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they draw on an impressively broad array of materials: hundreds of original interviews, reams of contemporary daily journalism, and an already-fat library of memoirs and journalistic accounts of the Trump years,

the authors are persuasive in arguing that in this White House, “impulse and instinct ruled.” Given the sheer number of crises and conflicts that erupted on Trump’s watch, herding them all into a narrative isn’t easy.

the authors center each chapter on its own topic or story line — Trump’s rocky relationship with foreign allies, for example, or the 2018 budget battle over the Mexico wall. Other chapters focus on key supporting players, who are rendered with deft portraits, such as Jared Kushner, Trump’s widely reviled but fireproof son-in-law, or the president’s antagonist-turned-sycophant, Senator Lindsey Graham

Some of the weightiest chapters take up Trump’s relationship with Russia.

Yet Baker and Glasser seem to endorse the view of the Democratic congressman Adam Schiff, who, during the first impeachment, warned Republicans, “You will not change him, you cannot constrain him.”

The chapters on the 2019 Ukraine scandal, when Trump linked aid to its government to delivery of dirt on Joe Biden, re-establish the gravity of the first impeachment

If “The Divider” has a dominant theme, it may be the struggle within the “almost cartoonishly chaotic White House” by people more reasonable and ethical than Trump to rein in his most dangerous instincts

Time and again, staffers debate whether to stay put in hopes of mitigating Trump’s basest impulses or to run screaming from the room. Even more stunning is the number of onetime loyalists who, after their tours of duty, emerged as among the president’s most strident critics.

Many Trump aides — even some, like National Security Adviser John Bolton or Attorney General William P. Barr, who might deserve harsh criticism on other grounds — did intervene valiantly at times to keep Trump in check. Without their small acts of resistance, things could have gone even worse

“The Divider” soberly and carefully reconstructs events to reveal anew Trump’s shocking deference to the Russian president, Vladimir Putin — notably at the 2018 Helsinki summit, where, the authors pointedly write, “Trump acknowledged that he would accept the word of Putin over that of his own intelligence agencies.”

They write: “So many had told themselves that they could manage the unmanageable president, that they could keep him from going too far, that they could steer him in the direction of responsible governance. … They had justified their service to him or their alliances with him or their deference to him on the grounds that they could ultimately control him. And what Schiff was saying is that three years had shown that was not possible.”

The idea that good soldiers needed good books didn’t start with World War II. During World War I, the American Library Association collaborated with the Army to gather and distribute donated books. Even before Pearl Harbor, the association had planned a new “Victory Book Campaign,” with the goal of collecting 10 million books in 1942. The goal was met, though there were concerns that too many were dirty, outdated or unreadable. The campaign was renewed in 1943, with a caveat that the public should donate only “good books.”

Books were seen not just as diversions, but as weapons in the fight for democracy. In American propaganda, the dedication to the free exchange of ideas was explicitly contrasted with Nazi book burnings.

Still, the specter of partisan bias shadowed the project. In 1944, when President Roosevelt was seeking a fourth term, Congress passed a law aimed at creating a uniform absentee ballot for soldiers. As part of the law, Republicans, concerned that Democrats were seeking to influence the military vote, included a clause stating that no material “containing political argument or political propaganda” could be distributed to troops.

The series mixed entertainment with more edifying fare. The first title was “The Education of Hyman Kaplan,” a collection of comic stories by Leonard Q. Ross (a pseudonym of Leo Rosten, future author of “The Joys of Yiddish”). The more than 1,300 titles that followed included literary classics, contemporary fiction, poetry, history, biography, humor and even one art book, a compilation of soldiers’ paintings.

A 1945 pamphlet credited the books with helping to create “a young, masculine reading public,” including some who may not have been eager to dig into, say, Herman Melville’s “Typee.” One Marine quoted in the exhibit said that when that book was given to him, he eventually “had nothing to do but read it.” His verdict? “Hot stuff. That guy wrote about three islands I’d been on!”

in early 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime, a publishers’ group formed in 1942, approached Ray Trautman, the Army’s chief librarian, with the idea of producing special paperbacks for soldiers overseas. The result was the Armed Services Editions. which were designed to fit in either the breast or pants pocket of a standard-issue uniform.

The vagueness of the language sent a chill through the book program. Some planned titles were pulled, including “Yankee From Olympus” (a biography of the former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that included a favorable depiction of President Roosevelt) and E.B. White’s “One Man’s Meat.”

Two months later, the law was amended, and all of the postponed books were released

But, OK - let’s accept the conflation of the Israeli state with the Jewish people for now. The immediate question is, on what planet does Israel stand alone?

There is such a powerful urge among Israel’s defenders to make the country out to be an underdog, but there is absolutely no rational basis for doing so. Israel enjoys one of the most powerful and advanced militaries on earth. Despite the conflict, Israeli citizens are actually remarkably safe from violence compared to most of the countries on the globe

All of that would be jeopardized if Israel did in fact stand alone. But it doesn’t! Indeed, it’s hard to name nation states that enjoy more diplomatic protection than Israel.

The subhead of this piece for the Free Press (which is proving itself to be, let’s say, not particularly free when it comes to this issue) reads “after the worldwide celebration of our people’s slaughter, my hope for peace is dead.” What? Worldwide celebration? Because a few dozen dopey college kids held a few small rallies? As of four days ago, at least forty-four countries expressed support for Israel in this conflict. How many will officially express support for the people dying by the droves in Gaza? Even the establishment governments of the greater Middle East (almost universally corrupt, theocratic, or both) don’t offer any real support to Palestinians. How much more support do you need, exactly, before you stop pretending like everyone is out to get you?

When you say no one stands with Israel, what the fuck are you talking about? I cannot fathom how anyone, even the most dedicated Zionist and supporter of the Netanyahu government, could believe that Israel is the vulnerable party in this exchange.

If we define the left as broadly and loosely as possible, we can say that one thing the left has certainly accomplished this past half-century is to associate moral superiority with the underdog. This is by turns both deeply misguided and an expression of an essential truth

this folk morality, maybe righteous, maybe misguided, most likely both, has become the default ethical firmament of modern politics. Sometimes Israel’s defenders argue that being the more powerful force does not make you wrong; that’s true, but their hearts never appear to be in it. They seem to feel the tug of powerlessness, the desire to wear the sad but comfortable cloak of a refugee people, a natural and sympathetic impulse for a people still defined by the diaspora.

Every time the Israel-Palestine conflict heats up again, certain elements within the pro-Israel coalition use creepy rhetoric to insist that everyone must be fully committed to Israel, that siding against Israel should not be within the sphere of legitimate debate. This takes place against a backdrop where principled supporters of the Palestinians argue that there’s a chilling effect created by pro-Israel hardliners which squelches legitimate debate, and where anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists claim that Jews pull the strings behind the scenes. All this loose talk about what we must do and must say does nothing to rebut the former and just plays into the propaganda of the latter. I wish people would stop doing it.

I need make no grand loyalty statements because my views on this conflict have been plain for many years: the moral imperative is that we create total legal and political equality for all people in the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, as basic democratic principles demand, and that all people in that land enjoy safety and prosperity

The fact remains, though - and it is a fact, an objective fact, an empirical fact, no matter how mad it makes people - that Hamas has always been empowered by Israel’s violence and oppression. I’m sorry if this is hard to accept, but Palestine is a Chinese finger trap; the more Israel pulls away, the more tightly the conflict will grip the country.

Permanent statelessness and dispossession for the Palestinians will ensure violence for generations. Only freedom for Palestinians can bring peace, and that’s the most hardheaded, ruthlessly pragmatic point anyone can make about this horrid crisis.

