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Elmar Degenhart, the chief executive of Continental since 2009, said the study was “overdue” but could not explain why it had taken so long.

Many prominent German companies have still not underwritten detailed studies of their behavior under Naziism. Mr. Erker lists some of them in a footnote in his book: the electronics giant Siemens, the detergent maker Henkel, and the chemical and pharmaceuticals maker Bayer, which during the war was a part of the notorious IG Farben conglomerate

Ariane Reinhart, the chief of human relations at Continental, said the study by Mr. Erker, which drew on company archives not previously available to researchers, contained lessons relevant for business today. She was struck, she said, by how easily the Nazis co-opted Continental’s managers.

“It shows me how fragile company cultures are,” Ms. Reinhart said. “In the 1920s, Continental was an open, international, liberal company. Within a few years, the Nazi system was able to smother all of these qualities.”

Continental’s story contains a warning for modern society amid the rise of right-wing and authoritarian leaders, Mr. Degenhart said. Without naming names, he criticized leaders who “place their self-interest and quest for power above empathy and responsibility.”“That was true then,” he added, “and it’s true now.”

It's thought that all or part of Zealandia may have existed as an island for a while. But then around 25 million years ago, it was disappeared beneath the ocean

The first real clues that New Zealand might represent just a tiny, visible portion of a vast incognito landmass came in 2002, when scientists used bathymetry – the study of the depth of bodies of water – to analyse the region. The ocean above what we now call Zealandia is considerably shallower than that surrounding it, suggesting that the area was not underlain by an oceanic tectonic plate – like most of the world's oceans – but a continental one.

The clincher came in 2017, when scientists put several lines of evidence together, including data about the kinds of rocks it contains and its relative thickness – oceanic plates tend to be thinner – to propose that this is indeed a new continent. This is not a mere continental fragment or microcontinent, as had previously been proposed, but the real deal, 95% of which is submerged underwater.

despite the excitement around the discovery of a new continent, and more than a decade of intensive research, many details of Zealandia's early formation have remained elusive. This is partly because of a strange event that occurred when it split from Gondwana.

In 2019, an international team of scientists mapped the geology of South Zealandia. Their research revealed that at some point, Zealandia had been stretched – pulled apart by tectonic forces, thinning the continent compared to regular continental plates and creating ruptures that later became oceanic crust. In the process, it became twisted and this made reconstructing its history to work out its original form much more challenging. 

The researchers' analysis of rocks from the lost continent revealed that the stretching happened in two stages. The first began around 89-101 million years ago, and led to a rip which became the Tasman Sea inbetween Australia and New Zealand. The second phase started 80-90 million years ago and led to Zealandia splitting off from West Antarctica and creating the Pacific Ocea

For the latest study, another research group – involving many of the same geologists as before – charted North Zealandia. This time, they analysed rocks that had been dredged up from the Fairway Ridge, a region of the South Pacific off the coast of Australia, which forms the northernmost tip of Zealandia. These ancient remnants, which have not had a dry day for 25 million years, included a mixture of igneous rocks – those formed by volcanic processes – and sedimentary ones made in shallow basins just off the coast of Zealandia.

The resulting maps of Zealandia transform it from a featureless mass into a place with many bands of distinctive geology running along its length from northwest to southeast. These fit together with the geology of West Antarctica like a jigsaw puzzle, confirming that this region and Zealandia once slotted together.

Numerous digs, most notably in Austria and Switzerland, have traced the outlines of the Celts. The artifacts offer evidence going back as far as about 800 B.C. The ancient Greeks and Romans also left written accounts of the Celts, and probably knew them well — the Celts sacked Rome around 390 B.C. and attacked Delphi in Greece in 279 B.C.

It seemed plausible that this group that had invaded Rome had invaded Ireland as well, and in the standard view, it was this people that eventually made it to Ireland.

For decades, however, archaeologists and other scholars have noted just how flimsy the evidence is for that standard account and how broad, nonetheless, is the application of the word.

n recent years, some archaeologists have proposed that the traditional story of the Celts' invasion was, in a sense, exactly wrong — the culture was not imported but exported — originating on the western edge of Europe much earlier than previously thought and spreading into the continent.

it flowed from the western edge of Europe, what he calls “the Atlantic zone” — into the rest of the continent. In many places of the Atlantic zone, he notes, people were buried in passages aligned with the solstices, a sign that they shared a unified belief system.

“From about 5,000 B.C. onwards, complicated ideas of status, art, cosmology were being disseminated along the Atlantic seaways,” Cunliffe said, and that culture then spread eastward.

“If we’re right, the roots of what is known as ‘Celtic’ culture go way way back in time,” Cunliffe said. “And the genetic evidence is going to be an absolute game-changer.”

If the new scholarship proves correct, exactly what to do with the word Celtic will probably be a matter of some dispute: Should it be applied to languages or cultures that, no matter how clearly defined, were largely uninfluenced by the historical Celts of continental Europe?

Complicating any answer are old ethnic antagonisms: The old notions of a distinct “Celtic race” or “Irish race” have been used not just for poetic tributes, but for scorn.

According to the genetic research, the Irish are at the extreme end of a genetic wave that washed across Europe, a wave of migrants that swept westward from above the Black Sea across Europe about 2,500 B.C.

The way to think about genetic variation in Europe is that it is more of a gradient than it is of sharp boundaries," said Bradley, the DNA researcher. "Sometimes, cultural features like language and natural borders can coincide with genetics, but most times not. Genetics is fuzzy, and it doesn't follow political and cultural borders."

