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I wrote a Fourth of July piece trying to explain my patriotic feelings for this country. My focus was an apparent contradiction in the idea of patriotism as a moral virtue. Patriotism seemed to require a commitment to the good of this particular country, even when its good was at odds with the greater good of everyone (“America First,” you might say). Love of a particular country appeared to conflict with the universal demands of ethics

I found a solution in the idea, expressed in our Declaration of Independence, that the American commitment to freedom was a commitment to the freedom of all people, not just of our citizens. My patriotism, I concluded, was a love of my country’s shared project of promoting freedom for all.

Viewed this way, the primary patriotic duty today would be to find some way to restore civil political discourse and a spirit of mutually respectful compromise.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”

his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

In his well-known essay from 1784 — “What Is Enlightenment?” — Kant defines enlightenment as “man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity,” a process of growing up that consists in finding the “courage” to think for oneself.

First, in order to think for oneself one must strive to transcend the perspective of one’s private commitments — personal, historical, professional, civic — and attempt to judge from the cosmopolitan “standpoint of everybody else.” Second, and closely related, is the idea that thinking for oneself is possible only by thinking aloud. We would not be able to think very “much” or all too “correctly,” Kant writes, if we would not think together “with others with whom we communicate.” Transcending our private perspective thus depends on submitting our opinions to the judgment of the “entire reading public” — striving to reach, through public debate, an agreement of “universal human reason in which each has his own say.”

Theodor Adorno, captured this notion in a 1959 lecture when he said that enlightenment consisted of resisting the use of the “disastrous word ‘as.’” We encounter that word, he explains, when “people say in the course of a discussion, ‘As a German, I cannot accept that …’ or ‘As a Christian, I must react in such-and-such a way.’”

Gripping and inconsistent myths swirl about him. In one telling, Malcolm is a hate-filled bigot, who through religion came to see the kinship of all. In another he is the self-redeemer, a lowly pimp become an exemplar of black chivalry. In still another he is an avatar of collective revenge, a gangster whose greatest insight lay in changing not his ways, but his targets. The layers, the contradictions, the sheer profusion of Malcolm X’s public pronouncements have been a gift to seemingly every contemporary black artist and intellectual from Kanye to Cornel West.

For me, he embodied the notion of an individual made anew through his greater commitment to a broad black collective.

I thought back on the debate running from Martin Delany and Frederick Douglass through Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and I knew a final verdict had been reached. Who could look on a black family that had won the votes, if not the hearts, of Virginia, Colorado, and North Carolina, waving to their country and bounding for the White House, and seriously claim, as Malcolm once did, that blacks were not American?

Christopher L. Eisgruber, the university’s president, told students Wednesday that he agreed that Wilson had been a racist but that he had done some things that were honorable and others that were worthy of scorn.

The document signed by students and administrators was published on the Princeton University website late Thursday. It contained no firm commitment to removing Wilson’s name from campus. Instead, it committed administrators to writing an email to the chairwoman of the university board of trustees “to initiate conversations concerning the present legacy” of the former president on campus.

The document held administrators to a series of spoken statements they had “verbalized” during the sit-in and committed them to write emails “to initiate the process to consider removal” of a mural of Wilson from a cafeteria in a residential college named after him. Administrators also said they would “collect information on the campus community’s opinion” on whether the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, a prestigious public policy school, should continue to bear his name.

Regnerus relies on the concept of sexual economics, in which mating is seen as a marketplace. In this view, women are gatekeepers to a limited, highly desired product: sex. In exchange for access to this product, men proffer commitment, fidelity and resources.

Regnerus believes that the sharp drop in the value of sex has shifted the market, even its more conservative parts, leading to a massive overall slowdown in the creation of committed relationships like marriage, in large part because men see less of a need to make themselves into appealing long-term partners.

among younger women, especially those who want that sort of traditional relationship, there increasingly seems to be a vague dissatisfaction with the state of things. Why, when women have gained so much power, are we so often at impasse in our romantic relationships? Why do men our age seem so unmotivated to grow up and so ambivalent about committing? As uncomfortable as it may be to contemplate, the shifts this book describes may provide an inkling of an explanation.

When you consider the plain meaning of the law, and the actions Haspel engaged in, it is impossible to conclude anything but that Haspel committed war crimes of the gravest kind and then helped destroy the evidence of them. There is no defense under the law in which a war criminal can claim that he or she was merely following orders.

There are equally no extenuating circumstances that can ever justify torture, according to the U.N. Convention signed by Ronald Reagan no less, in 1984: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

Nor is it possible for any human being to read what was done to these prisoners without concluding that this was torture. If an American were captured by ISIS, was waterboarded 83 times, hung from the ceiling by his wrists, locked into a tiny box for days, and turned into a shell of a human being, would any American deny that he was tortured? The question answers itself.

One has to say, purely on the merits, that Lee did indeed commit treason, if levying war against the United States and giving aid and comfort to its enemies are to have any meaning.

But treason de facto does not always become treason de jure. The distance between the two can be measured by Lee’s own carefully honed distinction: Until the Civil War settled matters, there was a plausible vagueness in the Constitution about the loyalty owed by citizens of states and the Union. So long as it could be argued that Lee was functioning within the latitude of that vagueness, it would be extraordinarily difficult to persuade a civilian jury that he had committed treason de jure.

Immigration, unsurprisingly, was the pivot point. As Trump has done for more than two years, he calls on us to see undocumented immigrants through the prism of horrifying and vicious murders. This is nothing but the most elemental kind of incitement. If you did the same – and you could – with any racial or ideological or regional identity the horror of this would be clear. But we treat it as normal now.

The rest of the speech was in this thematic path, aggressive ethno-nationalism. It wasn’t more or less outrageous than the things the President says all the time. It just stacked them together

It’s important to restate the facts. Out of more than 10 million undocumented immigrants in the country, of course there are some who commit crimes and even horrific crimes. The same would be the case for any other ten million people, certainly for any group that is disproportionately young. But every study shows that immigrants, both documented and undocumented, commit crimes at a low rate than the native born. This is pure incitement. We can’t lose sight of that.

American exceptionalism does not merely connote cultural and political uniqueness. It connotes moral superiority

Embedded in exceptionalist discourse is the belief that, because America has a special devotion to democracy and freedom, its sins are mostly incidental. The greatest evils humankind has witnessed, in places such as the Nazi death camps, are far removed from anything Americans would ever do

America’s adversaries commit crimes; America merely stumbles on its way to doing the right thing. This distinction means that, in mainstream political discourse, the ugliest terms—fascism, dictatorship, tyranny, terrorism, imperialism, genocide—are generally reserved for phenomena beyond America’s shores.

Mark Carney, a former Goldman Sachs director who now leads the Bank of England, sounded a warning. Global warming, he said, could send the world economy spiraling into another 2008-like crisis

He called for central banks to act aggressively and immediately to reduce the risk of climate-related catastrophe

the U.S. Federal Reserve was the pivotal American institution in stopping a second Great Depression. Its actions were “historically unprecedented, spectacular in scale,” he writes, and widely understood by experts to be the “decisive innovation of the crisis.”

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.