And if Israel’s defenders feel put upon, othered, alone, it’s because Israel and Israel alone has the power to make Palestinians free. I’m sorry, but it’s not a moral principle that says that Israel must bear responsibility for achieving peace and freedom. It’s a purely pragmatic statement of the reality of Israel’s overwhelming power in the region. Choosing sides has nothing do with it.

Or, I suppose, you could go through with the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, as a disturbing number of people are calling for. I doubt the world would stop you; that’s the upside of being Goliath. But that would destroy whatever hope there is left for Israel as a democratic state, a symbol of human rights. And I think that if you love Israel, the idea of Israel, you should fight like hell to stop that from happening. Because afterwards you’ll never be the same again.

The only way out is through de-escalation and the only permanent de-escalation is through formal legal recognition of Palestinians in the territories as full citizens in a democratic system. This might come from the establishment of a Palestinian state, or it might come with the absorption of the territories into a secular state of Israel-Palestine that extends perfectly equal legal and political rights to all people within it, as liberal values require

Serwer is a guy who constantly demands that he and his allies be allowed to do politics on easy mode, but he’s just part of a broader communal rejection of basic self-definition and comprehensible terms for this political tendency.

If you ask these people, are you part of a social revolution?, they’ll loudly tell you yes! Yes they are! They’re going to shake society at its very foundations. Well, OK then -what do I call your movement? You reject every name that organically develops! I’ll use the name you pick, but you have to actually pick one.

The basic stance of the social justice set, for a long time now, has been that they are 100% exempt from ordinary politics. BlackLivesMatter proponents have spent a year and a half acting as though their demand for justice is so transcendently, obviously correct that they don’t have to care about politics.

Well, sooner or later, guys, you have to actually give a shit about what people who aren’t a part of your movement think. Sorry. That’s life. The universe is indifferent to your demand for justice, and will remain so until you bother to try to change minds.

Do politics. Think and speak strategically. Be disciplined. Work harder. And for fuck’s sake, give me a simple term to use to address you. Please? Because right now it sure looks like you don’t want to be named because you don’t want to be criticized.

Edit: I might not have underlined this point enough - I sincerely am asking for a better term and would happily use one if offered. If woke, political correctness, identity politics, etc, are inflammatory terms, I'd be happy to substitute something that's not. But surely something is happening in our politics, and we have to be able to talk about it. So I'm asking for a name.

it is necessary to strip away the irrelevancies in which this controversy is usually wrapped up.

The enemies of intellectual liberty always try to present their case as a plea for discipline versus individualism.

The issue truth-versus-untruth is as far as possible kept in the background.

the writer who refuses to sell his opinions is always branded as a mere egoist, He is accused, that is, either of wanting to shut himself up in an ivory tower, or of making an exhibitionist display of his own personality, or of resisting the inevitable current, of history in an attempt to cling to unjustified privileges.

Each of them tacitly claims that “the truth” has already been revealed, and that the heretic, if he is not simply a fool, is secretly aware of “the truth” and merely resists it out of selfish motives.

Freedom of the intellect means the freedom to report what one has seen, heard, and fell, and not to be obliged to fabricate imaginary facts and feelings.

known facts are suppressed and distorted to such an extent as to make it doubtful whether a true history of our times can ever be written.

A totalitarian state is in effect a theocracy, and its ruling caste, in order to keep its position, has to be thought of as infallible. But since, in practice, no one is infallible, it is frequently necessary to rearrange past events in order to show that this or that mistake was not made, or that this or that imaginary triumph actually happened

Then, again, every major change in policy demands a corresponding change of doctrine and a revaluation of prominent historical figures. This kind of thing happens everywhere, but clearly it is likelier to lead to outright falsification in societies where only one opinion is permissible at any given moment.

The friends of totalitarianism in England usually tend to argue that since absolute truth is not attainable, a big lie is no worse than a little lie. It is pointed out that all historical records are biased and inaccurate, or, on the other hand, that modem physics has proved that what seems to us the real world is an illusion, so that to believe in the evidence of one’s senses is simply vulgar philistinism.

Something similar might be said about “The Maniac,” Benjamín Labatut’s new novel, whose designated Prometheus is the Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann, a pioneer of A.I. as well as an originator of game theory.

both narratives are grounded in fact, using the lives and ideas of real people as fodder for allegory and attempting to write a new mythology of the modern world.

on Neumann and Oppenheimer were close contemporaries, born a year apart to prosperous, assimilated Jewish families in Budapest and New York. Von Neumann, conversant in theoretical physics, mathematics and analytic philosophy, worked for Oppenheimer at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project. He spent most of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study, where Oppenheimer served as director after the war.

More than most intellectual bastions, the institute is a house of theory. The Promethean mad scientists of the 19th century were creatures of the laboratory, tinkering away at their infernal machines and homemade monsters. Their 20th-century counterparts were more likely to be found at the chalkboard, scratching out our future in charts, equations and lines of code.

MANIAC. The name was an acronym for “Mathematical Analyzer, Numerical Integrator and Computer,” which doesn’t sound like much of a threat. But von Neumann saw no limit to its potential. “If you tell me precisely what it is a machine cannot do,” he declared, “then I can always make a machine which will do just that.” MANIAC didn’t just represent a powerful new kind of machine, but “a new type of life.”

More than 200 years after the Shelleys, Prometheus is having another moment, one closer in spirit to Mary’s terrifying ambivalence than to Percy’s fulsome gratitude. As technological optimism curdles in the face of cyber-capitalist villainy, climate disaster and what even some of its proponents warn is the existential threat of A.I., that ancient fire looks less like an ember of divine ingenuity than the start of a conflagration. Prometheus is what we call our capacity for self-destruction.

Oppenheimer wasn’t a principal author of that theory. Those scientists, among them Niels Bohr, Erwin Schrödinger and Werner Heisenberg, were characters in Labatut’s previous novel, “When We Cease to Understand the World.” That book provides harrowing illumination of a zone where scientific insight becomes indistinguishable from madness or, perhaps, divine inspiration. The basic truths of the new science seem to explode all common sense: A particle is also a wave; one thing can be in many places at once; “scientific method and its object could no longer be prised apart.”

. Oppenheimer’s designation as Prometheus is precise. He snatched a spark of quantum insight from those divinities and handed it to Harry S. Truman and the U.S. Army Air Forces.

Labatut’s account of von Neumann is, if anything, more unsettling than “Oppenheimer.” We had decades to get used to the specter of nuclear annihilation, and since the end of the Cold War it has been overshadowed by other terrors. A.I., on the other hand, seems newly sprung from science fiction, and especially terrifying because we can’t quite grasp what it will become.

Von Neumann, who died in 1957, did not teach machines to play Go. But when asked “what it would take for a computer, or some other mechanical entity, to begin to think and behave like a human being,” he replied that “it would have to play, like a child.”

the intellectual drama of “Oppenheimer” — as distinct from the dramas of his personal life and his political fate — is about how abstraction becomes reality. The atomic bomb may be, for the soldiers and politicians, a powerful strategic tool in war and diplomacy. For the scientists, it’s something else: a proof of concept, a concrete manifestation of quantum theory.

If Oppenheimer took hold of the sacred fire of atomic power, von Neumann’s theft was bolder and perhaps more insidious: He stole a piece of the human essence. He’s not only a modern Prometheus; he’s a second Frankenstein, creator of an all but human, potentially more than human monster.

