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The sociologist Diane Vaughan coined the phrase the normalization of deviance to describe a cultural drift in which circumstances classified as “not okay” are slowly reclassified as “okay.”

In the case of the Challenger space-shuttle disaster—the subject of a landmark study by Vaughan—damage to the crucial O‑rings had been observed after previous shuttle launches. Each observed instance of damage, she found, was followed by a sequence “in which the technical deviation of the [O‑rings] from performance predictions was redefined as an acceptable risk.”

Repeated over time, this behavior became routinized into what organizational psychologists call a “script.” Engineers and managers “developed a definition of the situation that allowed them to carry on as if nothing was wrong.” To clarify: They were not merely acting as if nothing was wrong. They believed it, bringing to mind Orwell’s concept of doublethink, the method by which a bureaucracy conceals evil not only from the public but from itself.

40,000 fleeing Aleppo as battle for Syrian city intensifies, U.N. group says

The battle for Aleppo -- once Syria's commercial heart -- is intensifying, and video has surfaced appearing to show thousands of civilians streaming out of the devastated city

Reports said forces loyal to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government, crucially aided by Russian air power, have cut the city off from supplies and are advancing.

World leaders arrived in Paris on Sunday for potentially historic climate talks that will play out amid security concerns driven by the November 13 terror attacks in France.

Frustrations over restrictions on protests put in place following the attacks gave rise to what French President Francois Hollande called "scandalous" scuffles between protesters and police at the Place de Republique, the site of a memorial to victims.French authorities have clamped down on public demonstrations in the aftermath of the deadly attacks, blocking environmental campaigners' plans for a big march on Sunday.

Police arrested more than 200 people Sunday following flare-ups in which protesters pelted police with shoes, bottles and even candles police said were taken from memorials.

This fall I read Joe Bageant’s book, Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America’s Class War, which opened my eyes (and heart) to people I would not normally have given much thought to: working class men and women from Winchester, Virginia, Joe’s hometown. To put it bluntly, these are not my people but Joe paints a sympathetic portrait of men and women who have paid the real price of our current economy, the ones who get knocked to the ground when corporate decisions are made far, far from their doorsteps. These are people who are seen as consumers or digits on a spreadsheet. And when they are no longer valued as “assets” they disappear entirely from our radar.

And clearly, until Trump galvanized them, they have been (and to a large degree remain) invisible to the talking classes and, perhaps, more crucially, to themselves. The parade of shiny, happy people my mother sees on her TV in commercials and the shows themselves do not reflect the circumstances of their lives and when they do it is often in reality tv shows where their antics are remarkable only because they are so odd to the talking classes. They are fodder for entertainment. From this perspective any appeals to reason, ideology, true Christian values or whatever, will fall on deaf ears. Trump has made them visible to the talking classes and to themselves. They will not be denied. I’d like to say one more thing that seems critical to me. Capitalism takes care of the talking classes in a way most of us take for granted: it confers dignity to their labors. There might have been a time when a man who worked with his hands could also count on that as well but not in my memory. The phrase that keeps recurring to me is this one: “a place at the table.” This is what working class men and women have not had in some time.

“From the very beginning, for example, the relation between words and deeds among Mussolini and his followers was very peculiar, and words were used not to state any firm conviction, nor to outline a definite political program but, rather, to arouse emotions that would generate support for a changeable line of action.

he has taken Justice Kennedy’s place as the swing vote at the court’s ideological center, making him the most powerful chief justice in 80 years.But all of that new power comes at a dangerous time for the court, whose legitimacy depends on the public perception that it is not a partisan institution

Controlling the pace of change on a court whose conservative wing is eager to move fast will be the central problem of the next phase of Chief Justice Roberts’s tenure, said Daniel Epps, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

“If he’s smart, and he is, what he’s probably thinking is, ‘I do have a substantive agenda of things I want to accomplish. But it’s a lot easier to do that when the court retains its legitimacy. Let’s do as much as we can get away with, but maybe that’s a little less than some of my colleagues to my right think we can get away with,’” Professor Epps said

as flop accounts grow by the thousands as teens seek refuge from the wider web, many of the internet’s worst dynamics have begun to duplicate themselves on Instagram. Some flop accounts are rife with polarization, drama, and misinformation

All the while, an increasing number of teens are turning to these types of accounts for news, seeing them as more reliable and trustworthy than traditional media.

The accounts post photos, videos, and screenshots of articles, memes, things, and people considered a “flop,” or, essentially, a fail. A flop could be a famous YouTuber saying something racist, someone being rude or awful in person, a homophobic comment, or anything that the teen who posted it deems wrong or unacceptable

The history of labor shows that technology does not usually drive social change. On the contrary, social change is typically driven by decisions we make about how to organize our world. Only later does technology swoop in, accelerating and consolidating those changes.

This insight is crucial for anyone concerned about the insecurity and other shortcomings of the gig economy. For it reminds us that far from being an unavoidable consequence of technological progress, the nature of work always remains a matter of social choice. It is not a result of an algorithm; it is a collection of decisions by corporations and policymakers

In the industrious revolution, however, manufacturers gathered workers under one roof, where the labor could be divided and supervised. For the first time on a large scale, home life and work life were separated. People no longer controlled how they worked, and they received a wage instead of sharing directly in the profits of their efforts.

