in their homeland, Israel should formally annex the Jordan Valley

The world may blame Israel for the growth of settlements, but the real culprits are Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.

Settlements have grown because of Palestinian rejectionism — and the situation will only get worse for them.

Ironically, the Palestinians could have two states instead of the one foreseen by proponents of the two-state solution. In the unlikely event of Palestinian reconciliation, a corridor could be created between Gaza and the West Bank as envisioned in the Clinton parameters.

Unless Palestinians radically change their attitudes, they will reject any proposal that requires coexisting with Israel. This will leave them with a shrunken Palestinian state with limited power and the possibility for a larger state permanently closed off.

It may be difficult to accomplish in the next four years, but Israel’s best chance of achieving this “solution” is to take advantage of having a friend in the White House.

Schlissel, a former provost at Brown University and a scientist, expressed concern to a faculty group recently that Michigan, annually ranked among the top-rated public universities in the nation and owners of the most victories in college football history, had admitted football players who were not as academically qualified as the rest of the student body.

Michigan fans do not readily welcome change. They even have a name for one of their own: a Michigan Man.

When Gee was president at Ohio State, he was asked if he would fire the football coach Jim Tressel, who had come under fire for an N.C.A.A. investigation into violations involving his players. “I’m just hoping that the coach doesn’t dismiss me,” he said, a line that landed him in hot water.

Schlissel, who apologized to Hoke for his remarks to the faculty group, declined to comment on his concerns or his future plans. Schlissel is trusting Hackett to decide Hoke’s fate, but he will surely play a role in deciding the future of Wolverines football.

“I’m amazed that the regents would hire a president with so little grounding in intercollegiate athletics, so little understanding of it,” Bay said. “I have sympathy for the man, that he’s been put in a position where he has to deal with a major part of the university and has no experience. He’s never been in a culture like this.”

“If this university can’t get this right,” Bernstein, the regent, said, “then no university can.”

“Sanders statements portend that he would outsource U.S. foreign Policy in the Middle East to Iran,” Pregent said. “Iran is not in Iraq and Syria to defeat ISIS—they are there to grow influence and ensure their proxies are emboldened and empowered.”

Even the Mongols, famed for their brutality in conquest, realized the necessity for coexistence. In the 13th century, after creating the largest contiguous land empire the world has ever known, they established the “Pax Mongolica” — the Mongol Peace — that guaranteed religious freedom to all Mongol subjects.

As war has devastated Syria­­­­­­­ in the past nine years, the conflict has taken on an overtly sectarian dimension, and it’s not uncommon for observers to issue fatalistic comments along the lines of K.T. McFarland’s. Sectarian conflict has been said to date back 1,400 years to the founding of Islam, and we frequently hear, as Fox news viewers did this week, that somehow people in the region are irrational, stubbornly embroiled in ancient conflicts and unable to join the modern world. There were sectarian identities in the medieval era, of course, and these sometimes led to conflict. But the intensity of current sectarian cleavages is a surprisingly recent development, effectively beginning with the arrival of European political modernity and only made worse by the post-WWII rise of the authoritarian Arab state. Later, tensions were aggravated by the Lebanese Civil War and by the post-2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq, which remade its sectarian landscape.

“For Biden’s policies toward China, the part about making China play by the international rules, I think, is very hollow,” said Wang Dan, who helped lead the 1989 Tiananmen protests as a university student. “As we know, the Chinese Communist Party hardly abides by international rules.”

“The Trump Administration by far has done more to raise our issue than all other countries combined,” said Salih Hudayar, who was born in Xinjiang and moved to the United States as a child. “I’m very skeptical of a Biden administration because I am worried he will allow China to go back to normal, which is a 21st-century genocide of the Uighurs.”

“These guys are utilitarian, and they believe that if Trump is waging war against the C.C.P. then he’s right for them,” Mr. Badiucao said. “That mentality fits the whole ‘America First’ ideology, where it’s OK for other people to suffer if your goal is met, and their goal is overthrowing the C.C.P.”

“The United States must realize that there will be no improvements on human rights issues in China if there is no regime change,” Mr. Wang added. He has continued to question Mr. Trump’s electoral loss, baseless claims shared by other prominent Chinese-born dissidents.