“Technological power as such is always an ambivalent achievement,” Labatut’s von Neumann writes toward the end of his life, “and science is neutral all through, providing only means of control applicable to any purpose, and indifferent to all. It is not the particularly perverse destructiveness of one specific invention that creates danger. The danger is intrinsic. For progress there is no cure.”

the intellectual right effectively dismissed the book

Here is David Brooks, echoing the conservative consensus in 2006:

As any number of historians, sociologists and pollsters can tell you, the evangelical Protestants who now exercise a major influence on the Republican Party are an infinitely diverse and contradictory group, and their relationship to these hyperpartisans is extremely ambivalent.

The idea that members of the religious right form an “infinitely diverse and contradictory group” and were in no way “hyperpartisan” is now clearly absurd. Christianism, in fact, turned out to be the central pillar of Trump’s success, with white evangelicals giving unprecedented and near-universal support — 84 percent — to a shameless, disgusting pagan, because and only because he swore to smite their enemies.

The fusion of Trump and Christianism is an unveiling of a sort — proof of principle that, in its core, Christianism is not religious but political, a reactionary cult susceptible to authoritarian preacher

Christianism is to the American right what critical theory is to the American left: a reductionist, totalizing creed that “others” half the country, and deeply misreads the genius of the American project.

Christianism starts, as critical theory does, by attacking the core of the Founding: in particular, its Enlightenment defense of universal reason, and its revolutionary removal of religion from the state.

Mike Johnson’s guru, pseudo-historian David Barton, claims that the Founders were just like evangelicals today, and intended the government at all levels to enforce “Christian values” — primarily, it seems, with respect to the private lives of others. As Pete Wehner notes, “If you listen to Johnson speak on the ‘so-called separation of Church and state’ and claim that ‘the Founders wanted to protect the church from an encroaching state, not the other way around,’ you will hear echoes of Barton.”

Christianism is a way to think about politics without actually thinking. Johnson expressed this beautifully last week: “I am a Bible-believing Christian. Someone asked me today in the media, they said, ‘It’s curious, people are curious: What does Mike Johnson think about any issue under the sun?’ I said, ‘Well, go pick up a Bible off your shelf and read it. That’s my worldview.

this tells us nothing, of course. The Bible demands interpretation in almost every sentence and almost every word; it contains universes of moral thought and thesauri of ambiguous words in a different ancient language; it has no clear blueprint for contemporary American politics, period

Yet Johnson uses it as an absolute authority to back up any policy he might support

The submission to (male) authority is often integral to fundamentalism

Trump was an authority figure, period. He was a patriarch. He was the patriarch of their tribe. And he was in power, which meant that God put him there. After which nothing needs to be said. So of course if the patriarch says the election is rigged, you believe him.

And of course you do what you can to make sure that God’s will be done — by attempting to overturn the election results if necessary.

Christianism is a just-so story, with no deep moral conflicts. Material wealth does not pose a moral challenge, for example, as it has done for Christians for millennia. For Christianists, it’s merely proof that God has blessed you and you deserve it.

“I believe that scripture, the Bible is very clear: that God is the one that raises up those in authority. And I believe that God has ordained and allowed each one of us to be brought here for this specific moment.” That means that Trump was blessed by God, and not just by the Electoral College in 2016. And because he was blessed by God, it was impossible that Biden beat him fairly in 2020.

More than three-quarters of those representing the most evangelical districts are election deniers, compared to just half of those in the remaining districts. Fully three-quarters of the deniers in the caucus hail from evangelical districts.

since the Tea Party, the turnover in primary challenges in these evangelical districts has been historic — a RINO-shredding machine. No wonder there were crosses being carried on Capitol Hill on January 6, 2021. The insurrectionists were merely following God’s will. And Trump’s legal team was filled with the faithful.

Tom Edsall shows the skew that has turned American politics into something of a religious war: “When House districts are ranked by the percentage of voters who are white evangelicals, the top quintile is represented by 81 Republicans and 6 Democrats and the second quintile by 68 Republicans and 19 Democrats.”

the overwhelming majority of the Republican House Caucus (70%) represents the Most Evangelical districts (top two quintiles). Thus, we can see that a group that represents less than 15% of the US population commands 70% of the districts comprising the majority party in the House of Representatives.

And almost all those districts are safe as houses. When you add Christianism to gerrymandering, you get a caucus that has no incentive to do anything but perform for the cable shows.

This is not a caucus interested in actually doing anything.

I don’t know how we best break the grip of the fundamentalist psyche on the right. It’s a deep human tendency — to give over control to a patriarch or a holy book rather than engage in the difficult process of democratic interaction with others, compromise, and common ground.

he phenomenon has been given new life by a charismatic con-man in Donald Trump, preternaturally able to corral the cultural fears and anxieties of those with brittle, politicized faith.

What I do know is that, unchecked, this kind of fundamentalism is a recipe not for civil peace but for civil conflict

It’s a mindset, a worldview, as deep in the human psyche as the racial tribalism now endemic on the left. It controls one of our two major parties. And in so far as it has assigned all decisions to one man, Donald Trump, it is capable of supporting the overturning of an election — or anything else, for that matter, that the patriarch wants. Johnson is a reminder of that.

— giving the next generation of Republican officeholders, senior advisers, judges and appointees explicit permission and encouragement to believe that the country is on the verge of collapse.

The list of people making these arguments includes former officials in the Trump administration, some of whom are likely to be considered for top jobs in the event of a Trump restoration in 2024.

The ideas about the threat of an all-powerful totalitarian left and the dismal state of the country — even the most outlandish of them — are taken seriously by conservative politicians as well as prominent influencers on the right.

If Mr. Trump manages to win the presidency again in 2024, many of these intellectual catastrophists could be ready and willing to justify deeds that could well bring American liberal democracy to its knees.

Mr. Anton’s “Flight 93” essay originally appeared on a website with modest traffic, but two days later Rush Limbaugh was reading it aloud in its entirety on his radio show. The essay set the tone of life-or-death struggle (and related imagery) that is common among catastrophists.

Mr. Anton updated and amplified the argument in a 2021 book, “The Stakes: America at the Point of No Return.”

The prospect of Mr. Biden’s becoming president constituted an “existential threat,” Mr. Eastman said, to the survivability of the country. Would we “completely repudiate every one of our founding principles” and allow ourselves to be “eradicated”? Those were the stakes, as he viewed them.

Once a thinker begins to conceive of politics as a pitched battle between the righteous and those who seek the country’s outright annihilation, extraordinary possibilities open up.

in May 2021, Mr. Anton came to conduct a two-hour podcast with a far-right Silicon Valley tech guru and self-described “monarchist,” Curtis Yarvin, in which the two agreed that the American “regime” is today most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy.” In that arrangement, an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in executive branch agencies, the universities, elite media and other leading institutions of civil society promulgate and enforce a distorted and self-serving version of reality that illegitimately justifies their rule.

It culminated in Mr. Yarvin sketching a scenario in which a would-be dictator he alternatively describes as “Caesar” and “Trump” defies the laws and norms of democratic transition and uses a “Trump app” to direct throngs of his supporters on the streets of the nation’s capital to do his bidding, insulating the would-be dictator from harm and the consequences of his democracy-defying acts.

Mr. Anton described Caesarism as one-man rule that emerges “after the decay of a republican order, when it can no longer function.”

he would prefer the country to embrace the principles of “1787 forever.” But if that is no longer possible, he said, the rule of a Caesar can be a necessary method to restore order.)

Those on the right primarily concerned about the fate of traditionalist Christian morals and worship in the United States insist that we already live in a regime that oppresses and brutalizes religious believers and conservatives. And they make those charges in a theologically inflected idiom that’s meant to address and amplify the right’s intense worries about persecution by progressives.