To prevent factions from distorting public policy and threatening liberty, Madison resolved to exclude the people from a direct role in government. “A pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction,” Madison wrote in “Federalist No. 10.”

The Framers designed the American constitutional system not as a direct democracy but as a representative republic, where enlightened delegates of the people would serve the public good. They also built into the Constitution a series of cooling mechanisms intended to inhibit the formulation of passionate factions, to ensure that reasonable majorities would prevail.

Madison, however, thought Plato’s small-republic thesis was wrong. He believed that the ease of communication in small republics was precisely what had allowed hastily formed majorities to oppress minorities. “Extend the sphere” of a territory, Madison wrote, “and you take in a greater variety of parties and interests; you make it less probable that a majority of the whole will have a common motive to invade the rights of other citizens; or if such a common motive exists, it will be more difficult for all who feel it to discover their own strength, and to act in unison with each other.” Madison predicted that America’s vast geography and large population would prevent passionate mobs from mobilizing. Their dangerous energy would burn out before it could inflame others.

most of the ads unearthed thus far appear to have been devoted to reinforcing the American electorate’s own prejudices;

For example, YouTube videos recently uncovered by the Daily Beast feature two black men with African accents deriding Black Lives Matter and calling Clinton an “evildoer” while praising WikiLeaks. One meme posted on a Russian troll-operated Facebook account read—with a dropped article worthy of Boris Badenov—“Why do I have a gun? Because it’s easier for my family to get me out of jail than out of cemetery.”

Facebook has said the Russian-bought ads were probably viewed 10 million times; Columbia University professor Jonathan Albright has suggested that the ads actually were viewed hundreds of millions, and possibly billions, of times.

Four months ago, the Trump administration released the outlines of a tax-reform plan—a one-page list of ideas and principles that was notable mostly for how many questions it left unanswered.

To the delight of Republican leaders, the one lawmaker Trump singled out for pressure was not one of their own; for the first time in weeks, the president picked on a Democrat, Missouri Senator Claire McCaskill, who is up for reelection in a state he won easily in November. If McCaskill doesn’t vote for tax reform—whatever it turns out to be—“you have to vote her out of office,” Trump demanded of the crowd.

Yet while Trump talked at length about the need for tax reform, he said little about how Republicans would get it done. And that’s because they still don’t know themselves. GOP leaders haven’t made several crucial decisions. Will the legislation be a revenue-neutral tax reform that fully offsets the reduction in rates by eliminating costly—and popular—exemptions and deductions? Or will it be a more straightforward tax cut, that would likely have to expire within a decade to comply with Senate rules? How low will they try to push down the corporate rate? About all they’ve determined is that 15 percent is too low, but will it be closer to 20 percent or 25 percent? And on, and on.

I supervised this dissertation and knew it was something terrific, but I doubted it could be published because it was so terse and so far from the mainstream. It had received the Leo Strauss Award from the American Political Science Association as the best dissertation in political philosophy in 1974, but this was a citation of contested value for those who disagreed with Leo Strauss. Nonetheless, I tried to get her to revise it for publication during her lifetime, and she always refused, saying she needed to know more Aristotle (an infinite task). Then, 10 years after she died and at the urging of friends, I put it up at Chicago (my publisher for the most part), and to my great surprise, it sailed through, praised to the skies. It would have been more Harvard if this Harvard dissertation were being published by Harvard University Press, but it’s an honor that the Harvard government department will appreciate.  And it ought to cause a commotion among Aristotle scholars, as well as start waves that ought to reach the wider circles of thoughtful citizens in democracies. These are two “oughts” of the kind that in our age of haste sometimes takes time to be fulfilled.What does Delba Winthrop find and propose?

She punctures the complacency with which we defend democracy as the best or even the only legitimate form of government, and turns to Aristotle for justification of democracy. In Aristotle’s day and in ours, democrats want inclusiveness; they want above all to include everyone as part of a whole. But what is a whole?

The assertive quality of political speech, the argumentative character of argument, is shown to have a crucial role in philosophy itself, where human reason must claim its due as a contribution to the whole of the universe. Political science has the double task of teaching citizens how to include everyone and of teaching those who want to understand the thought that sustains democracy.

Cities that once ranked among the nation’s deadliest, such as Oakland and Richmond, have seen enormous decreases over the past decade. These are not single-year drops in killings, but declines sustained over multiple years

There’s early evidence that local violence prevention strategies – including a refocused, more community-driven “Ceasefire” policing strategy, and intensive support programs that do not involve law enforcement at all – were a “key change” contributing to these huge decreases.

Gun homicide rates for all races have fallen, but the drop was largest for black Bay Area residents: a 40% decrease.

These remarks reflect scorn not only for those who wish to come here, but those who already have. It is a president of the United States expressing his contempt for the tens of millions of descendants of Africans, most of whose forefathers had no choice in crossing the Atlantic, American citizens whom any president is bound to serve.