In June, Mr. Trump signed legislation that led to sanctions being placed on Chinese officials who have overseen the construction of mass detention camps in the northwestern region of Xinjiang, where more than a million people, mostly members of the Uighur Muslim minority, have been imprisoned.

uring the presidential campaign, Mr. Biden released a statement calling the situation in Xinjiang a “genocide.” The Trump Administration has not used such a designation, and a book by his former national security adviser said that Mr. Trump told Mr. Xi that he should continue building the detention camps in Xinjiang.

Foreign policy advisers to Mr. Biden say that it is unfair to presume that he will continue the Obama administration’s moderate stance. It is, they say, a different era. The recent human rights legislation championed by the Trump administration has received broad bipartisan support.

And some Asian dissidents acknowledge that the antipathy toward Mr. Biden is driven in part by a deluge of online misinformation that paints the president-elect as a secret socialist or contends, without any proof, that foreign “communist money” turned the election against Mr. Trump. Such unsubstantiated claims have been repeated by niche online publications in Vietnamese, Chinese and other languages.

“The crisis of democracy in the world makes people, especially activists, confused and susceptible to the influence of conspiracy theories and information manipulation,” said Nguyen Quang A, a Vietnamese dissident

Linker’s description of Bushnell’s options and actions is measured and not without some respect:

Damon hops off the bus at the same point I do: Bushnell displayed a tremendous amount of courage, yes. But this was mated to an absolute moral certainty.

Every society needs both, because that is how we conserve our achievements while still working toward a more perfect order.

[Bushnell’s] choice of that word to describe Israel means he followed the “anti-colonial left” in viewing the interminable conflict in and around the Jewish state through the lens of Western imperialism across the “global south.” Viewed in this way, Israelis are rapacious oppressors, exploiters, unjustly stealing from the Palestinians, occupying their land, not just in the territories of the West Bank that are occupied under international law but likely in its entirety. That’s certainly how Hamas views the situation, with an added overlay of Islamist theofascism.

What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a world so morally simple, so neat and tidy, so devoid of tragic clashes, so orderly, with its heroes and villains, its Children of Light and its Children of Darkness? I really wouldn’t know. Because the world I inhabit is one permeated by ambiguity and people with mixed motives who are often (usually?) torn between competing moral considerations and imperatives, not a world divided between the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The line between good and evil doesn’t run between East and West, or North and South, or white and black, or Israel and Palestine. It runs right through every human heart. Or at least most hearts.

This is where liberalism and conservatism meet, in the most elemental sense. The conservative impulse is to be suspicious of change because you are aware that things can always get worse, that systems are often too complex to be understood, that tail risk rules the world. The liberal impulse is to believe that agency is precious, that the world can be improved, that progress is both possible and desirable.

Linker notes that Bushnell referred to Israelis as “colonizers”:

Every governing system needs both, because that is how we channel passions out of the street and into political institutions.

And every person needs both, because that is how we avoid the epistemic certainty that can drive us to extremes of exuberance or despair.

The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other.

The 10/7 attack was an act of unconstrained barbarism that made it impossible for Israel to coexist with Hamas. Or at least: I am not aware of any proposed remedy that would have made coexistence possible without Israel becoming a fully militarized, illiberal state.

The Israeli response has at times violated the rules of war—sometimes of its own volition and sometimes because Hamas’s strategy has been to position assets in such a manner as to result in the deaths of as many Palestinian civilians as possible.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and of a magnitude that is almost impossible to comprehend.

And yet, the war continues because Hamas has no interest in a ceasefire. “We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” one Hamas official told the media yesterday.

The world is messy. Life is messy. Often in ways which break the human heart. The project of liberal society, which requires equal measures of liberalism and conservatism, is to manage this messiness as well as possible.

It was not simply that the eurozone was not structured to accommodate Europe’s economic diversity; it was that the structure of the eurozone, its rules and regulations, were not designed to promote growth, employment and stability.

The founders of the euro were guided by a set of ideas and notions about how economies function that were fashionable at the time, but that were simply wrong. They had faith in markets, but lacked an understanding of the limitations of markets and what was required to make them work.