Among the most extreme catastrophists writing in this vein is Stephen Wolfe, whose book “The Case for Christian Nationalism” calls for a “just revolution” against America’s “gynocracy” (rule by women) that emasculates men, persuading them to affirm “feminine virtues, such as empathy, fairness and equality.” In its place, Mr. Wolfe proposes the installation of a “Christian prince,” or a form of “theocratic Caesarism.”

Other authors aspire to greater nuance by calling the dictatorship weighing down on religious believers soft totalitarianism, usually under the rule of social-justice progressivism. These writers often draw direct parallels between the fate of devout Christians in the contemporary United States and the struggles of Eastern Europeans who sought to practice their faith but were harshly persecuted by Soviet tyranny

the most recent book by the writer Rod Dreher, “Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents.”

Patrick Deneen of the University of Notre Dame offers the most elaborate and intellectually sophisticated response in his recent book, “Regime Change: Toward a Postliberal Future.”

“Regime Change” is a much darker book that goes well beyond diagnosing America’s ills to propose what sounds, in certain passages, like a radical cure.

Mr. Deneen and other discontented intellectuals of the religious right can perhaps be most accurately described as political reactionaries looking to undertake a revolutionary act in reverse.

Growing numbers of Americans supposedly reject this outlook, demanding a postliberal government and social, cultural and economic order — basically, hard-right policies on religious and moral issues and hard left on economics. But the forces of liberalism are entrenched on the center left and center right, using every power at their disposal to prevent regime change.

In some passages, he advocates a “peaceful but vigorous overthrow of a corrupt and corrupting liberal ruling class” and proposes modest reforms to replace i

in other passages, Mr. Deneen goes much further, describing the separation of church and state as a “totalitarian undertaking” that must be reversed so that American public life can be fully integrated with conservative forms of Christianit

He even affirmatively quotes a passage from Machiavelli in which he talks of the need to use “extralegal and almost bestial” forms of resistance, including “mobs running through the streets,” in order to topple the powers that be.

The source of these maladies, Mr. Deneen claims, is liberalism, which until recently has dominated both political parties in the United States, imposing an ideology of individual rights and historical progress on the country from above. This ideology, he says, denigrates tradition, faith, authority and community.

Costin Alamariu, the person generally understood to be writing under the pseudonym Bronze Age Pervert.

He self-published a book in 2018, “Bronze Age Mindset,” which follows Friedrich Nietzsche and other authors beloved by the European far right in proclaiming that Western civilization itself is on the verge of collapse, its greatest achievements far in the past, its present a “garbage world” in an advanced state of decay.

All around us, Mr. Alamariu declares, greatness and beauty are under assault. Who are its enemies? Women, for one. (“It took 100 years of women in public life for them to almost totally destroy a civilization.”) Then there’s belief in democratic equality. (“I believe that democracy is the final cause of all the political problems I describe.”)

But blame must most of all be laid at the feet of the creature Mr. Alamariu calls the “bugman,” a term he uses to describe a majority of human beings alive today. This insectlike infestation venerates mediocrity and is “motivated by a titanic hatred of the well-turned-out and beautiful.”

Mr. Alamariu proposes breeding great men of strength who model themselves on pirates, disregarding laws and norms, plundering and taking anything they want and ultimately installing themselves as absolute rulers over the rest of us.

“Now imagine a man of Trump’s charisma, but who is not merely beholden to the generals, but one of them, and able to rule and intimidate them as well as seduce the many. … Caesars and Napoleons are sure to follow.”

In a recent essay, Mr. Alamariu wrote: “I believe in fascism or ‘something worse’ …. I believe in rule by a military caste of men who would be able to guide society toward a morality of eugenics.”

Mr. Alamariu’s recently self-published doctoral dissertation reached No. 23 on Amazon sitewide in mid-September. Among those on the right treating the author as a friend, ally or interlocutor worthy of respectful engagement are the prominent activist Christopher Rufo, the author Richard Hanania and the economist-blogger Tyler Cowen.

These writers are giving Republican elites permission and encouragement to do things that just a few years ago would have been considered unthinkable.

In a second term, Mr. Trump’s ambition is to fire tens of thousands of career civil servants throughout the federal bureaucracy and replace them with loyalists. He also reportedly plans to staff the executive branch with more aggressive right-wing lawyers. These would surely be people unwaveringly devoted to the president and his agenda as well as the danger the Democratic Party supposedly poses to the survival of the United States.

These writers also exercise a powerful influence on media personalities with large audiences. Tucker Carlson has interviewed Curtis Yarvin and declared that with regard to the 2024 election, “everything is at stake. What wouldn’t they do? What haven’t they done? How will you prepare yourself?”

Other right-wing influencers with large followings assert more bluntly that if conservatives lose in 2024, they will be hunted down and murdered by the regime.

It’s important that we respond to such statements by pointing out there is literally no evidence to support them. Other intellectual catastrophists are likewise wrong to suggest the country is ruled by a progressive tyranny, and we can know this because people on the right increasingly say such things while facing no legal consequences at all.

The question, then, is why the intellectual catastrophists have gotten to this point — and why others on the right are listening to them. The answer, I think, is an intense dislike of what America has become, combined with panic about the right’s ability to win sufficient power in the democratic arena to force a decisive change.

In refusing to accept that deal, many of the right’s most prominent writers are ceasing to behave like citizens, who must be willing to share rule with others, in favor of thinking and acting like commissars eager to serve a strongman.

“Pocock rejected the idea that politics or philosophy addressed the same problems over time — what justice meant for Aristotle did not mean the same for Hobbes or for Rousseau,”

“So explaining what political ideas meant in theory and in practice became the historian’s task.”

The Cambridge School attracted devotees across the world in departments of politics, history, philosophy, literature and language — scholars who were admonished to set aside any modern-day assumptions and prejudices they might hold when delving into the past.

“Readers, Christian or non-believing, who may find themselves involved in analyses of thought they consider obsolete or false, are asked to remember that they are studying the history of a time when such thinking was offered and read seriously,” he wrote.

Professor Pocock’s first book, “The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law,” made clear that he would not be a conventional historian. The book asked how people in the 17th century viewed their past, and he wasn’t satisfied with drawing on the go-to philosopher of the period, John Locke. As Colin Kidd wrote in The London Review of Books in 2008, the book “drove a bypass around Locke” and “concentrated instead on a set of debates among such obscure antiquaries as William Petyt, James Tyrrell, William Atwood and Robert Brady.”

“The Machiavellian Moment” cemented Professor Pocock’s reputation among historians, and it continued to grow from there. The first volume of “Barbarism and Religion” came out in 1999, when Professor Pocock was in his mid-70s. Volume 6 appeared in 2015. He also edited or co-edited “The Political Works of James Harrington” (1977), “Edmund Burke: Reflections on the Revolution in France” (1987) and “The Varieties of British Political Thought, 1500-1800” (1993), among other books.

“Pocock’s central contention,” the Oxford historian Keith Thomas wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1986, “is that a work of political thought can only be understood if the reader is aware of the contemporary linguistic constraints to which its author was subject, for these constraints prescribed both his subject matter and the way in which that subject matter was conceptualized.”

its application to the history of political ideas forms a great contrast to the assumptions of the 1950s, when it was widely thought that the close reading of a text by an analytic philosopher was sufficient to establish its meaning, even though the philosopher was quite innocent of any knowledge of the period in which the text was written or of the linguistic traditions within which its author operated.”

“Historians need to understand that the history of discourse is not a simple linear sequence in which new patterns overcome and replace the old,” he wrote in 1988 in a preface to a reissue of “Politics, Language and Time,” a 1971 essay collection, “but a complex dialogue in which these patterns persist in transforming one another.”

Why this, why now?

One answer is simple misapprehension: People steeped in the most alarmist forms of activism and argument may believe, wrongly, that we’re on track for the imminent collapse of human civilization or the outright extinction of the human race.