"The public will always want a place on the map and for someone to point and say, 'This where the Irish are from,'

"But there’s going to be no way to do that. These groups were frequently traveling east-west across Europe, from one place to another. Everyone is a mix.”

At least 12 groups are working to develop a vaccine.

European Medicines Agency (EMA), Europe's drugs regulator, said it established an expert task force to advise companies working on Zika vaccines and medicines, mirroring similar action during the two-year-long Ebola epidemic that started in December 2013 and the pandemic flu outbreak in 2009.

There are no vaccines or treatment for Zika and none even undergoing clinical studies. Most infected people either have no symptoms or develop mild ones like fever and skin rashes.

"The good news is this is not like Ebola; people don't die of Zika. A lot of people get it and don't even know that they have it," Obama told CBS News

Most of the money sought by Obama, who faces pressure from Republicans and some fellow Democrats to act decisively on Zika, would be spent in the United States on testing, surveillance and response in affected areas, including the creation of rapid-response teams to contain outbreak clusters.

Dr. Anne Schuchat, principal deputy director of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said she was not expecting "large-scale amounts of serious Zika infections" in the continental United States as warmer months bring larger and more active mosquito populations.

Obama's funding request to Congress includes $335 million for the U.S. Agency for International Development to support mosquito-control, maternal health and other Zika-related public health efforts in affected countries in the Americas.

Fauci said he anticipated beginning a so-called Phase 1 trial this summer for a Zika vaccine that would take about three months to test if it is safe and induces a good immune response before further studies can be conducted.

The CDC said its Zika emergency operations center, with a staff of 300, has been placed on its highest level of activation, reflecting a need for accelerated preparedness for possible local virus transmission by mosquitoes in the continental United States.

Much remains unknown about Zika, including whether the virus actually causes microcephaly, a condition marked by abnormally small head size that can result in developmental problems.Brazil is investigating the potential link between Zika infections and more than 4,000 suspected cases of microcephaly. Researchers have identified evidence of Zika infection in 17 of these cases, either in the baby or in the mother, but have not confirmed that Zika can cause microcephaly. 

Word that Zika can be spread by sexual transmission and blood transfusions and its discovery in saliva and urine of infected people have added to concern over the virus.

The World Health Organization declared the outbreak an international health emergency on Feb. 1, citing a "strongly suspected" relationship between Zika infection in pregnancy to microcephaly.

Brazil is grappling with the virus even as it prepares to host the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro in August, with tens of thousands of athletes and tourists anticipated.The U.S. Olympic Committee has told U.S. sports federations that athletes and staff concerned about their health due to Zika should consider not going to the Olympics.

Former Olympian Donald Anthony, president and board chairman of USA Fencing, said, "One of the things that they immediately said was, especially for women that may be pregnant or even thinking of getting pregnant, that whether you are scheduled to go to Rio or no, that you shouldn't go."

hat urgency is at odds with the stance of the Trump administration, which has rolled back several Obama-era environmental regulations and incentivized the production of fossil fuels. Trump also has said he plans to withdraw the nation from the Paris climate accord and questioned the science of climate change just last month, saying on CBS’s “60 Minutes” that “I don’t know that it’s man-made” and that the warming trend “could very well go back.”

“This report draws a direct connection between the warming atmosphere and the resulting changes that affect Americans' lives, communities, and livelihoods, now and in the future,” the document reads, concluding that “the evidence of human-caused climate change is overwhelming and continues to strengthen, that the impacts of climate change are intensifying across the country, and that climate-related threats to Americans' physical, social, and economic well-being are rising.

The report finds that the continental United States already is 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than it was 100 years ago, surrounded by seas that are on average nine inches higher and being racked by far worse heat waves than the nation experienced only 50 years ago. But those figures offer only the prelude to even more potentially severe impacts. The report suggests that by 2050, the country could see as much as 2.3 additional degrees of warming in the continental United States. By that same year, in a high-end global-warming scenario, coral reefs in Hawaii and the U.S. Pacific territories could be bleaching every single year — conditions in which their survival would be in severe doubt. A record-warm year like 2016 would become routine.

In another major step, the authors of the new report have begun to put dollar signs next to projected climate damage, specifically within the United States. In a worst-case climate-change scenario, the document finds, labor-related losses by the year 2090 as a result of extreme heat — the sort that makes it difficult to work outdoors or seriously lowers productivity — could amount to an estimated $155 billion annually. Deaths from temperature extremes could take an economic toll of $141 billion per year in the same year, while coastal property damage could total $118 billion yearly, researchers found

Of course, mitigating climate change would also mitigate this damage, by as much as 58 percent in the case of high-temperature related deaths, the report finds.

The categorical tone of the new assessments reflects scientists' growing confidence in the ability to detect the role of a changing climate in individual extreme events, such as heat waves and droughts. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated computer simulations now allow them to project future changes in highly specific regions of the country

The Second State of the Carbon Cycle Report, which examines all of North America (not just the United States), finds that over a decade, greenhouse-gas emissions from fossil fuels declined by 1 percent per year. The result is that while North America emitted 24 percent of the world’s emissions in 2004, that was down to 17 percent in 2013. This occurred in part thanks to improvements in vehicle fuel efficiency, the growth of renewable energy and the swapping of coal-burning for natural gas.