Market fundamentalists believed, for instance, that if only the government would ensure that inflation was low and stable, markets would ensure growth and prosperity for all. While in most of the world market fundamentalism has been discredited, especially in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, those beliefs survive and flourish within the eurozone’s dominant power, Germany. These beliefs are held with such conviction and certainty, immune to new contrary evidence, that they are rightly described as an ideology.

Germany is talked about as a “success” only by comparison with the other countries of the eurozone.

It is perhaps natural that the eurozone’s leaders want to blame the victim – to blame the countries in recession or depression or reeling from a referendum result – for bringing about this state of affairs. They do not want to blame themselves and the great institutions that they have helped create, and which they now head.

According to Juncker, Europe is not to be held together because of the benefits that accrue – benefits that far exceed the costs, the economic prosperity, the sense of solidarity, the pride in being a European. No, Europe is to be held together by threats and fear – of what would happen if a country leaves.

One of the first lessons of economics is that bygones are bygones. One should always ask: given where we are, what should we do? On both sides of the Channel, politics should be directed at understanding the underlying sources of anger; how, in a democracy, the political establishment could have done so little to address the concerns of so many citizens, and figuring out how to do that now: to create within each country, and through cross-border arrangements, a new, more democratic Europe, which sees its goal as improving the wellbeing of ordinary citizens

There are alternatives to the current arrangements that can create a true shared prosperity: the challenge is to learn from the past to create this new economics and politics of the future. The Brexit referendum was a shock. My hope is that the shock will set off waves on both sides of the Channel that will lead to this new, reformed European Union.

The exclusion happens by omission, in the course of telling a story about America that’s powerful but incomplete.

In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions

Given this story’s premises, saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended.

But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built their a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.

Then for a variety of reasons — a necessary reckoning with white supremacism, a new and diverse wave of immigration, the pull of a more globalist ethos, the waning of institutional religion — that mid-century story stopped making as much sense.

As late as the 1960s, liberalism as well as conservatism identified with these particularisms, and with a national narrative that honored and included them. The exhortations of civil rights activists assumed a Christian moral consensus.

Our crisis of the house divided was a Christian civil war. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

n its place emerged a left-wing narrative that stands in judgment on the racist-misogynist-robber baron past, and a mainstream liberal narrative that has room for Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Alexander Hamilton (as opposed to the slightly more Trumpish genuine article) and Emma Lazarus, but feels unsure about the rest.

meanwhile for a great many Americans the older narrative still feels like the real history. They still see themselves more as settlers than as immigrants, identifying with the Pilgrims and the Founders, with Lewis and Clark and Davy Crockett and Laura Ingalls Wilder. They still embrace the Iliadic mythos that grew up around the Civil War, prefer the melting pot to multiculturalism, assume a Judeo-Christian civil religion rather the “spiritual but not religious” version.

Trump’s ascent is, in part, an attempt to restore their story to pre-eminence. It’s a restoration attempt that can’t succeed, because the country has changed too much, and because that national narrative required correction.

But so far we haven’t found a way to correct the story while honoring its full sweep — including all the white-male-Protestant-European protagonists to whom, for all their sins, we owe so much of our inheritance.

Instead liberalism, under pressure from the left, has become steadily more anxious about its political and cultural progenitors, with Woodrow Wilson joining Jackson and Jefferson in the dock

Meanwhile the right’s narrative has become steadily more exclusionary — religious-conservative outreach to Muslims has given way to Islamophobia, racial optimism has been replaced by white resentment.

Maybe no unifying story is really possible. Maybe the gap between a heroic founders-and-settlers narrative and the truth about what befell blacks and Indians and others cannot be adequately bridged.

But any leader who wants to bury Trumpism (as opposed to just beating Trump) would need to reach for one — for a story about who we are and were, not just what we’re not, that the people who still believe in yesterday’s American story can recognize as their own.

The findings lend support to an emerging hypothesis that the Clovis technology, named for the town in New Mexico where the first specimens were discovered, actually arose in what is now the Southeastern United States and moved west to the Plains and the Southwest. The Western Stemmed technology began, perhaps earlier, in the West. Most artifacts of that kind have been found on the West Coast and in Idaho, Nevada, Utah and Wyoming. “We seem to have two different traditions coexisting in the United States that did not blend for a period of hundreds of years,” Dr. Jenkins said.