Another answer is ideological: The ideas of white and Western guilt are particularly important to contemporary progressivism, and in certain visions of ecological economy, removing one’s potential kids from the carbon-emitting equation amounts to a kind of eco-reparations.

I still suspect the fear of suffering and dying per se is more important than the kind of suffering and death being envisioned — that it’s the general idea of bearing a child fated to extinction that’s most frightening, not the specific perils of climate change.

the psychological roots of the procreation-amid-climate-change anxiety.

Or, rather, an image of men in a godless universe.

the problem of meaning in a purposeless cosmos clearly hangs over the more secularized precincts of our society, lending surprising resilience to all kinds of spiritual impulses and ideas but also probably contributing to certain forms of existential dread.

to the extent that every child deliberately conceived is a direct wager against Pascal’s dire analysis, it would make sense that under such shadows, anxieties about the ethics of childbearing would be particularly acute.

Against these anxieties, my colleague’s column urges a belief in a future where human agency overcomes existential threats and ushers in a “welcoming” and even “thrilling” world. This is a welcome admonition; I believe in those possibilities myself.

But the promise of a purposive, divinely created universe — in which, I would stress, it remains more than reasonable to believe — is that life is worth living and worth conceiving even if the worst happens, the crisis comes, the hope of progress fails.

The child who lives to see the green future is infinitely valuable; so is the child who lives to see the apocalypse. For us, there is only the duty to give that child its chance to join the story; its destiny belongs to God.

a senior College Board official now acknowledges the organization was mindful of how “systemic” and certain other words in the modern lexicon of race in America would receive intense scrutiny in some places.

Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development. He said the College Board worried some phrases and concepts had been “co-opted for a variety of purposes” and were being used as “political instruments.” So the organization took a cautious approach to the final edits even as it sought to preserve robust content on historical and cultural impacts of slavery and racial discrimination.

“We wanted this course to be adopted by 50 states, and we wanted as many students and teachers as possible to be able to experience it,” Manoharan said. His acknowledgment underscored the inherent politics behind promoting a course that deals so squarely with race in America.

John K. Thornton, a professor of African American studies and history at Boston University, who contributed to the planning, said he was pleased the course opens with five weeks on early Africa. But he lamented that reparations and Black Lives Matter ended up only as optional research topics. “It did upset me a little bit,” he said. “Those things obviously feel very much a part of what a college course is about.”

DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, has accused the course architects of promoting “a political agenda.” He also criticized an early course plan’s references to Black queer studies and “intersectionality,” a concept that helps explain overlapping forms of discrimination that affect Black women and others.

Teresa Reed, dean of music at the University of Louisville, said her work as one of 13 members of the AP African American studies committee resembled similar assignments she has undertaken for other AP courses. Reed supports the African American studies course plan and said it will continue to be revised as pilot teachers give feedback. She said she saw no evidence of political meddling in the course design. “That was absolutely not my experience,”

Two luminaries in the field, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, both of Harvard University and both of whom advised the College Board, also issued statements vouching for the course.

The first 81-page draft of the course plan, in February 2022, drew topics and sources from the syllabi of introductory classes at historically Black universities, Ivy League schools and other prominent institutions. The College Board said it was produced as a preview for 200 college professors at a March 2022 symposium. Faculty recommended cutting 20 percent to 25 percent of the proposed topics, the College Board said, and as much as half of suggested readings.

The April version, 299 pages, was the pilot course guide, a road map for teachers before classes began in the fall. It included much more detail on goals, essential knowledge and potential source material. It also made an important switch on contemporary issues: Certain lessons on reparations, incarceration and movements for Black lives became optional and would not be covered on the AP exam. At this stage, the guide included a week of instruction on Black feminism, womanism and intersectionality, and it used the word “systemic” nine times.

One of the most consequential decisions made last year was to set aside significant time — ultimately, three weeks — near the end of the course for a research paper of up to 1,500 words on a topic students would choose. The project will count for 20 percent of the AP score for those who seek college credit.

Among 40 sample topics in the official plan are Black Lives Matter; intersectionality; reparations debates; gay life and expression in Black communities; and Black conservatism.

College Board officials point to the development of an extensive digital library for the course — including a 1991 text on intersectionality from Crenshaw — as evidence that they are not censoring writers or voices. Crenshaw teachers, they say, use the course framework as a starting point to design their own syllabi of readings and assignments.

Riding the waves of mutability has always been possible if the frame of mind in government and society is adequately supple and responsive. Reliance on ancient nostrums, and expectations that old solutions will remain good enough, are almost inevitably fatal.

Civilisations that become dependent on large, widespread and complex supply networks and reciprocal markets usually generate their own fragilities. If one part of such a network fails, the effects cascade in a series of chain reactions through all apparently powerful participants in the system

The end of the Bronze Age c.1200 BC, perhaps triggered by drought in Anatolia, may have precipitated one such domino collapse, as the Hittite empire, the Mycenaeans, the Mesopotamian states and Pharaonic Egypt all either fell apart or shrank to an unrecognisable impotence.

Volcanoes are the unexpected killers. Their spewing of ash into an atmosphere whose winds distribute it around the globe has repeatedly destroyed summers, devastated crops, induced famines and collapsed societies

In his hands, the triumph of the West, with the unconscionable horrors of the Atlantic slave trade at its heart, takes on the appearance of an alarming fusion of Faust and Midas. For centuries, Europeans felt they could do no wrong. They could use the world, its people and beauties. They could transform it as they wished, shifting its plants, animals and populations where they wanted, and there would be no consequences. Or at least, as in those two myths of the cult of ‘entitlement’ – a word Frankopan repeatedly uses of the transforming empires – the consequences were hidden from the perpetrators.

His story of destruction over the past two centuries is one of arrogant myopia which led in the 20th century to ‘a sequence of catastrophes unparalleled both in human history and in that of the natural world. The suffering of the past 100 years has been by far the greatest in recorded history in terms of its scale and its horror’.

The assumption that man must conquer nature was allied to the capital and industrialised capacity to bring it about. Humanity became its own climate. Its own actions created the world in which it lived

The value of this book is as an act of deep understanding, recognising not only scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are epiphenomena – not dominators of the Earth but products of it

Bleakly and soberingly, Frankopan recognises from the long line of precedents that the prospects are for a world of war and suffering. The destructive changes are already ‘baked in’. Success does not breed success, he says, but more often than not ‘sows the seeds of ruin’.

They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization

My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security priso

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet

they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones

My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks

I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry

We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.

Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors

My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades.

Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits

No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements.

And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same?

Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail

However, there is widespread skepticism about the prospect for change. In eight of the 17 publics, roughly half or more of those polled say the political system needs major changes or a complete overhaul and say they have little or no confidence the system can be changed effectively.

We found that the strongest predictor of being dissatisfied was being unhappy with the current state of the national economy. Another significant predictor was how someone feels about economic opportunity.

dissatisfaction with the way democracy is working was much more common among people who expect that when children in their country today grow up, they will be worse off financially than their parents. The economic pessimists are also especially likely to think their country’s political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. For example, in the United Kingdom, 61% of respondents who are pessimistic about the next generation’s financial prospects think their country needs significant political reform, compared with just 34% among those who are optimistic that the next generation will do better financially than their parents.

People who believe their country is doing a poor job of dealing with the pandemic are consistently more likely to say they are dissatisfied with the way their democracy is working and that they want significant changes to the political system. For instance, 73% of Germans who feel their country is handling the crisis poorly say they believe their political system needs major changes or should be completely overhauled, while just 32% of those who think the country is handling it well express this view.