“For the globe, we’re still going up, but regionally, there have been these changes in how humans have been acting that have caused our emissions to go down,” said Ted Schuur, a Northern Arizona University expert on permafrost carbon

The report concludes that it appears possible to for economies to grow — at least in the United States, Mexico and Canada — without increasing overall emissions of greenhouse gases. That would be an important signal for the ability of the world to slow climate change over the course of the century

After Walpole’s fall over his handling of the war with Spain in 1742, which George II had very much opposed, the King backed John, Lord Carteret only to be forced to part with him twice: in 1744 and 1746

The Hanoverian ambitions of both kings made their British ministries vulnerable to domestic criticism and Hanover itself to foreign attack, but they learned, however reluctantly, to accept the limitations of their position.

As the monarch remained the ultimate political authority, his court remained the political centre, since it provided access to him

While it is true that George II’s closet was not as powerful as Henry VIII’s privy chamber, the insignificance of the Hanoverian Court has been overdone.

George I and George II both detested the Tories as the party whose ministry had negotiated the Peace of Utrecht in 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession (in which George II had fought), and abandoned Britain’s allies, including Hanover. George I and George II both suspected the Tories of Jacobite inclinations and were alienated by Tory opposition to their commitments to Continental power politics

This forced both kings to turn to the Whigs, limiting their ability to break away in the event of a dispute. The rulers had to make concessions in ministerial and policy choices. George I fell out with Walpole and his brother-in-law and political ally, Charles Viscount Townshend, in 1717 when the ministers opposed his Baltic policy and supported his son, George, Prince of Wales, in the first of those hardy perennials of Hanoverian royal politics, a clash between monarch and heir

Similarly, George II came to the throne in 1727 determined to part with Walpole, but he swiftly changed his mind when he realised that it was expedient to keep the minister if he wanted to enjoy parliamentary support, have the public finances satisfactorily managed, and retain the stability of Britain’s alliance system

Instead, much of the credit for Britain’s modern constitutional monarchy rests with those who redefined the royal position between 1689 and 1707, and then made it work over the following half-century

Cumberland’s eventually successful generalship at Culloden serves as a reminder of the extent to which Britain had to be fought for from 1688, just as Continental dynasties such as the Bourbons in Spain in 1704-15 had to fight to establish themselves in succession wars

The role of the Crown was still central. However constrained and affected by political exigencies, monarchs chose ministers. General Thomas Erle, a long-standing MP, wrote in 1717, ‘The King is certainly master of choosing who he thinks fit to employ’.

If monarchs needed to appoint and, if necessary, sustain a ministry that could get government business through Parliament, this was a shifting compromise, and one subject to contingency and the play of personality

Walpole was also expected to find money for George’s female German connections, and to spend time as a courtier, attending on the royal family, as on July 3rd, 1724, when he was present at George I’s review of the Foot Guards in Hyde Park. Similarly, Newcastle and even Pitt had, at least in part, to respond to George II’s interests and views

Both kings were pragmatists, who did not have an agenda for Britain, other than helping Hanover. In this they present a contrast with George III

Neither man sought governmental changes akin to those introduced by Peter the Great or by Frederick William I of Prussia. Neither George had pretensions to mimic the lifestyle of Louis XIV or the Emperor Charles VI. Instead, they presented themselves in a relatively modest fashion, although both men were quite prepared to be prodded into levées, ceremonies and other public appearances

George II had the Guards’ regimental reports and returns sent to him personally every week, and, when he reviewed his troops he did so with great attention to detail

Strong Lutherans, George I and George II were ready to conform to the Church of England. Although they sponsored a number of bishops whose beliefs were regarded as heterodox, they were not seen as threats to the Church of England as compared to that presented by the Catholic Stuarts

Neither George I nor his son did much to win popularity for the new order (certainly far less than George III was to do), but, far more crucially, the extent to which they actively sapped consent was limited. This was crucial when there was a rival dynasty in the shape of the Stuarts, with ‘James III’ a claimant throughout both reigns

Ultimately George I and George II survived because they displayed more stability, and less panic, in a crisis than James II and VII had shown in 1688

Both rulers also sought to counter Hanoverian vulnerability to attack from France or Prussia.

Georges I and II benefited from the degree to which, while not popular, they were at least acceptable

By the close of George II’s reign, Britain had smashed the French navy and taken much of the French empire, becoming the dominant European power in South Asia and North America

International comparisons are helpful. In Sweden in 1772, Gustavus III brought to an end the ‘Age of Liberty’.

Hereditary monarchy placed less emphasis on individual ability than did its ‘meritocratic’ counterpart, whether electoral (kings of Poland) or dictatorial (Cromwell, Napoleon); but it had an important advantage in the form of greater continuity and therefore stability

his form was to prove a durable one, and it provided a means to choose, an agreed method of succession, and a way to produce individuals of apparent merit. This system, however, had only been  devised in response to the unwanted breakdown of rule by the British Crown. Within Britain no such expedient was necessary, nor appeared so. The world of Georges I and II was one in which republicanism found little favour in Britain

GM’s view contrasts with other auto-making giants, including Toyota Motor Corp. TM 0.93% and Ford Motor Co. F -0.32% , which are working on full electrics but also expanding their U.S. hybrid offerings

Last week, Continental AG, one of the world’s biggest car-parts makers, said it would cut investment in conventional engine parts because of a faster-than-expected fall in demand—yet another sign the industry is accelerating the shift to electric vehicles.