The modern combination between democracy and Judaism was supposed to give birth to a spectacular, pluralistic kaleidoscope. The state would be a great, robust democracy that would protect Jews against persecution and victimhood. Jewish culture, on the other hand, with its uncompromising moral standards, would guard against our becoming persecutors and victimizers of others.

We never gave much thought to the Palestinian Israeli citizens within the Jewish-democratic equation. We also never tried to separate the synagogue and the state. If anything, we did the opposite. Moreover, we never predicted the evil effects of brutally controlling another people against their will. Today, all the things that we neglected have returned and are chasing us like evil spirits.

In the absence of a binding constitution, Israel has no real protection for its minorities or for their freedom of worship and expression.

the only way for us to agree when we disagree is a true, vigorous democracy. A democracy based on a progressive, civil constitution; a democracy that enforces the distinction between ethnicity and citizenship, between synagogue and state; a democracy that upholds the values of freedom and equality, on the basis of which every single person living under Israel’s legitimate and internationally recognized sovereignty will receive the same rights and protections.

Underlying the dispute is a complicated economic and political landscape of factories and farms that at once entrench the Israeli occupation and help feed the Palestinian families that oppose it. About 25,000 Palestinians work legally for Israelis in the West Bank, many in construction, building the settlements they hope will soon be dismantled.

. They have about 1,000 plants — sophisticated aluminum and food manufacturers as well as tiny textile and furniture workshops — that pump roughly $300 million into the Palestinian economy through salaries and, at the same time, take up vast acreage in what Palestinians see as their future state.Palestinian officials and boycott advocates say that these settlement businesses exploit a vulnerable work force, and that Israel’s occupation is largely responsible for the moribund Palestinian economy that makes its own jobs appealing. Israeli leaders and factory owners, though, say the companies do more to help than hurt Palestinians, and provide rare opportunities for coexistence between the two peoples.

Israeli industries operating in settlements that most of the world considers illegal and a prime obstacle to peace have become a focus of global attention in recent weeks, amid growing momentum for a boycott movement targeting Israeli businesses and institutions

Palestinian minimum wage was $410 a month, compared with Israel’s $1,217, and most Palestinian workers lacked pensions, vacation days and disability insurance — factors she and others say are the fault of the Palestinian Authority as well as Israel.

The Palestinian Authority began boycotting settlement products in late 2009, but stopped short of punishing people who helped produce them. Mohammed Mustafa, the Palestinian deputy prime minister for economic affairs, called the industrial parks part of an exploitative pattern of “business colonization” that has blocked the authority from building a viable economy.

“If we have our land, if we have our resources, if we have independence, if we have control of our economy, then we will give them opportunities,” Mr. Mustafa said. “Yes, they are paying them more, but who wants to be working in a settlement? This is, in a way, even worse than not giving them a job.”

The Palestinian Authority cannot inspect these workplaces, and the Israeli Ministry of Economy has jurisdiction over only minimum-wage violations (a spokeswoman said it opened 10 investigations last year).

"We've seen a revival of religion in the world," Fukuyama says, noting that religion has played a central role in the historical development of political institutions as well. Early human sociability was limited to face-to-face interactions within close-knit kin groups, and trust didn't extend beyond a few dozen relatives. Large-scale cooperation didn't become possible until the development of religious beliefs, which allowed trust to transcend kin. And that paved the way for the big faith communities—Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism—capable of uniting tens of millions of people in collective action.

"There is no clearer illustration of the importance of ideas to politics than the emergence of an Arab state under the Prophet Muhammad," Fukuyama writes. "The Arab tribes played an utterly marginal role in world history until that point; it was only Muhammad's charismatic authority that allowed them to unify and project their power throughout the Middle East and North Africa."

Fukuyama's portrayal of religion as a unifying force in history will irk some atheists, for whom religion is at all times a source of intolerance, conflict, and violence.

religion's role in the contemporary world is more problematic. Pluralistic societies require religions to coexist in proximity. As a result, he says, "integration today has to be based on shared political values, not deep, religiously rooted cultural beliefs."

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,

some areas of academic life aren't vulnerable to this crisis of confidence in the importance of one's work. Scientists can rest secure in the knowledge that their labors will help shove along the modern project of advancing health—and wealth.