And it is a public admission of sorts that he is incapable of being a president for all Americans, the logic of his argument elevating not just white immigrants over brown ones, but white citizens over the people of color they share this country with.

The racist pseudoscience underpinning Walker’s belief that immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe were incapable of responsible self-government is out of vogue today, but the both the sentiment and logic are now applied by the descendants of those very same “beaten races” who now work for Trump in the White House, who craft arguments defending his prejudice, and who cast ballots bearing his name.

The decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem makes a war in Korea more likely. Not because there is any direct connection between the two, nor because it was a bad idea, recognizing as it did the simple fact that the western part of Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital for over 70 years and will most assuredly remain so. The dangerous bit, rather, was when pundits and diplomats wrung their hands and predicted calamity and (far more predictably) nothing happened. The Arab street grumbled, while Cairo, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi looked the other way, and Donald Trump could be forgiven for thinking that his instincts had been proven entirely correct.

As we can see from the irritable id that manifests itself in his tweets, Trump believes that he has been an exceptionally successful president, who deserves credit for the absence of deaths from plane crashes, a soaring stock market, and a tax cut rammed through on a completely partisan basis by a Republican majority that has thirsted for little else for decades.

This is serious. The president feels vindicated, smart, and self-confident beyond the outlandish egotism of his campaign days in 2016.

Last weekend in the Middle East, a new wave of chaos swept across the border between Israel and Syria. On Saturday, Iranian forces flew a drone into Israel’s airspace. In retaliation, Tel Aviv attacked the air base near Palmyra from which it had been launched. When Syria’s anti-air systems sought to protect the Iranians, downing one Israeli F-16, they were mauled. Russia, which intervened in the Syrian civil war in 2015 to aid President Bashar al-Assad, had deployed advanced S-400 missile defense systems to his ally. This time, they did nothing to intervene. Moscow seemed willing to let Israel give Iran a bloody nose to warn Assad against aligning himself too closely with Tehran—a double win of sorts.

With these wild swings in fortune for Vladimir Putin, the question becomes: Is he in control in Syria, or stuck in the sand? The honest answer: a bit of both.

Ensuring the survival of Assad’s authoritarian regime in Damascus was never the sole goal of Russia’s intervention. Instead, its purpose was at least as much to inject itself into a crucial geopolitical battleground and force Washington—which, at the time, sought to isolate Moscow diplomatically—to realize that Russia would not be overlooked. It was also to keep Syria from becoming an Iranian vassal; Moscow and Tehran are, at best, frenemies, happy to try to marginalize the United States yet also fierce competitors seeking influence in the Middle East and South Caucasus

Smartphones changed the advertising game completely. It took only a few years for billions of people to have an all-purpose content delivery system easily accessible sixteen hours or more a day. This turned media into a battle to hold users’ attention as long as possible.

And it left Facebook and Google with a prohibitive advantage over traditional media: with their vast reservoirs of real-time data on two billion individuals, they could personalize the content seen by every user. That made it much easier to monopolize user attention on smartphones and made the platforms uniquely attractive to advertisers. Why pay a newspaper in the hopes of catching the attention of a certain portion of its audience, when you can pay Facebook to reach exactly those people and no one else?

Wikipedia defines an algorithm as “a set of rules that precisely defines a sequence of operations.” Algorithms appear value neutral, but the platforms’ algorithms are actually designed with a specific value in mind: maximum share of attention, which optimizes profits.

what is normal for other presidents was out of character for Trump. In the rest of his spoken or tweeted expressions, there’s been practically no evidence of what has preoccupied most other leaders: the centrality, and fragility, of the institutional underpinnings of American life.

Except for that odd passage in his inaugural address, there’s no evidence I can think of that he recognizes the claims, validity, or importance of a set of rules beyond his personal interests or aggrandizement.

I wonder increasingly about the proper name to give it

we are American citizens, and thus bound to a collective enterprise that extends beyond our individual and personal reach. It would seem ridiculous to dispute invocations of the Founders, or the Greatest Generation, on the basis of a lack of membership in either group.

We recognize our lineage as a generational trust, as inheritance, and the real dilemma posed by reparations is just that: a dilemma of inheritance. It is impossible to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.

enslavement “shaped every crucial aspect of the economy and politics” of America, so that by 1836 more than $600 million, almost half of the economic activity in the United States, derived directly or indirectly from the cotton produced by the million-odd slaves

There are ways in which the United States is a more just country than it was when we rocketed men onto the lunar surface

But as a commemoration of the moon landing, that kind of emphasis on our own era’s greater enlightenment falls fla

the appropriate response — which should be awe at what past Americans achieved, and regret that we have not matched such greatness since.

With Facebook’s announcement Friday that it has suspended more developer apps for misusing users’ data than previously identified, the company revealed how little we know about the life of our data, even when we already know it’s been breached.

The global data economy mines human information to predict and influence behavior in ways most of us are incapable of comprehending.

to better understand what this means for the future of privacy, we need to look back to a much older idea, one from the Middle Ages.