Today, auto companies generally lose money on each electric car they sell, mostly because of the high cost of lithium-ion batteries. Concerns about the battery range, along with a lack of places to plug in, also deter buyers from considering electric vehicles. Those factors make going straight to all-electric cars a risky strategy

Hybrids, which were popularized by Toyota’s Prius last decade as a social statement, accounted for about 3% of U.S. sales in 2018, according to research firm LMC Automotive. Sales of plug-in electric vehicles were around 1% of the total market—mostly thanks to the success of Tesla Inc.’s offerings.

pouring investment into both hybrids and electrics strains car-company finances, Morgan Stanley analyst Adam Jonas said. “It’s time to pick a path and commit to it,”

VW and GM are focused on all-electric cars largely because of China, where new regulations require car companies to sell a minimum number of zero-emissions vehicles to avoid financial penalties.

VW plans to use its electric-car expansion in China to build scale and drive down prices faster in the U.S., said Scott Keogh, VW’s U.S. chief.

Auto companies are spending $225 billion to develop more than 200 new plug-in vehicles through 2023, a figure that doesn’t include hybrids

For now, both hybrids and electric cars are more expensive to produce than comparable gas-powered vehicles. A hybrid system can add roughly $2,000 to a vehicle’s cost, while a fully electric version costs an additional $6,000 to $10,000,

Toyota’s sales chief for North America, said that with U.S. electric-vehicle sales expected to lag behind Europe and China, the company needs a nearer-term remedy. “That’s why we feel so confident in hybrids

Much as he admires Heidegger, Sheehan said he believes it is important to acknowledge his strict limitations as a philosopher. In Sheehan’s opinion, Heidegger shows us how to live authentically but then stops short. “Now what do I do?” Sheehan asks. “Do I become a Nazi – or read the pre-Socratics? He has nothing to say about where one might go next. There’s no ethics in Heidegger, and no meaningful political philosophy.”  

“My approach is to take a fire hose and hose down the Teutonic bombast that so many Heideggerians find so fascinating but that in fact hides what he’s really driving at,” he explains. “Then you can clearly see the basic existential focus of his work rather than the obsession with being– a term that in fact no Heideggerian can define.”

he claims that the 1989 publication of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, which contained evidence that Being was not the real centerpiece of Heidegger’s thought, exploded the Being paradigm and debunked what scholars had claimed was Heidegger’s “turn” in the 1930s from human existence to Being. Contributions to Philosophy ushered in a third wave of Heidegger studies that finds its articulation in Sheehan’s Making Sense of Heidegger.

he regards the current juncture in Heidegger scholarship as an opportunity for scholars to rethink the whole of Heidegger’s philosophy. “Finding out that he was a lifelong anti-Semite (not to mention outrageously unfaithful to his wife) has demolished that personality cult,” Sheehan says. “That’s a positive development, because now we’re down to brass tacks. We have to get back to the texts.”  

Sheehan said he hopes his work will speak to analytic as well as continental philosophers – both of whom are subjects of his criticism. “The analysts follow a somewhat scientific model of evidence and argument, which I think is admirable and utterly necessary but which sometimes appears to overlook the existential dimensions of life and philosophy.

as Sheehan puts it, continental philosophers, and especially the Heideggerians “with their utterly fuzzy and loopy ‘logic,’ risk pricing themselves out of being taken seriously by those who justifiably ask for reasoned arguments.”

From the start, the British Navy far outmatched that of France. An oceanic superpower whose fleet dominated the seas, Britain repeatedly beat France. The most famous defeats were both delivered by Admiral Nelson, who destroyed Napoleon’s transport fleet at the Battle of the Nile and then smashed a Franco-Spanish force at Trafalgar, where the British Admiral lost his life.

As a mercantile nation, the British were reliant upon international trade. Napoleon, therefore, tried to win the economic war through the Continental System, a blockade of British trade at ports across Europe. It was easier to enforce in some areas than others. Anywhere directly controlled by France, Napoleon could order the system into place. Elsewhere, he had to win cooperation through diplomacy.

The system was full of holes. Occupied territories became resentful of the imposition, stirring opposition to the French. France’s Atlantic ports were hit hard by the British counter-blockade, their trade and supporting industries badly savaged. In the Netherlands, Napoleon’s brother failed to crack down on smuggling, while in Russia the Tsar gave up on the blockade as unhelpful for his nation.Not only did the Continental System fail to cripple Britain, it also damaged France’s own economy.

Between the driving determination of Tsar Alexander of Russia; the international influence of Austria; the freshly mobilized and experienced armies of Prussia; and the financial and military power of Great Britain, this alliance was finally able to push Napoleon’s troops back into France and defeat them there. He had offended too many people, leaving his nation without potential allies. The Coalition finally brought together enough strength to bring him down.

Napoleon always had to win on his terms. Ultimately, that led him to lose.

Such thinkers had a heyday a century ago, in the European wreckage of World War I: Julius Evola, the mad monk of Italian fascism; Charles Maurras, the reactionary French nationalist; Charles Coughlin, the American radio ranter; and even the author of a German book called “Mein Kampf.”

Putin has followed that counsel to the letter, and he must have felt things were going well when he saw window-smashing rioters in the corridors of the U.S. Congress, Britain’s Brexit from the European Union and Germany’s growing dependence on Russian natural gas.

