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Burnham demonstrates that legal institutions were central to sustaining, extending, and legitimizing the violence, at both the local and national levels.

Why were partisans so oblivious to the escalating tensions that were tearing America apart? Why were they so confident that the solution to American polarization was domination and not accommodation? 

The answer was clear. For decades, winners and losers alike spun virtually every American election as the sign of things to come, the harbinger of a permanent victory (or permanent defeat). You don’t even have to be that old to see the recent pattern. The thrill of Democratic victory in 1992 turned into the agony of defeat in 1994, then the thrill of victory again in 1996

Then Obama won in 2008. But for Republicans, that was an aberration—a fluke caused by the housing crash and an unpopular war. The real majority came to the polls in Tea Party 2010. But wait: Obama won again in 2012, and suddenly all the momentum was on the side of the “coalition of the ascendant.” Remember that phrase? It signaled permanent Republican doom—the alleged party of white people couldn’t possibly keep winning in a nation that was growing more diverse by the year, could it?

I’ve begun to think of Exhibit H as a skeleton key for the final, halcyon days of the tech boom—unlocking an understanding of the cultural brain worms and low-interest-rate hubris that defined the industry in 2022. What we see in Exhibit H is only a tiny snapshot of a very important inbox, but it’s enough to make this one of the most revealing documents in a year that’s been absolutely overflowing with tech disclosures

the Musk texts demonstrate a decadence, an unearned confidence, and a boy’s-club mentality that coincide with the cultural disillusionment regarding the genius-innovator narrative.

I snarkily coined the Elon Musk School of Management to describe the petulant way that some tech founders, such as Musk and Coinbase’s Brian Armstrong, seemed to use confrontational, culture-warring, Twitter-addled thought leadership as a business tactic. The Musk School revolves around two principles: running a company in an authoritarian manner, and ensuring that every management decision is optimized to make news and hijack the attention of those following along on social media

Throughout their life cycle, plastics, which are manufactured from fossil fuels, release air pollutants, harm human health and kill marine life. In 2015, they were responsible for 4.5 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, one recent study found, more than all of the world’s airplanes combined.

Figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that, over the past seven decades, plastics production has soared from two million metric tons (there are about 2,200 pounds per metric ton) to more than 400 million — and is expected to almost triple by 2060.

Danone alone used more than 750,000 metric tons of plastic — about 74 times the weight of the Eiffel Tower — in water bottles a, yogurt containers and other packaging in 2021, according to its 2021 financial report.

Americans, they said, just don’t want to work. Socialism has made them lazy. They’d rather play video games. They don’t have the skills required by a 21st-century economy. High unemployment is “structural” and can’t be solved with monetary and fiscal stimulus.

none of them were true

the speed and extent of America’s recovery from the pandemic shock have been incredible.

Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

When civilizations promote parity along one axis, they tend to lapse back toward hierarchy along another. Legal equality may be offset by widening economic rifts, as in Western democracies today; the expansion of the franchise to a larger segment of the male population may be accompanied by the fervent demonization of women or non-natives, as in ancient Athens; movements for justice may prompt reactionary backlash, as in France after the 1789 revolution.

At a time when equality is widely lauded as an uncomplicated good, McMahon’s sweeping if occasionally schematic study provides a thought-provoking reminder of its pitfalls

All too often, equality within a group is premised on the exclusion of those outside it.

the problem I’m most concerned about isn’t the political melee; it’s the ongoing cultural transformation of red America, a transformation that a second Trump term could well render unstoppable.

t the most enduring legacy of a second Trump term could well be the conviction on the part of millions of Americans that Trumpism isn’t just a temporary political expediency, but the model for Republican political success and — still worse — the way that God wants Christian believers to practice politics.

Already we can see the changes in individual character. In December, I wrote about the moral devolution of Rudy Giuliani and of the other MAGA men and women who have populated the highest echelons of the Trump movement

The conventional wisdom of 1968 was that Humphrey lost to Nixon because he couldn’t find the courage to break with Johnson on a war that a majority of Americans had come to oppose.

That’s almost certainly wrong: Disaffected liberals ultimately came back, but disaffected blue-collar voters, who largely supported the war and abhorred the chaos in the streets, defected to Nixon or to George Wallace. (A Harris Poll found that two-thirds of respondents supported the Chicago cops’ tactics.)

The shrunken Democratic base that emerged from the election is very much the one the party relies on today: Blacks and well-educated white liberals.

The video, along with Eric Trump’s claim that his father “literally saved Christianity” and the image Donald Trump reposted on Truth Social of Jesus sitting next to him in court, raises a question:

Does Trump believe that he is God’s messenger, or are his direct and indirect claims to have a special relationship with God a cynical ploy to win evangelical votes?

“Over the years since, there has been a growing chorus of voices saying Trump is the defender of Christians and Christianity. Trump says this himself all the time, ‘When they come after me, they’re really coming after you.’”

I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.”

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review

Defense Minister Boris Pistorius has begun warning Germans that they should prepare for decades of confrontation with Russia — and that they must speedily rebuild the country’s military in case Vladimir V. Putin does not plan to stop at the border with Ukraine.

