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Why did the national emergency brought about by the Covid pandemic not only fail to unite the country but instead provoke the exact opposite development, further polarization?

Covid seems to be the almost ideal polarizing crisis. It was conducive to creating strong identities and mapping onto existing ones

That these identities corresponded to compliance with public health measures literally increased “riskiness” of intergroup interaction. The financial crisis was also polarizing for similar reasons — it was too easy for different groups to blame each other for the problems.

What started as a smattering of unconnected Facebook events that sprung up the day after Donald Trump’s election became the largest single-day political action in U.S. history — a convening of nearly half a million people, who organized themselves by state and city and bought plane tickets and chartered buses to D.C. to be together on Jan. 21, 2017, five years ago today.

If nothing else, the fact that we remember the Women’s March as a net-positive event rather than a Fyre Festival is a major win.But five years after the record-setting event, it’s a bit harder to identify its place in contemporary politics. The image of millions of Americans filling the streets to express dissatisfaction with the Trump agenda held immense promise for so many. Did it deliver?

What do we expect the purpose of public protest to be? Some critics deem a social movement a failure if it doesn’t yield immediate, tangible policy changes.

Glib treatments of World War II have done real harm, she says, distorting our understanding of the past and consequently shaping how we approach the future. As “the last American military action about which there is anything like a positive consensus,” World War II is “the good war that served as prologue to three-quarters of a century of misbegotten ones.”

Like the cadets she teaches at West Point, civilians would do well to see World War II as something other than a buoyant tale of American goodness trouncing Nazi evil. Yes, she says up front, American involvement in the war was necessary. But she maintains that it’s been a national fantasy to presume that “necessary” has to mean the same thing as “good.”

The United States only entered the war after the attack on Pearl Harbor — and even then, Samet says, contemporary observers remarked on “a general American indifference to the fact that the world was on fire.”

For decades, psychologists have puzzled over the ingredients of creative popularity by studying music, because the medium offers literally millions of data points.

Is the thing that separates one-hit wonders from consistent hitmakers luck, or talent, or some complex combination of factors

Berg compiled a data set of more than 3 million songs released from 1959 to 2010 and pulled out the biggest hits. He used an algorithm developed by the company EchoNest to measure the songs’ sonic features, including key, tempo, and danceability.

Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history

This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families

A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,

The political and pedagogical firefight encapsulates a broader debate that has erupted across the country about what to teach about race, history and the intersection of the two. It underscores how the nation’s metastasizing culture wars — now firmly ensconced in the nation’s classrooms — have broadened to strip Americans of a shared sense of history, leaving many to view the past through the filter of contemporary polarization.

“Most of our prior arguments were about who to include in the story, not the story itself,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the history of education. “America has lost a shared national narrative.”

history has become a defining topic for contenders angling for the presidency.

Between the middle of the 1970s and the late 2010s, in their responses to the General Social Survey, American women reported themselves to be steadily unhappier. The trend was not drastic, but it was consistent: Women were less happy in the 1980s than they were in the 1970s, less happy in the Obama era than the Clinton era, and still less happy under Trump.

For men, the trend was more complex. They started out slightly unhappier than women and then made gains in the Reagan and Clinton years, while female happiness declined. But then male unhappiness plunged between the 9/11 era and Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012, before stabilizing a bit thereafter. By the pre-Covid period, the sexes were close to parity — sharing more reported unhappiness than either had been experiencing 30 or 40 years before.

These figures are drawn out of a fascinating new paper, “The Socio-Political Demography of Happiness,” from the University of Chicago economist Sam Peltzman

What’s striking about AITA is the language in which it states its central question: you’re asked not whether I did the right thing but, rather, what sort of person I’m being.

We would have a different morality, and an impoverished one, if we judged actions only with those terms of pure evaluation, “right” or “wrong,” and judged people only “good” or “bad.”

, if Aristotle’s ethics is to be sold as a work of what we call self-help, we have to ask: How helpful is it?

I have talked about the importance of ideological opponents and intellectual analysts of the contemporary right making distinctions between Republican words and deeds that are normal from those that are abnormal or truly alarming.

Thinking back to Donald Trump’s time in the White House, the normal included things any Republican president would do—nominate conservative judges, support tax cuts, take executive action to roll back regulations, and break from the Iran nuclear deal and Paris climate accord.

The abnormal, meanwhile, involved policy moves connected to distinctively Trumpian policy commitments. These included everything from instituting the travel ban and the policy of family separation on the Southern border to provoking an international trade war, lobbing insults at allies, and holding chummy meetings with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

The tradition of scholars teaching academic subjects part-time while doubling as researchers is a relic of medieval monasticism. Oxbridge operates for just 24 weeks a year while many other universities operate two semesters. Staff and buildings may be otherwise employed, but students will sit idle, doing odd jobs or studying on their own. No one dares challenge this system. Whitehall inspectors never declare universities “failing” or “inadequate” as they do schools.

an Ipsos Mori poll showed a falling demand for university among school-leavers, with just 32% being “very likely” to go in 2018. The same trend is evident in the US where college enrolments have been falling for over a decade

EY’s Maggie Stilwell, who said there was “no evidence” to conclude that exam success correlated with career success. Personal qualities and professional training were what mattered. Her firm, along with accountants PwC and Grant Thornton, have dropped any requirement of degree classes or even A-level results from their application forms.