Across 27 nations we polled in 2018, a median of 54% said that most politicians in their country are corrupt. This sentiment was especially high in Greece (89%) and Russia (82%). When we asked Americans a similar question in the fall of 2020, two-thirds said most politicians are corrupt.

A median of 78% across the 38 nations polled said that “a democratic system where representatives elected by citizens decide what becomes law” is a very or somewhat good way to govern their country. More than half expressed this view in every country polled. However, even at this broad level, enthusiasm for representative democracy was somewhat subdued – a median of only 33% said it is a very good approach to governing.

Across the 16 advanced economies surveyed, a median of just 17% consider American democracy a good model for other countries to follow. A median of 57% think it used to be a good example but has not been in recent years. And around a quarter say the U.S. has never been a good example. The belief that democracy in the U.S. has never been a good model for other nations is especially common among young adults.

For example, a median of 49% believed a system in which “experts, not elected officials, make decisions according to what they think is best for the country” would be very or somewhat good. 

A median of 26% considered “a system in which a strong leader can make decisions without interference from parliament or the courts” a very or somewhat good way to govern.

A median of 24% said “a system in which the military rules the country” would be a very or somewhat good system. In five countries – Vietnam, Indonesia, India, South Africa and Nigeria – roughly half or more expressed this opinion, as did at least 40% in another six nations. And higher-income nations weren’t completely immune: 17% in the United States, Italy and France believed military rule could be a good way to run the country.

For example, 27% of Americans who identified as conservative thought autocracy would be a good way to govern, compared with 14% who identified as liberal. And 20% of conservatives supported military rule, compared with 12% of liberals. People with lower levels of educational attainment were more likely to consider military rule a good way to govern in 23 countries.

A median of more than 67% across 34 countries rated a fair judicial system, gender equality and freedom of religion as very important. But there was less support for holding regular competitive elections, freedom of speech and press freedom. A median of roughly six-in-ten or fewer said it was very important to have free expression on the internet or to allow human rights groups and opposition parties to operate freely.

In Greece, for example, the share who say having people of many different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds makes their country a better place to live more than doubled between 2017 and 2021. Over the same period, favorable views of diversity increased by about 10 percentage points or more in Japan, the Netherlands, the UK and Spain. Slightly smaller increases can be seen in Germany, South Korea, Australia and Sweden.

A median of 67% across the same 17 publics say racial or ethnic discrimination is a problem where they live. Roughly three-in-ten or more in Germany, Spain, the UK, Greece, France, the U.S. and Italy say it is a very serious problem in their country. Younger adults and those on the ideological left are often more convinced on this point. In the U.S., about two-thirds of Americans on the left say racial and ethnic discrimination is a very serious problem in their country, compared with only 19% of Americans on the political right.

median of 56% across 17 advanced economies surveyed in 2021 say their political system needs major changes or needs to be completely reformed. Roughly two-thirds or more express this opinion in Italy, Spain, the U.S., South Korea, Greece, France, Belgium and Japan.

Across the 17 advanced economies we surveyed in 2021, a median of 61% say their country is more divided than before the outbreak. Moreover, the share of the public that feels this way has risen substantially as the pandemic has worn on. In the spring of 2020, only months into the crisis, just 29% of Canadians believed they were more divided, but a year later 61% express this view.

a median of 64% disagreed with the statement “most elected officials care what people like me think.”

A median of 50% disagreed with the statement “the state is run for the benefit of all the people,” while 49% agreed.

For example, 88% of Italians in 2002 said their government was run for the benefit of all, but only 30% held this view in 2019.

Across 34 nations polled in 2019, a median of 67% agreed that voting gives ordinary people some say about how the government runs things.

let’s shift from self-flagellation to prescription

The essence of the humanities’ failure, over the last generation but especially in the internet era, 0c 0cis a refusal to accept that a similar kind of separation is necessary for what the guardians of the liberal arts are trying to preserve.

I flatter myself that I can mostly follow the sentence structure in these books, but in every other way I am the reader described by Claybaugh, too attached to the distracting present to enter fully the complex language of the past.

But that quest can end only in self-destruction when the thing to which you’re trying so desperately to bind yourself (the culture and spirit of the smartphone-era internet, especially) is actually devouring all the habits of mind that are required for your own discipline’s survival. You simply cannot sustain a serious humanism as an integral part of a digitalized culture; you have to separate

“The humanities sealed their own fate,” the Temple University professor Jacob Shell tweeted in response to the Heller article, “when they refused to adjust to playing the needed role of intellectual ‘rightist’ critique of soc science, technocracy.”

a more modest version of Shell’s argument would be just that the humanities need to be proudly reactionary in some way, to push consciously against the digital order in some fashion, to self-consciously separate and make a virtue of that separation.

at the very least it would involve embracing an identity as the modern multiversity’s internal exiles — refusing any resentment of lavishly funded STEM buildings because that funding is corruption and your own calling is more esoteric and monastic, declining any claim to political relevance because what you’re offering is above and before the practical business of the world

It would mean banishing every token of the digital age from classrooms and libraries, shutting out the internet, offering your work much more as an initiation into mysteries, a plunge into the very depths. It would mean cultivating a set of skills even less immediately useful to technocratic professional life than reading a dense 19th-century text — memorization and recitation, to your classmates if possible

Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”

We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.

“The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years

a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010

The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states.

Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions.

The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.

the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.

We do see that southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”

By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.

These gaps play a significant role in determining the quality of teachers,

Sixty percent of teachers and 65 percent of principals reported believing that systemic racism exists. Only about 20 percent of teachers and principals reported that they believe systemic racism does not exist, and the remainder were not sure

“We find,” they write, “that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations — and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance.”

teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater nonteaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions.

the scholars found that the cognitive skills of teachers in the United States fell in the middle ranks:Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.

Increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation.

How, then, to raise teacher skill level in the United States? Hanushek and his two colleagues have a simple answer: raise teacher pay to make it as attractive to college graduates as high-skill jobs in other fields.

policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.

The teaching of disputed subjects in schools has compounded many of the difficulties in American education.

The researchers found that controversies over critical race theory, sex education and transgender issues — aggravated by divisive debates over responses to Covid and its aftermath — are inflicting a heavy toll on teachers and principals.

“On top of the herculean task of carrying out the essential functions of their jobs,” they write, “educators increasingly find themselves in the position of addressing contentious, politicized issues in their schools as the United States has experienced increasing political polarization.”

Teachers and principals, they add, “have been pulled in multiple directions as they try to balance and reconcile not only their own beliefs on such matters but also the beliefs of others around them, including their leaders, fellow staff, students, and students’ family members.”

These conflicting pressures take place in a climate where “emotions in response to these issues have run high within communities, resulting in the harassment of educators, bans against literature depicting diverse characters, and calls for increased parental involvement in deciding academic content.”

Forty-eight percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in school leadership or teaching, respectively, was a job-related stressor. By comparison, only 16 percent of working adults indicated that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in their jobs was a source of job-related stress

In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364

Nearly all Black or African American principals (92 percent) and teachers (87 percent) reported believing that systemic racism exists.

White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.

and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compar

A 54 percent majority of teachers and principals said there “should not be legal limits on classroom conversations about racism, sexism, and other topics,” while 20 percent said there should be legislated constraint

Voters, in turn, are highly polarized on the teaching of issues impinging on race or ethnicity in public schools. The Education Next 2022 Survey asked, for example:Some people think their local public schools place too little emphasis on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other people think their local public schools place too much emphasis on these topics. What is your view about your local public schools?

Among Democrats, 55 percent said too little emphasis was placed on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people, and 8 percent said too much.

Among Republicans, 51 said too much and 10 percent said too little.