Alas, a competing sea-based empire of corrupt, money-grubbing individualists, led by the United States and Britain, thwarted Russia’s destiny and brought “Eurasia” — his term for the future Russian empire — low.

Dugin tells essentially the same story from a Russian point of view. Before modernity ruined everything, a spiritually motivated Russian people promised to unite Europe and Asia into one great empire, appropriately ruled by ethnic Russians.

In his magnum opus, “The Foundations of Geopolitics: The Geopolitical Future of Russia,” published in 1997, Dugin mapped out the game plan in detail. Russian agents should foment racial, religious and sectional divisions within the United States while promoting the United States’ isolationist factions. (Sound familiar?) In Great Britain, the psy-ops effort should focus on exacerbating historic rifts with Continental Europe and separatist movements in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Western Europe, meanwhile, should be drawn in Russia’s direction by the lure of natural resources: oil, gas and food. NATO would collapse from within.

Putin has turned to the pages of Dugin’s text in which he declared: “Ukraine as an independent state with certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia,” and “without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics.”

So what comes next, should Putin manage to “resolve” Russia’s “problem” in Ukraine? Dugin envisions a gradual dividing of Europe into zones of German and Russian influence, with Russia very much in charge thanks to its eventual stranglehold over Germany’s resource needs. As Great Britain crumbles and Russia picks up the pieces, the empire of Eurasia will ultimately stretch, in Dugin’s words, “from Dublin to Vladisvostok.”

according to Dugin, China, too, must fall. Russia’s ambitions in Asia will require “the territorial disintegration, splintering and the political and administrative partition of the [Chinese] state,” Dugin writes. Russia’s natural partner in the Far East, according to Dugin, is Japan.

Dugin’s 600-page doorstop can be boiled down to one idea: The wrong alliance won World War II. If only Hitler had not invaded Russia, Britain could have been broken. The United States would have remained at home, isolationist and divided, and Japan would have ruled the former China as Russia’s junior partner.

Strangely, though nonprofits are increasingly expected to perform like businesses, they do not get the same leeway in funding that government-contracted businesses do. They don’t have nearly the bargaining power of big corporations, or the ability to raise costs for their products and services, because of tight controls on grant funding. “D.C. is full of millionaires who contract with government in the defense field, and they make a killing, and yet if you’re a nonprofit, chances are you aren’t getting the full amount of funding to cover the cost of the services required,” Iliff said. “Can you imagine Lockheed Martin or Boeing putting up with a government contract that didn’t allow for overhead?”

When faced with dwindling funding, one response would be to cut a program or reduce the number of people an organization serves. But nonprofit leaders have shown themselves very reluctant to do that. Instead, many meet financial challenges by squeezing more work out of their staffs without a proportional increase in their pay:

nonprofits like PIRG, for example, have a tradition of forcing employees to work long, unpaid hours—especially their youngest staff. “There’s a culture that says, ‘Young people are paying their dues. It’s okay for them to be paid for fewer hours than they’re actually working because it’s in the effort of helping them grow up and contribute to something greater than they are,’” Boris says.

These nonprofit employees are saying that their operations depend on large numbers of their lowest-paid staff working unpaid overtime hours. One way to get  to that point would be to face a series of choices between increased productivity on the one hand and reduced hours, increased pay, or more hiring on the other, and to choose more productivity every time. That some nonprofits have done this speaks to a culture that can put the needs of staff behind mission-driven ambitions.

In the 1970s, 62 percent of full-time, salaried workers qualified for mandatory overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours in a week. Today, because the overtime rules have not had a major update since then (until this one), only 7 percent of workers are covered, whether they work in the nonprofit sector or elsewhere. In other words, U.S. organizations—nonprofit or otherwise—have been given the gift of a large pool of laborers who, as long as they clear a relatively low earnings threshold and do tasks that meet certain criteria, do not have to be paid overtime.

Unsurprisingly, many nonprofits have taken advantage of that pool of free work. (For-profit companies have too, but they also have the benefit of being more in control of their revenue streams.) B

“There is this feeling that the mission is so important that nothing should get in the way of it,”

“Too often, I have seen the passion for social change turned into a weapon against the very people who do much—if not most—of the hard work, and put in most of the hours,” Hastings recently wrote on her blog. “Because they are highly motivated by passion, the reasoning goes, they don’t need to be motivated by decent salaries or sustainable work hours or overtime pay.”

A 2011 survey of more than 2,000 nonprofit employees by Opportunity Knocks, a human-resources organization that specializes in nonprofits, in partnership with Jessica Word, an associate professor of public administration at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, found that half of employees in the nonprofit sector may be burned out or in danger of burnout.

. “These are highly emotional and difficult jobs,” she said, adding, “These organizations often have very high rates of employee turnover, which results from a combination of burnout and low compensation.” Despite the dearth of research, Word’s findings don’t appear to be unusual: A more recent study of nonprofits in the U.S. and Canada found that turnover, one possible indicator of burnout, is higher in nonprofits than in the overall labor market.

for all their hours and emotional labor, nonprofit employees generally don’t make much money. A 2014 study by Third Sector New England, a resource center for nonprofits, found that 43 percent of nonprofit employees in New England were making less than $28,000 per year—far less than a living wage for families with children in most cities in the United States, and well below the national median income of between $40,000 and $50,000 per year.