Then there is economics, the new queen of the sciences—a discipline perfectly tailored to the modern market-driven university, and not coincidentally the most popular concentration

The humanities have no such reservoirs of confidence. And attempts by humanities professors to ape the rigor of their scientific colleagues have led to a decades-long wade in the marshes of postmodern academic theory, where canons are scorned, books exist only as texts to be deconstructed, and willfully obscure writing is championed over accessible prose. All this has merely reinforced capitalism's insistence that the sciences are the only important academic pursuits, because only they provide tangible, quantifiable (and potentially profitable) results. Far from making the humanities scientific, postmodernism has made them irrelevant.

The retreat into irrelevance is visible all across the humanities curriculum. Philosophy departments have largely purged themselves of metaphysicians and moralists; history departments emphasize exhaustive primary research and micro-history. In the field of English there is little pretense that literature is valuable in itself and should be part of every educated person's life, rather than serving as grist for endless academic debates

Sure, historians believe in their primary sources, English scholars in their textual debates, philosophers in their logic games. But many of them seem to believe that they have nothing to offer students who don't plan to be historians, or literary theorists, or philosophers. They make no effort to apply their work to what should be the most pressing task of undergraduate education: to provide a general education, a liberal arts education, to future doctors and bankers and lawyers and diplomats.

In this environment who can blame professors if, when it comes time to grade their students, they sometimes take the path of least resistance—the path of the gentleman's B-plus?

the Core's mission statement asserts, with a touch of smugness, that "the Core differs from other programs of general education. It does not define intellectual breadth as the mastery of a set of Great Books, or the digestion of a specific quantum of information … rather, the Core seeks to introduce students to the major approaches to knowledge in areas that the faculty considers indispensable to undergraduate education."

These words, which appear in the course catalogue each year, are the closest that Harvard comes to articulating an undergraduate educational philosophy. They suggest that the difference in importance between, say, "Democracy, Development, and Equality in Mexico" and "Reason and Faith in the West" (both offerings in Historical Study) does not matter. As the introduction to the history courses puts it, both courses offer a "historical" approach to knowledge that is presumably more valuable than mere "facts" about the past. Comprehending history "as a form of inquiry and understanding" trumps learning about actual events. The catalogue contains similarly pat introductions to the other disciplines. In each case the emphasis is squarely on methodology, not material.

The few Core classes that are well taught are swamped each year, no matter how obscure the subject matter. The closest thing to a Harvard education—that is, to an intellectual corpus that most Harvard graduates have in common—is probably obtained in such oversubscribed courses as "The Warren Court and the Pursuit of Justice," "First Nights: Five Performance Premieres," and "Fairy Tales, Children's Literature, and the Construction of Childhood."

As in a great library ravaged by a hurricane, the essential elements of a liberal arts education lie scattered everywhere at Harvard, waiting to be picked up. But little guidance is given on how to proceed with that task.

Harvard never attempted to answer that question—perhaps the most important question facing any incoming freshman. I chose my classes as much by accident as by design. There were times when some of them mattered to me, and even moments when I was intoxicated. But achieving those moments required pulling myself away from Harvard's other demands, whether social, extracurricular, or pre-professional, which took far more discipline than I was usually able to exert.

It was hard work to get into Harvard, and then it was hard work competing for offices and honors and extracurriculars with thousands of brilliant and driven young people; hard work keeping our heads in the swirling social world; hard work fighting for law-school slots and investment-banking jobs as college wound to a close … yes, all of that was heavy sledding. But the academics—the academics were another story.

What makes our age different is the moment that happened over and over again at Harvard, when we said This is going to be hard and then realized No, this is easy. Maybe it came when we boiled down a three-page syllabus to a hundred pages of exam-time reading, or saw that a paper could be turned in late without the frazzled teaching fellow's docking us, or handed in C-quality work and got a gleaming B-plus. Whenever the moment came, we learned that it wasn't our sloth alone, or our constant pushing for higher grades, that made Harvard easy. No, Harvard was easy because almost no one was pushing back.

Some of the highest employment rates in the advanced world are in places with the highest taxes and most generous welfare systems, namely Scandinavian countries.