Because of the lack of reliable national data, there is widespread disagreement among scholars of education over the scope and severity of the shortage of credentialed teachers, although there is more agreement that these problems are worse in low-income, high majority-minority school systems and in STEM and special education faculties.

Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term “Critical Race Theory,” as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity. These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.

The chilling effect also has led to marked declines in general support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity.

These political conflicts, the authors wrote,have made the already hard work of public education more difficult, undermining school management, negatively impacting staff, and heightening student stress and anxiety. Several principals shared that they were reconsidering their own roles in public education in light of the rage at teachers and rage at administrators’ playing out in their communities.

State University of New York tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction” for 50 years, from the 1970s to the present and founda consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.

Who among the next generation of college graduates will choose to teach?

Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s, and 38 percent since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years

the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50-year low

Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81 percent to 42 percent in the last 15 years

The combination of these factors — declining prestige, lower pay than other professions that require a college education, increased workloads, and political and ideological pressures — is creating both intended and unintended consequences for teacher accountability reforms mandating tougher licensing rules, evaluations and skill testing.

Education policy over the past decade has focused considerable effort on improving human capital in schools through teacher accountability. These reforms, and the research upon which they drew, were based on strong assumptions about how accountability would affect who decided to become a teacher. Counter to most assumptions, our findings document how teacher accountability reduced the supply of new teacher candidates by, in part, decreasing perceived job security, satisfaction and autonomy.

The reforms, Kraft and colleagues continued, increasedthe likelihood that schools could not fill vacant teaching positions. Even more concerning, effects on unfilled vacancies were concentrated in hard-to-staff schools that often serve larger populations of low-income students and students of color

We find that evaluation reforms increased the quality of newly hired novice teachers by reducing the number of teachers that graduated from the least selective institutions

We find no evidence that evaluation reforms served to attract teachers who attended the most selective undergraduate institutions.

In other words, the economic incentives, salary structure and work-life pressures characteristic of public education employment have created a climate in which contemporary education reforms have perverse and unintended consequences that can worsen rather than alleviate the problems facing school systems.

If so, to improve the overall quality of the nation’s more than three million public schoolteachers, reformers may want to give priority to paychecks, working conditions, teacher autonomy and punishing workloads before attempting to impose higher standards, tougher evaluations and less job security.

Karahan Tepe, and its penis chamber, and everything that inexplicably surrounds the chamber – shrines, cells, altars, megaliths, audience halls et al – is vastly older than anything comparable, and plumbs quite unimaginable depths of time, back before agriculture, probably back before normal pottery, right back to a time when we once thought human ‘civilisation’ was simply impossible.

After all, hunter gatherers – cavemen with flint arrowheads – without regular supplies of grain, without the regular meat and milk of domesticated animals, do not build temple-towns with water systems.

Taken together with its age, complexity, sophistication, and its deep, resonant mysteriousness, and its many sister sites now being unearthed across the Harran Plains – collectively known as the Tas Tepeler, or the ‘stone hills’ – these carved, ochre-red rocks, so silent, brooding, and watchful in the hard whirring breezes of the semi-desert, constitute what might just be the greatest archaeological revelation in the history of humankind.

The solitary Kurdish man, on that summer’s day in 1994, had made an irreversibly profound discovery – which would eventually lead to the penis pillars of Karahan Tepe, and an archaeological anomaly which challenges, time and again, everything we know of human prehistory.

in late 1994 the German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt came to the site of Gobekli Tepe to begin his slow, diligent excavations of its multiple, peculiar, enormous T-stones, which are generally arranged in circles – like the standing stones of Avebury or Stonehenge. Unlike European standing stones, however, the older Turkish megaliths are often intricately carved: with images of local fauna. Sometimes the stones depict cranes, boars, or wildfowl: creatures of the hunt. There are also plenty of leopards, foxes, and vultures. Occasionally these animals are depicted next to human heads.

The obsession with the penis is obvious – more so, now we have the benefit of hindsight provided by Karahan Tepe and the other sites. Very few representations of women have emerged from the Tas Tepeler so far; there is one obscene caricature of a woman perhaps giving birth. Whatever inspired these temple-towns it was a not a benign matriarchal culture. Quite the opposite, maybe.

Urfa man now has a silent hall of his own in one of Turkey’s greatest archaeological galleries. More importantly, we can now see that Urfa man has the same body stance of the T-shaped man-pillars at Gobekli (and in many of the Tas Tepeler): his arms are in front of him, protecting his penis

‘Gobekli Tepe upends our view of human history. We always thought that agriculture came first, then civilisation: farming, pottery, social hierarchies. But here it is reversed, it seems the ritual centre came first, then when enough hunter gathering people collected to worship – or so I believe – they realised they had to feed people. Which means farming.’ He waved at the surrounding hills, ‘It is no coincidence that in these same hills in the Fertile Crescent men and women first domesticated the local wild einkorn grass, becoming wheat, and they also first domesticated pigs, cows and sheep. This is the place where Homo sapiens went from plucking the fruit from the tree, to toiling and sowing the ground.’

People were already speculating that – if you see the Garden of Eden mythos as an allegory of the Neolithic Revolution: i.e. our fall from the relative ease of hunter-gathering to the relative hardships of farming (and life did get harder when we first started farming, as we worked longer hours, and caught diseases from domesticated animals), then Gobekli Tepe and its environs is probably the place where this happened

‘I believe Gobekli Tepe is a temple in Eden’. It’s a quote I reused, to some controversy, because people took Klaus literally. But he did not mean it literally. He meant it allegorically.

This number is so large it is hard to take in. For comparison the Great Pyramid at Giza is 4,500 years old. Stonehenge is 5,000 years old. The Cairn de Barnenez tomb-complex in Brittany, perhaps the oldest standing structure in Europe, could be up to 7,000 years old.

I do definitely know this: some time in 8000 BC the creators of Gobekli Tepe buried their great structures under tons of rubble. They entombed it. We can speculate why. Did they feel guilt? Did they need to propitiate an angry God? Or just want to hide it?’ Klaus was also fairly sure on one other thing. ‘Gobekli Tepe is unique.’

These days Gobekli Tepe is not just a famous archaeological site, it is a Unesco World-Heritage-listed tourist honeypot which can generate a million visitors a year. It is all enclosed by a futuristic hi-tech steel-and-plastic marquee (no casual wandering around taking photos of the stones and workers

Necmi shows me the gleaming museum built to house the greatest finds from the region: including a 11,000 year old statue, retrieved from beneath the centre of Sanliurfa itself, and perhaps the world’s oldest life size carved human figure

‘We have found no homes, no human remains. Where is everyone, did they gather for festivals, then disperse? As for their religion, I have no real idea, perhaps Gobekli Tepe was a place of excarnation, for exposing the bones of the dead to be consumed by vultures, so the bodies have all gone

Aslan tells me how archaeologists at Gobekli have also, more recently, found tantalising evidence of alcohol: huge troughs with the chemical residue of fermentation, indicating mighty ritual feasts, maybe.

he explains how scientists at Karahan Tepe, as well as Gobekli Tepe, have now found evidence of homes.

The builders lived here. They ate their roasted game here. They slept here. And they used, it seems, a primitive but poetic form of pottery, shaped from polished stone. They possibly did elaborate manhood rituals in the Karahan Tepe penis chambe

Yet still we have no sign at all of contemporary agriculture; they were, it still appears, hunter gatherers, but of unnerving sophistication.

Another unnerving oddity is the curious number of carvings which show people with six fingers. Is this symbolic, or an actual deformity? Perhaps the mark of a strange tribe?