Why would nonprofit workers be willing to stay in jobs where they are underpaid, or, in some cases, accept working conditions that violate the spirit of the labor laws that protect them? One plausible reason is that they are just as committed to the cause as their superiors

But it also might be that some nonprofits exploit gray areas in the law to cut costs. For instance, only workers who are labelled as managers are supposed to be exempt from overtime, but many employers stretch the definition of “manager” far beyond its original intent.

even regardless of these designations, the emotionally demanding work at many nonprofits is sometimes difficult to shoehorn into a tidy 40-hours-a-week schedule. Consider Elle Roberts, who was considered exempt from overtime restrictions and was told not to work more than 40 hours a week when, as a young college grad, she worked at a domestic-violence shelter in northwest Indiana. Doing everything from home visits to intake at the shelter, Roberts still ignored her employer’s dictates and regularly worked well more than 40 hours a week providing relief for women in crisis. Yet she was not paid for that extra time.

“The unspoken expectation is that you do whatever it takes to get whatever it is done for the people that you’re serving,” she says. “And anything less than that, you’re not quite doing enough.

Suddenly we find ourselves campaigning not for what could be, but for what was.

Now progressives are fighting desperately to hold on to what we’ve got, trying to stop the unravelling going any further.

If that makes us the new conservatives – with Bannon, Trump and the Brexiteers as the wrecking-ball radicals – then so be it.

The East was the Nazi Manifest Destiny. In Hitler’s view, “in the East a similar process will repeat itself for a second time as in the conquest of America.” As Hitler imagined the future, Germany would deal with the Slavs much as the North Americans had dealt with the Indians. The Volga River in Russia, he once proclaimed, will be Germany’s Mississippi.

t's easy to consider the reduction of this hemisphere's aboriginal people, the seizure of their land, their enslavement, the importation of African labor, the creation of a "black race," the profitable murder of black families, the perpetual warring against black people, the subsequent campaigns of terrorism which followed, as without analogue or global import. As though the land simply appeared beneath our feet, and by God's decree, delivered onto us its wealth. As though our state was not founded in plunder of land, labor and lives. 

Hitler knew better.

he Völkischer Beobachter published many graphic stories that were intended to support lynching as a tool to shield white sexual purity. “The SS journal Schwarze Korps exclaimed that if lynching occurred in Germany as it did in the American South, the whole world would complain loudly.” 

The desire to put a history of American racism, which is to say a portion of America's roots, in a corner is a kind of wish-fulfillment. It would be so much easier if "black studies" really were niche, if it really weren't that important, if racism really was a minor thread in the history of the West.

France was one of only two European countries where proficiency had decreased over the past six years. Norway was the other; but there, proficiency remained at such a high level that the change was insignificant.

“English is the de facto language of communication today between people who don’t share a native language,” Ms. Bell. said “Measuring English proficiency is in many ways a proxy measurement of international integration.”

the level of English proficiency among French adults suffers both from inadequate teaching at high school level and the reality that — despite fears of French culture’s being overwhelmed by American pop culture, very little English is actually used in everyday life.

France’s secondary school system, which has only recently started testing English oral skills as part of the Baccalaureate, is a major reason for poor language skills

Unlike its smaller northern European neighbors, France dubs most American films and television shows into French. The top English speakers in continental Europe — Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands — all tend to use subtitling.

Turkey, though still a “low proficiency” nation, ranked 41st in the index, was the country showing the biggest improvement in the past six years. EF researchers point to Turkey as a perfect example of economic development and international engagement that go hand-in-hand with English proficiency.

“The Middle East and North Africa are the weakest regions in English,” the study said, with Iraq ranked 60th, at the bottom of the list.

“Poor English remains one of the key competitive weaknesses of Latin America,” it added, with more than half the countries in the region in the lowest proficiency band.

American conservatism has always been different than the conservatism found on continental Europe and elsewhere. There it was based on blood and soil, here on promise.

American free market and religious conservatives have traditionally embraced a style of nationalism that is hopeful and future minded. From Lincoln to Reagan to Bush, the market has been embraced for being dynamic and progressive. The major faiths uplift in part because they are eschatological — they look forward to a glorious future.

This pessimism isn’t justified by the facts. As a definitive report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently found, today’s immigrants are assimilating as fast as previous ones. They are learning English. They are healthier than native-born Americans. Immigrant men age 18 to 39 are incarcerated at roughly one-fourth the rate of American men.

This failing in the West’s economies is also a failing of economics

many people have long felt the desire to do something with their lives besides consuming goods and having leisure. They desire to participate in a community in which they can interact and develop.

Our prevailing political economy is blind to the very concept of inclusion; it does not map out any remedy for the deficiency

injustice of another sort. Workers in decent jobs view the economy as unjust if they or their children have virtually no chance of climbing to a higher rung in the socioeconomic ladder

though the injustices in the West’s economies are egregious, they ought not to be seen as a major cause of the productivity slowdowns and globalization. (For one thing, a slowdown of productivity started in the US in the mid-1960s and the sharp loss of manufacturing jobs to poorer countries occurred much later—from the late 1970s to the early 1990s.) Deeper causes must be at work.

justice is not everything that people need from their economy. They need an economy that is good as well as just. And for some decades, the Western economies have fallen short of any conception of a “good economy”—an economy offering a “good life,” or a life of “richness,” as some humanists call it

The good life as it is popularly conceived typically involves acquiring mastery in one’s work, thus gaining for oneself better terms—or means to rewards, whether material, like wealth, or nonmaterial—an experience we may call “prospering.”