In Scandinavian countries, working parents have the option of heavily subsidized child care. Leave policies make it easy for parents to take off work to care for a sick child. Heavily subsidized public transportation may make it easier for a person in a low-wage job to get to and from work. And free or inexpensive education may make it easier to get the training to move from the unemployment rolls to a job.

In short, more people may work when countries offer public services that directly make working easier, such as subsidized care for children and the old; generous sick leave policies; and cheap and accessible transportation. If the goal is to get more people working, what’s important about a social welfare plan may be more about what the money is spent on than how much is spent.

, it could mean that more direct aid to the working poor could help coax Americans into the labor force more effectively than the tax credits that have been a mainstay for compromise between Republicans and Democrats for the last generation.

In Denmark, someone who enters the labor force at an average salary loses 86 percent of earnings to a combination of taxes and lost eligibility for welfare benefits; that number is only 37 percent in the United States. Yet the percentage of Danes between the ages of 20 and 59 with a job is 10 percentage points higher than in the United States.

In the United States, the major policies aimed at helping the working poor are devised around tax subsidies that put more cash in people’s pockets so long as they work, most notably through the Earned-income tax credit and Child Tax Credit.

There is a solid correlation, by Mr. Kleven’s calculations, between what countries spend on employment subsidies — like child care, preschool and care for older adults — and what percentage of their working-age population is in the labor force.

Collectively, these policies and subsidies create flexibility such that a person on the fence between taking a job versus staying at home to care for children or parents may be more likely to take a job.

The employment subsidies Mr. Kleven cites surely help coax more Scandinavians into the work force, Mr. Greenstein agrees, but shouldn’t be viewed in isolation.

wages for entry-level work are much higher in the Nordic countries than in the United States, reflecting a higher minimum wage, stronger labor unions and cultural norms that lead to higher pay

There are countless differences between Northern European countries and the rest of the world beyond child care policies and the like. The Scandinavian countries may have cultures that encourage more people to work, especially women.

Every country has a mix of taxes, welfare benefits and policies to promote work that reflects its politics and culture. In the large, diverse United States, there is deep skepticism of social welfare programs and direct government spending, along with a greater commitment to keeping taxes low.

The Islamic State is trying to create a religious divide and an anti-refugee backlash, so that Muslims will feel alienated and turn to extremism. If so, American and European politicians are following the Islamic State’s script.

Let’s be careful not to follow that script further and stigmatize all Muslims for ISIS terrorism.

The discovery reinforced an idea that was emerging at the time: that there was not a single line of early humans, but multiple lineages. It was already known that three other species were living in Africa around the same time: H. habilis, H. erectus and Paranthropus boisei. H. rudolfensis added to this diversity.

Later finds from Koobi Fora suggest that the three Homo species coexisted between 1.78 and 1.98 million years ago.

H. erectus are thought to be our direct ancestors. They were the first hominins to migrate out of Africa, spreading into Europe and Asia.

but a 2013 study suggested that H. erectus had evolved the ability to throw.

This may have given H. erectus the drive they needed to become more social.There is some evidence that they shared information and worked in teams.

In the summer of 2015, researchers announced the discovery of the oldest known stone tools, dating to 3.3 million years ago. It had been assumed that only Homo species could make stone tools, but the tools were older than any known Homo fossils, suggesting that older species like A. afarensis or K. platyops could also make stone tools.

a 3.2-million-year-old fossil Australopithecus afarensis, nicknamed "Lucy". Lucy's species was immediately hailed as a key contender for our direct ancestor.

There was a single lineage descending from apes through to Lucy, "and then out pops our immediate ancestors". To her, that did not make

sense.

Her team found fossils on the western shore of lake that demonstrated there was "diversity at the age of Lucy".

A. anamensis. This was the oldest species known from Lake Turkana, having lived about four million years ago.

another new species called Kenyanthropus platyopus, or "flat-faced man". This species lived 3.5 million years ago, when other members of Lucy's species also roamed.

"the common ancestor" of Homo, and largely killed off the idea that humans evolved on a single line.

The earliest known Acheulean hand-axes were discovered near Lake Turkana in 2011. They are 1.76 million years old and were probably made by H. erectus.

There was thought to be a "substantial link between the emergence of humans (Homo) and the emergence of technology", says de la Torre, but it now seems this is not necessarily true.

Lake Turkana has played a pivotal role in our understanding of human evolution. But that is not to say the area was particularly significant for the early humans themselves.