What’s the last great book you read?C.V. Wedgwood’s “The Thirty Years War.” It’s sprawling and masterly and has the feel of a great novel

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?Rebecca West’s “The Court and the Castle.” It’s this fascinating book of lectures she gave at Yale in the 1950s about the relationship between the individual and authority as read through literature from “Hamlet” up through Kafka

Leslie Fiedler’s sublime cycle of books “Love and Death in the American Novel,” “What Was Literature?” and “Waiting for the End

her photographs capture both the isolation and the beauty of the rural South: the dirt roads without a soul in sight, the creeks and rivers that curve away into even greater isolation, the trees choked by moss and vines, the gravestones and makeshift memorials barely visible through the trees.

The landscapes in these photographs are not so much threatening as bereft of protection. Entering such beautiful spaces is always a risk for a woman alone — not because of anything inherently dangerous about a mist-drenched stream or a bamboo-clotted riverbank or even a rocky waterfall, but because bucolic settings aren’t always as empty as they seem. And nobody would hear you scream if danger has followed you into the woods — or if danger is already there, just waiting for you to arrive.

Our deep woods are lovely, our still waters restful, but the Southern landscape has never been a safe place for a woman alone. It has never been a safe place for a Black man alone. It has never been a safe place for L.G.B.T.Q. people of any race or gender. To enter an isolated place alone has always been to take a risk, and we have known that all our lives.

in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, an important shift has taken place. Rather than mere electoral contenders or shapers of public opinion, Europe’s far-right parties now appear as plausible and normal forces of government. Long a purely oppositional force, they are moving into the halls of power.

Since the signing of the Maastricht treaty in 1991, which locked in low public spending and deflation, European politicians have increasingly become beholden to business interests at the expense of citizens. Through this process, which the political scientist Peter Mair termed “elite withdrawal,” representatives grew hesitant to make grand promises to voters, lest any threaten their pro-market policies.

By invoking the threat of impending right-wing extremism, mainstream politicians could present themselves as the lesser evil. As long as their power was untouched, politicians seemed relaxed about how political common sense — notably on immigration and welfare — slipped ever farther to the right.

“All the women that I know on similar platforms,” Moran says, speaking about fellow writers, “we’re out there mentoring young girls and signing petitions and looking after the younglings. The men of my generation with the same platforms have not done that. They are not having a conversation about young men. So given that none of them have written a book that addresses this, muggins here is going to do it.”

Feminism has a stated objective, which is the political, social, sexual and economic equality of women.

With men, there isn’t an objective or an aim. Because there isn’t, what I have observed is that the stuff that is getting the most currency is on the conservative side. Men going: “Our lives have gotten materially worse since women started asking for equality. We need to reset the clock. We need to have power over women again.”

The world is in turmoil, and the men alive today are reeling because most of them have only known the most peaceful and prosperous times in history.

The Columbia University economic historian Adam Tooze has been making the case since around the time of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that a “polycrisis” is gripping the world economy, a dynamic in which disparate shocks compound upon each other to create something greater and more profound than any one of them. Or, to paraphrase popular 1990s novelist Tom Clancy, the sum of all fears.

For men, life in the 2020s feels as if the world suddenly turned on them

Critical historians who thought they were winning the fight for control within the academy now face dire retaliation from outside the academy. The dizzying turn from seeming triumph in 2020 to imminent threat in 2022 has unnerved many practitioners of the new history. Against this background, they did not welcome it when their association’s president suggested that maybe their opponents had a smidgen of a point.

a background reality of the humanities in the contemporary academy: a struggle over who is entitled to speak about what. Nowhere does this struggle rage more fiercely than in anything to do with the continent of Africa. Who should speak? What may be said? Who will be hired?

One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.

Experts say that younger collectors often regard art from the distant past as remote and irrelevant, and find the technical aspects of a sale off-putting. “Old masters are difficult to approach because of the problem of condition and attribution,” Turquin said. Today’s buyers tend to be interested in paintings by artists who are under 45 0c, not over 400.

The fixation with “the Now” (as Sotheby’s calls its most of-the-moment auction category) could be viewed as just a byproduct of fashionable 21st-century life. But for sociologists, changes in the art market are one of the many elements that reflect how the pace and preoccupations of our culture have altered over more than 100 years. In 1899, Thorstein Veblen’s landmark socio-economic study, “The Theory of the Leisure Class,” showed how free time and superfluity — what we now call luxury — conferred status, or “reputability,” on the wealthiest individuals in late 19th-century America.

Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,”

It’s been nearly 90 years since its publication, but reading it now is like staring into the worst of next week. It’s all there: The ways in which a country can lose its grip on the truth. The ways in which tribalism — referred to in “The Oppermanns” as “anthropological and zoological nonsense” — is easily roused to demonize others. The ways in which warring factions can be abetted by the media and accepted by a credulous populace.

The novel reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time.

The feeling of being ni de aquí, ni de allá—from neither here nor there—is the fundamental paradox of latinidad, its very essence.

Tobar’s book should be read in the context of other works that, for more than a century, have tried to elucidate the meaning of latinidad.

In his 1891 essay “Our America,” José Martí, a Cuban writer then living in New York, argued that Latin American identity was defined, in part, by a rejection of the racism that he believed characterized the United States.

Jonathan Clarke, writing in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal, of which he is a contributing editor, said the “democratization of dress” in recent decades has produced “the rapid casualization of American life.” But this has calcified into an unattractive norm

Is there a more obvious contemporary ostentation than tech billionaires conducting business wearing T-shirts to advertise that they are too rich to have sartorial concerns?

Clarke, who confesses a “slightly antique sense of propriety,” writes “few things are more heartening than to see a man or woman of advanced age very well dressed.