Karahan Tepe is stupefyingly big. ‘So far,’ he says, ‘We have dug up maybe 1 per cent of the site’ – and it is already impressive. I ask him how many pillars – T stones – might be buried here. He casually points at a rectangular rock peering above the dry grass. ‘That’s probably another megalith right there, waiting to be excavated. I reckon there are probably thousands more of them, all around us. We are only at the beginning. And there could be dozens more Tas Tepeler we have not yet found, spread over hundreds of kilometres.’

Karahan too was definitely and purposely buried. That is the reason Necmi and his team were able to unearth the penis pillars so quickly, all they had to do was scoop away the backfill, exposing the phallic pillars, sculpted from living rock.

the most remarkable answer of all, and it is this: archaeologists in southeastern Turkey are, at this moment, digging up a wild, grand, artistically coherent, implausibly strange, hitherto-unknown-to-us religious civilisation, which has been buried in Mesopotamia for ten thousand years. And it was all buried deliberately.

The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

“The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception

his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo

By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.

For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures

In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.

he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew

She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision

in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975

while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.

Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state

It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.

Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich

She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another

All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it

right now Germany’s resolution forbids it

This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth

The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”

What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning

Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil

Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.

Special effects software can give your music all sorts of subtle vibes. For $299, for instance, you can make your song sound as though it was recorded in Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, on the $20,000 vintage microphones with the $100,000 mixing console that recorded Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana. For $259 you can simulate the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios

In the past, when you assembled all the tracks for a song, it would have to be mixed and mastered in a studio by a sound engineer adjusting the levels. Now an app will do it for you.

Now, all you need to do is get the files uploaded to streaming services. If you are signed with a label, they will do that for you, but you don’t need a record deal to do that. There are companies such as DistroKid that act as postmen: for £17.99 a year, you can ensure that the song you created in your bedroom is available on multiple streaming platforms.

Some artists thrive on social media. It suits lively, quirky performers like Ryder, and artists who want to experiment with different genres. Mxmtoon, a 23-year-old American YouTuber, singer-songwriter and ukulele player, is also a streamer on Twitch, a platform on which people watch others playing online games, has published graphic novels and made a podcast. Maia — the artist’s name — describes mxmtoon as “a multi-hyphenated project”.

More traditional musicians struggle with some aspects of tech. “We get together,” says Sital-Singh of his contemporaries in the business, “and have a little moan about how everyone’s telling us to do TikTok and we can’t bring ourselves to dance and we feel old and decrepit.”

Even digital natives struggle sometimes: “I already have nostalgia for a simpler past, even though I’m 23,” says Maia. “It’s exciting but it does put so much pressure on a normal individual to be an entrepreneur to advertise their own personal brand.”

Journalists, regrettably, no longer have the power they once did. What matters these days is social media. The A&R (artists and repertoire) people at record companies who would once have hung out in basement clubs scouting for new talent now sit in meetings examining the data on artists’ social media performance.

Now that the whole world’s music is available all over the world at the click of a play button, there’s a greater diversity among top-selling artists.

People making videos of themselves performing or dancing to the song on TikTok helped propel it to the stratosphere. It has been streamed a billion times. Sethi now plays to packed venues in America and Europe; last year, he performed at Coachella, America’s Glastonbury. “Without digital technology I would be a south Asian indy musician, working on the fringes of Bollywood,” he says from his home in New York.

For musicians, it’s more ambiguous. Because the costs of making music are lower, anybody with ambition can have a go. Many more people, as a result, are getting into the music business. According to PPL, the organisation which distributes money to music performers and rights-holders, the number of registered artists has risen from 61,310, when the industry was at its nadir, to 165,039 last year.

That makes the business fiercely competitive. As Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of Tarzan Economics, points out, around 100,000 tracks are being uploaded on to Spotify every day: that’s more than were released in an entire calendar year in the 1980s

That has cemented the power of the record companies. When the digital revolution started, it was widely expected that record labels would cease to exist, and be replaced by a model in which everybody promoted and distributed their own music. That’s not what has happened: because it’s so difficult to get noticed, embryonic stars need record labels to promote them.

A label invests in the production of the music, the styling of the band, video content, interviews, touring and the crucial business of getting a song on a streaming service’s playlist that suggests the song to listeners to suit their tastes. Artists that are signed with major labels get paid more, per stream, than those that aren’t.

Three quarters of streamed tracks have one of the major record labels behind them. And even though streaming is booming, it doesn’t contribute much to the incomes of the vast majority of artists.

Most artists stay hungry. A single stream will earn a musician anywhere between 0.1p and 2.4p. Crispin Hunt reckons that on average a million streams for a song — a wild ambition for most musicians — will, if you have to pay a cut to a record company, probably make you £1,000

If you’ve then got to pay your manager 20 per cent, and divide the rest between the four band members, “it barely pays for a Sainsbury’s shop. That’s why music is dominated by middle-class people called Crispin whose parents can afford to buy them an electric guitar and a laptop.”

For Christie Gardner, half of Lilo, a two-woman band, it helps planning gigs. “You can see where your listeners are and you can tell what they’re listening to. We make decisions about shows on that basis.” But for most bands, the economics of live performance are pretty grim.

Deathcrash’s manager Joe Taylor says that the band has been offered the opportunity of a European tour supporting a much bigger act. It would be good for their career but not their bank balance. The fees per show would be €200; once the costs of a sound engineer, a tour van, a driver, fuel, hotels and a carnet for importing musical instruments into the EU had been factored in, they would lose £15,000.

music has always been an uneconomic business, which people subsidise through other activities. The fiddler in the village pub probably worked in the fields in the daytime and played for money and fun in the evenings and at the weekend, rather as Ryder ran a juice bar and sang at weddings. These days, there is also the wafer-thin chance that they might end up being one of the 1,200 artists who make more than $1 million a year on Spotify

There are some signs that in the new musical economy, the balance of power between artists and the big record companies may have tipped slightly in the artists’ favour

the share of streaming revenues going to artists increased from 19.7 per cent to 23.3 per cent between 2012 and 2021 and that going to songwriters has risen from 8 per cent in 2008 to 15 per cent in 2021. “Outcomes for consumers, artists and songwriters,” it concludes, “are getting better.”

Most of the extra revenues generated by streaming are going to the top earners. But the stars are not the only ones benefiting. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of artists earning over $1 million on Spotify more than doubled, but so did the number earning over $10,000

more than two fifths of artists who release their own music aren’t expecting to make a full-time career. They’re in it for fun, for the love of it, or to be able to show their mum that they have released a song on Spotify.

It seems likely that the more music is being created, the greater the chance that wonderful tunes are being written, but it’s not necessarily the case. The best stuff might get buried under a mound of mediocrity.

Still others believe that the advent of civil rights laws created, in essence, a second Constitution entirely, one that privileges group identity over individual liberty.

Protestant Christian nationalists tend to have a higher regard for the American founding, but they believe it’s been corrupted. They claim that the 1787 Constitution is essentially dead, replaced by progressive power politics that have destroyed constitutional government.

Catholic post-liberals believe that liberal democracy itself is problematic. According to their critique, the Constitution’s emphasis on individual liberty “atomizes” American life and degrades the traditional institutions of church and family that sustain human flourishing.

The original Constitution and Bill of Rights, while a tremendous advance from the Articles of Confederation, suffered from a singular, near-fatal flaw. They protected Americans from federal tyranny, but they also left states free to oppress American citizens in the most horrific ways

if your ultimate aim is the destruction of your political enemies, then the Constitution does indeed stand in your way.

Right-wing constitutional critics do get one thing right: The 1787 Constitution is mostly gone, and America’s constitutional structure is substantially different from the way it was at the founding. But that’s a good thing