Lake Turkana was simply an ideal place for fossils to be preserved, says Spoor. "That doesn't mean human evolution doesn't happen everywhere else in Africa."

It allows us to see multiple species that lived millions of years apart, and compare them.

you can usefully combine these takes, and describe Bush nostalgia as a longing for something America used to have and doesn’t really any more — a ruling class that was widely (not universally, but more widely than today) deemed legitimate, and that inspired various kinds of trust (intergenerational, institutional) conspicuously absent in our society today.

we miss the WASPs — because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

Those virtues included a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety that went beyond the thank-you notes and boat shoes and prep school chapel going — a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country.

However, one of the lessons of the age of meritocracy is that building a more democratic and inclusive ruling class is harder than it looks, and even perhaps a contradiction in terms. You can get rid of the social registers and let women into your secret societies and

you still end up with something that is clearly a self-replicating upper class, a powerful elite, filling your schools and running your public institutions.

you even end up with an elite that literally uses the same strategy of exclusion that WASPs once used against Jews to preserve its particular definition of diversity from high-achieving Asians — with the only difference being that our elite is more determined to deceive itself about how and why it’s discriminating

certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion

the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive

The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it

The goal would have been to keep piety and discipline embedded in the culture of a place like Harvard, rather than the mix of performative self-righteousness and raw ambition that replaced them.

for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.

And somehow the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship — one that from the late-19th century through the middle of the 1960s was arguably unmatched among the various imperial elites with whom our establishment contended

So as an American in the old dispensation, you didn’t have to like the establishment — and certainly its members were often eminently hateable — to prefer their leadership to many of the possible alternatives

And as an American today, you don’t have to miss everything about the WASPs, or particularly like their remaining heirs, to feel nostalgic for their competence

long with the establishment failure in Vietnam, which hastened the collapse of the old elite’s authority, there was also a loss of religious faith and cultural confidence, and a belief among the last generation of true WASPs that the emerging secular meritocracy would be morally and intellectually superior to their own style of elite

the WASP ascendancy did not simply fall; it pre-emptively dissolved itself.

its virtues were to some extent transferable to a more diverse society: The establishment had always been somewhat permeable to arrivistes,

in our era their admirable influence is still felt in figures as different as Barack Obama and Mitt Romney

In such a world the establishment would have still admitted more blacks, Jews, Catholics and Hispanics (and more women) to its ranks … but it would have done so as a self-consciously elite-crafting strategy, rather than under the pseudo-democratic auspices of the SAT and the high school resume and the dubious ideal of “merit.”

At the same time it would have retained both its historic religious faith (instead of exchanging Protestant rigor for a post-Christian Social Gospel and a soft pantheism) and its more self-denying culture (instead of letting all that wash away in the flood of boomer-era emotivism).

“Those who are mourning the passing of the old Establishment should mourn its many failures, too,” he writes. Which is fair enough: The old ruling class was bigoted and exclusive and often cruel, it had failures aplenty

it’s to look forward, and to suggest that our current elite might someday be reformed — or simply replaced — through the imitation of the old establishment's more pious and aristocratic spirit.

Right now, almost all the discussion of our meritocracy’s vices assumes the system’s basic post-WASP premises, and hopes that either more inclusion (the pro-diversity left’s fixation) or a greater emphasis on academic merit (the anti-affirmative right’s hobbyhorse) will cure our establishment’s all-too-apparent ills.

a more radical theory of the case, one proposed by Helen Andrews in a 2016 Hedgehog Review essay on meritocracy and its discontents:

The meritocracy is hardening into an aristocracy — so let it. Every society in history has had an elite, and what is an aristocracy but an elite that has put some care into making itself presentable? Allow the social forces that created this aristocracy to continue their work, and embrace the label

By all means this caste should admit as many worthy newcomers as is compatible with their sense of continuity. New brains, like new money, have been necessary to every ruling class, meritocratic or not

they must give up any illusion that such tinkering will make them representative of the country over which they preside. They are separate, parochial in their values, unique in their responsibilities. That is what makes them aristocratic.

If we would learn from their lost successes in our own era of misrule, reconsidering this idea — that a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly — might be a fruitful place to start.