As humanists and philosophers have conceived it, the good life involves using one’s imagination, exercising one’s creativity, taking fascinating journeys into the unknown, and acting on the world—an experience I call “flourishing.”

“Money is like blood. You need it to live but it isn’t the point of life.”4

prospering and flourishing became prevalent in the nineteenth century when, in Europe and America, economies emerged with the dynamism to generate their own innovation.

High-enough wages, low-enough unemployment, and wide-enough access to engaging work are necessary for a “good-enough” economy—though far from sufficient. The material possibilities of the economy must be adequate for the nonmaterial possibilities to be widespread—the satisfactions of prospering and of flourishing through adventurous, creative, and even imaginative work.

In nineteenth-century Britain and America, and later Germany and France, a culture of exploration, experimentation, and ultimately innovation grew out of the individualism of the Renaissance, the vitalism of the Baroque era, and the expressionism of the Romantic period.

What made innovating so powerful in these economies was that it was not limited to elites. It permeated society from the less advantaged parts of the population on up.

today’s standard economics. This economics, despite its sophistication in some respects, makes no room for economies in which people are imagining new products and using their creativity to build them. What is most fundamentally “wrong with economics” is that it takes such an economy to be the norm—to be “as good as it gets.”

It will also be essential that high schools and colleges expose students to the human values expressed in the masterpieces of Western literature, so that young people will want to seek economies offering imaginative and creative careers. Education systems must put students in touch with the humanities in order to fuel the human desire to conceive the new and perchance to achieve innovations

ince around 1970, or earlier in some cases, most of the continental Western European economies have come to resemble more completely the mechanical model of standard economics. Most companies are highly efficient. Households, apart from the very low-paid or unemployed, have gone on saving

In most of Western Europe, economic dynamism is now at lows not seen, I would judge, since the advent of dynamism in the nineteenth century. Imagining and creating new products has almost disappeared from the continent

The bleak levels of both unemployment and job satisfaction in Europe are testimony to its dreary economies.

a recent survey of household attitudes found that, in “happiness,” the median scores in Spain (54), France (51), Italy (48), and Greece (37) are all below those in the upper half of the nations labeled “emerging”—Mexico (79), Venezuela (74), Brazil (73), Argentina (66), Vietnam (64), Colombia (64), China (59), Indonesia (58), Chile (58), and Malaysia (56)

The US economy is not much better. Two economists, Stanley Fischer and Assar Lindbeck, wrote of a “Great Productivity Slowdown,” which they saw as beginning in the late 1960s.11 The slowdown in the growth of capital and labor combined—what is called “total factor productivity”—is star

What is the mechanism of the slowdown in productivity

The plausible explanation of the syndrome in America—the productivity slowdown and the decline of job satisfaction, among other things—is a critical loss of indigenous innovation in the established industries like traditional manufacturing and services that was not nearly offset by the innovation that flowered in a few new industries

hat then caused this narrowing of innovation? No single explanation is persuasive. Yet two classes of explanations have the ring of truth. One points to suppression of innovation by vested interests

some professions, such as those in education and medicine, have instituted regulation and licensing to curb experimentation and change, thus dampening innovation

established corporations—their owners and stakeholders—and entire industries, using their lobbyists, have obtained regulations and patents that make it harder for new firms to gain entry into the market and to compete with incumbents.

The second explanation points to a new repression of potential innovators by families and schools. As the corporatist values of control, solidarity, and protection are invoked to prohibit innovation, traditional values of conservatism and materialism are often invoked to inhibit a young person from undertaking an innovation.

ow might Western nations gain—or regain—widespread prospering and flourishing? Taking concrete actions will not help much without fresh thinking: people must first grasp that standard economics is not a guide to flourishing—it is a tool only for efficiency.

Widespread flourishing in a nation requires an economy energized by its own homegrown innovation from the grassroots on up. For such innovation a nation must possess the dynamism to imagine and create the new—economic freedoms are not sufficient. And dynamism needs to be nourished with strong human values.

a reform of education stands out. The problem here is not a perceived mismatch between skills taught and skills in demand

The problem is that young people are not taught to see the economy as a place where participants may imagine new things, where entrepreneurs may want to build them and investors may venture to back some of them. It is essential to educate young people to this image of the economy.

prospering

This reorientation of general education will have to be supported by a similar reorientation of economic education.

Never ones to let a serious crisis go to waste, leading Republicans seized the ensuing constitutional crisis as an opportunity to remake the nation’s political economy and geography. In the summer of 1862, as Lincoln mulled over the Emancipation Proclamation’s details, officials in his administration created the Department of Agriculture, while Congress passed the Morrill Land Grant Act, the Pacific Railroad Act and the Homestead Act.

s a result, federal authorities could offer citizens a deal: Enlist to fight for Lincoln and liberty, and receive, as fair recompense for their patriotic sacrifices, higher education and Western land connected by rail to markets. It seemed possible that liberty and empire might advance in lock step.

the project of continental expansion fostered sectional reconciliation. Northerners and Southerners agreed on little at the time except that the Army should pacify Western tribes. Even as they fought over the proper role for the federal government, the rights of the states, and the prerogatives of citizenship, many Americans found rare common ground on the subject of Manifest Destiny.

many American soldiers, whether they had fought for the Union or the Confederacy, redeployed to the frontier. They became shock troops of empire. The federal project of demilitarization, paradoxically, accelerated the conquest and colonization of the West.