Russia’s military, he has said in a series of recent interviews with German news media, is fully occupied with Ukraine. But if there is a truce, and Mr. Putin, Russia’s president, has a few years to reset, he thinks the Russian leader will consider testing NATO’s unity.

some of Mr. Pistorius’s colleagues are warning that if American funding dries up and Russia prevails, its next target will be closer to Berlin.

He got a phone call about the imminent sale of a tech company and allegedly traded on the confidential information, according to charges filed by the Securities and Exchange Commission. The profit for a few minutes of work: $415,726.

rarely has anyone traded his reputation for seemingly so little reward. For Mr. Bechtolsheim, $415,726 was equivalent to a quarter rolling behind the couch. He was ranked No. 124 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index last week, with an estimated fortune of $16 billion.

Last month, Mr. Bechtolsheim, 68, settled the insider trading charges without admitting wrongdoing. He agreed to pay a fine of more than $900,000 and will not serve as an officer or director of a public company for five years.

In the course of those cases and confrontations, I’ve learned that the issue of campus protest is remarkably complex and that campus culture is at least as important as law and policy in setting the boundaries of debate.

There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions between free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission

Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms, but not cooperating with student activists to advance shared goals — or does it incorporate activism as part of the educational process itself, including by coordinating with the protesters and encouraging their activism?

President Biden’s effort to build American security alliances in China’s backyard is likely to reinforce the Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s view that Washington is leading an all-out campaign of “containment, encirclement and suppression” of his country. And there is not much Mr. Xi can do about it.

To China, Mr. Biden’s campaign looks nothing short of a reprise of the Cold War, when the world was split into opposing blocs. In this view, Beijing is being hemmed in by U.S. allies and partners, in a cordon stretching over the seas on China’s eastern coast from Japan to the Philippines, along its disputed Himalayan border with India, and even across the vast Pacific Ocean to a string of tiny, but strategic, island nations.

The summit ended with agreements to hold more naval and coast guard joint exercises, and pledges of new infrastructure investment and technology cooperation. It builds on a groundbreaking defense pact made at Camp David last August between Mr. Biden and the leaders of Japan and South Korea, as well as on plans unveiled last year to work with Australia and Britain to develop and deploy nuclear-powered attack submarines.

Under the Trump administration, the GOP-controlled Senate confirmed 174 district court judges, 54 circuit court judges and three Supreme Court justices — shifting the balance of the highest court to a 6-3 conservative majority. During his campaign rallies and events, Trump often likes to highlight the total, though he has exaggerated it.

In a 2022 interview with The Washington Post, McConnell recalled that Trump’s first candidacy had worried many conservatives at the time but that his Supreme Court list and picks had calmed their nerves and that his bargain with Trump had moved the country “right of center.”

McConnell and Trump have not spoken since late 2020, and Trump has repeatedly called for McConnell to be removed as the GOP leader of the Senate.

The thing about the Republican Party is that it’s not so much that it likes Putin or even thinks he’s an okay guy. Polling last year showed fewer than 1 in 10 Republicans had a favorable view of Putin or trusted him to do the right thing on the world stage, and Republicans said 76 percent to 16 percent that Putin is a war criminal. These are not in line with Carlson’s professed worldview.

But a significant and influential segment of the party has demonstrated a tendency toward a brand of moral relativism and even authoritarianism that creates an opening for giving Putin a pass.

Shortly after it was revealed in late 2016 that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump, an Economist/YouGov poll showed a sharp increase in favorable GOP views of Putin. Suddenly, 37 percent had a favorable view, and 47 percent had an unfavorable one. Just 14 percent had a “very” unfavorable view of him.

Thanks to social media, gaining widespread public attention for oneself and one’s favored causes has never been easier.

This has incentivized a lot of performative outrage that sometimes manifests itself in acts of protest, from environmental activists throwing soup on paintings in European museums to pro-Palestinian demonstrators halting traffic in major cities by sitting down en masse in the middle of roadways.

I don’t think they do much to advance the aims of the activists. In fact, I think they often backfire, generating ill-will among ordinary citizens inconvenienced by the protest. (As for the activists hoping to fight climate change by destroying works of art, I don’t even grasp what they think they’re doing with their lives.)

Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.

That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers. 

Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishized specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.   

with all these diverse issues, whether it's International monetary relations, alliance relations, concerns about the German question, nuclear strategy, and troop withdrawals, you'll have an expert in charge of each. But it's only at the top that these issues are all tied together.

President Kennedy, day after day after day, in 61 and 62 through 63, might have eight meetings. One might involve tax cuts, another the crisis with US steel, and the Test Ban Treaty, Berlin, and the balance of payments. Then different people would be in different meetings. So Carl Kaysen would deal with his portfolio and he would come in for one or maybe two of those meetings. Only at the top was some consideration given to all these issues. So in a president or prime minister's mind, the German question would be related to the balance of payments, which would be related to tax cuts, which would be related to Berlin, in a way that a mid-level person might not see.

It's sort of the reverse of the bureaucratic politics model. I started seeing that these issues got tied together in a way that many mid-level people would not see, but was understood at the top where grand strategy was made.