The Indian wars of the Reconstruction era devastated not just Native American nations but also the United States.

For a moment, it seemed that the federal government could accomplish great things. But in the West, Native Americans would not simply vanish

Red Cloud’s War, then, undermined a utopian moment and blurred the Republican Party’s vision for expansion

at least the Grant administration had a plan. After he took office in 1869, President Grant promised that he would pursue a “peace policy” to put an end to violence in the West, opening the region to settlers. By feeding rather than fighting Indians, federal authorities would avoid further bloodshed with the nation’s indigenous peoples. The process of civilizing and acculturating Native nations into the United States could begin.

President Grant’s Peace Policy perished in the Modoc War. The horror of that conflict, and the Indian wars more broadly, coupled with an endless array of political scandals and violence in the states of the former Confederacy – including the brutal murder, on Easter Sunday 1873 in Colfax, La., of at least 60 African-Americans – diminished support for the Grant administration’s initiatives in the South and the West.

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, collective memory casts that conflict as a war of liberation, entirely distinct from the Indian wars.

though Reconstruction is typically recalled in the popular imagination as both more convoluted and contested – whether thwarted by intransigent Southerners, doomed to fail by incompetent and overweening federal officials, or perhaps some combination of the two – it was well intended nevertheless, an effort to make good on the nation’s commitment to freedom and equality.

But this is only part of the story. The Civil War emerged out of struggles between the North and South over how best to settle the West – struggles, in short, over who would shape an emerging American empire. Reconstruction in the West then devolved into a series of conflicts with Native Americans

so, while the Civil War and its aftermath boasted moments of redemption and days of jubilee, the era also featured episodes of subjugation and dispossession, patterns that would repeat themselves in the coming years.

When Chief Joseph surrendered, the United States secured its empire in the West. The Indian wars were over, but an era of American imperialism was just beginning.

it is an emerging practice that several former attorneys general say threatens the integrity of the office.“It is a magnificent and noble institution, the office of attorney general, as it is truly the lawyer for the people,”

“That independence is clearly at risk here. What is happening diminishes the reputation of individual attorneys general and the community as a group.”

Industries that he regulates have also joined him as plaintiffs in court challenges, a departure from the usual role of the state attorney general, who traditionally sues companies to force compliance with state law.Energy industry lobbyists have also distributed draft legislation to attorneys general and asked them to help push it through state legislatures to give the attorneys general clearer authority to challenge the Obama regulatory agenda, the documents show.

Mr. Miller’s pitch to Mr. Pruitt became a reality early last year at the historic Skirvin Hilton Hotel in Oklahoma City, where he brought together an extraordinary assembly of energy industry power brokers and attorneys general from nine states for what he called the Summit on Federalism and the Future of Fossil Fuels.

The event was organized by an energy-industry-funded law and economics center at George Mason University of Virginia. The center is part of the brain trust of conservative, pro-industry groups that have worked from the sidelines to help Mr. Pruitt and other attorneys general.

Attorneys general said they had no choice but to team up with corporate America. “When the federal government oversteps its legal authority and takes actions that hurt our businesses and residents, it’s entirely appropriate for us to partner with the adversely affected private entities in fighting back,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi of Florida, whose top deputy attended the meeting.

And the input poured forth. The states worked to detail major federal environmental action, like efforts to curb fish kills, reduce ozone pollution, slow climate change and tighten regulation of coal ash. Then they identified which attorney general’s office was best positioned to try to monitor it and, if necessary, attempt to block it.

While Japan and Germany’s economies might be considered very large by developed country standards, these countries are not economic giants

n addition to being as big as continental Europe’s three largest economies put together, China’s economy is about 55 percent the size of the United States’ in current U.S. dollars

It is also, in U.S.-dollar terms, one and a half times the size of the other three so-called BRIC economies combined (Brazil, Russia, India and China),

What about the other BRIC countries? Some years after I first coined the acronym in 2001, I suggested that a BRIC economy should be regarded as one that was already producing or had the clear potential to produce 5 percent of global GDP or more. China’s is the only one that qualifies

It is already the major trading partner for many countries — both exports and imports — and I would expect that before this decade is over, possibly quite a bit before, China will replace the United States as the world’s largest importer.

Today, the economies of Brazil, India and Russia are all generating around 3 percent of global GDP, similar to Italy. But the countries’ big populations and reforms to lift productivity still mean their economies have a reasonable chance of going above that 5 percent threshold. They may someday become giants.

it is adding another $1 trillion to global GDP every year. I often point out to people that China is adding another India to the world economy every two years.

I am quite confident that India will make this leap — its economy has a really good chance of becoming the world’s third-largest before 2040. The country has exceptionally favorable demographics, and in electing Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has given itself the best chance in at least 30 years of being run by a government that is not smothered by its democracy but flourishes instead

Brazil and Russia’s economies have different reasons for their recent disappointments, but they share a common dilemma: They are too dependent on volatile commodities.

Brazil’s economy in particular needs to change course, whatever the country’s political leadership. The government has to create incentives and room for much more private sector investment and it needs to stop using directives to run so much of the economy.

Of the rest of the world’s largest populated countries, I believe none has a realistic chance of producing 5 percent of global GDP or more, but there are a few that could reach the 3-5 percent range, or more than Italy, which currently has the world’s eighth-largest economy. Mexico, Indonesia, Nigeria and Turkey — the so-called MINT economies — along with the more developed South Korea, have this chance.