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Sacks makes three points: that “new” atheists lack the gravitas of old ones, that religion is the only reliable source of morality, so that without faith the world would crumble, and that a plurality of faiths is a bulwark against religious “fundamentalists,” whom he sees as not religious at all.

it’s simply not true that we haven’t grappled with those “real issues.” It’s just that they don’t upset most of us as much as Sacks thinks they should

Holocaust? Really? And did the Christian ethic prevent that? Indeed, much of the Holocaust was the inevitable working-out of a Christian animus against Jews, a reflection of the eternal Jewish status as killers of Christ.

The UK has deployed hundreds of troops to Eastern Europe as NATO continues to bolster its presence in the face of perceived Russian provocation.

"Russia has tripled defense spending," Stoltenberg told reporters.

"Russia has invested heavily in a modern military equipment. They are conducting a large-scale, no-notice exercises close to NATO borders, but perhaps most importantly Russia has been willing to use military force against neighbors.

the mainstream Republican position, is based on the unconscious supposition that American society is like a lake, with a relatively fixed boundary. If you cut the supply of fish coming from outside, there will be more food for the ones born here.

The problem is that American society is actually more like a river. Sometimes the river is running high, with a lot of volume and flow, with lots of good stuff for everybody, and sometimes it’s running low.

Nationwide, there are now about 200,000 unfilled construction jobs, according to the National Association of Home Builders. If America were as simple as a lake, builders would just raise wages, incomes would rise and the problem would be over.

Why are these other countries beating us if we spend so much more? The truth is that we may not be spending more

we broadened the scope of traditional health care industry analyses to include spending on social services, like rent subsidies, employment-training programs, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, family support and other services that can extend and improve life.

We studied 10 years’ worth of data and found that if you counted the combined investment in health care and social services, the United States no longer spent the most money — far from it. In 2005, for example, the United States devoted only 29 percent of gross domestic product to health and social services combined, while countries like Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark dedicated 33 percent to 38 percent of their G.D.P. to the combination. We came in 10th.

Since the first conference, global carbon emissions have increased by some 50 percent — an outcome that those who were present 20 years ago would surely have seen as disastrous. And we are continuing this sorry trend: As the Arctic becomes ice-free, we can expect that it will be drilled for oil.

despite the alarming news, the seeds of an energy revolution are being sown.

Solar and wind energy are developing faster than predicted — indeed, faster than most people realize. Europe is showing the way. Denmark gets about 20 percent of its electricity from wind. On a nice day, Germany, which no one thinks of as a sunny place, gets from the sun over 40 percent of the electricity it uses.

A child’s prospects are actually more fluid elsewhere, not just in the most equal countries, like Denmark or Sweden, but even in countries like Canada that have moderate levels of inequality, as I demonstrate in a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Economic Perspectives.

More than one-quarter of sons raised by fathers in the top 10 percent stay in the top 10 percent as adults, and another quarter fall no further than the top third. Meanwhile, half of those raised by fathers in the bottom 10 percent remain at the bottom or rise no further than the bottom third. In Canada there is less stickiness at the top, and children raised in the bottom are more likely to rise to the top half in earnings.

The difference is that Danes, Swedes and even Canadians are able to promote mobility for the majority while continuing to live with a dynasty at the top. It is the lack of a cleareyed focus on the top, free from rhetoric about talent and the pursuit of dreams, that is keeping Americans from effectively promoting upward mobility.

The College Board—the nonprofit consortium of colleges, high schools, and other organizations that creates the SAT—has repeatedly jiggered the test to respond to critics, most obviously in 2005, when it added a writing section that boosted the highest possible score to 2400 from 1600

Huge disparities remain. Asians score the highest on the test, and their average rose this past academic year even as the scores of all other ethnic groups fell.

University of Wyoming President Robert Sternberg was stupid in elementary school. IQ tests said so. Knowing his scores, his teachers in the 1950s expected him to perform badly, and he agreeably lived down to their expectations. In fourth grade a teacher named Virginia Alexa saw something special in him and conveyed her high expectations. Almost overnight he became an A student.

within poor and middle-income countries, is inequality getting worse or better? Are we moving toward a more fair world, or a more unjust one?

Starting in the 18th century, the industrial revolution produced giant wealth for Europe and North America.

the gap between the rich and the rest, as a global phenomenon, widened even more, right up through about World War II.

The site in Happisburgh was 900,000 years old, a time when mammoths and hippos still roamed in these parts. No human bones or prints that old had ever been found in Britain.

Standing on the ridge above Cardigan Bay in Borth, Dr. Bates described what the area would have looked like at the height of the last ice age some 20,000 years ago: more than half a mile of ice overhead and dry land stretching across today’s North Sea. The sea level was 400 feet lower than it is today.“You could have walked from Denmark to Yorkshire in those days,”

suggest that they walked upright and looked much like modern humans, though their brains were smaller. If they had language, it was primitive. Living at the tail end of an interglacial era, as winters were growing colder, they may have had functional body hair. So far, there is no evidence that they used clothes, shelter, fire or tools more complex than simple stone flakes.

Migrant crisis: EU ministers attempt to resolve quota row

European Union ministers are meeting to try to resolve a dispute over how to relocate 120,000 asylum seekers who have recently arrived in Europe.

Who are the 120,000?

Greenland has awarded UK-based company London Mining a 30-year licence to build and run a giant iron ore mine.

Greenland's industry minister called it the largest commercial project in the autonomous Danish territory's history.

In a statement on its website, London Mining said the mine was expected to produce 15m tonnes a year of "very high quality iron ore concentrate to the global steel industry".

Caldwell suggests that European elites have been so guilt-ridden about their past crimes, and so intent on avoiding anything that even resembled chauvinism or bigotry, that for decades they failed to put any sustained pressure on their steadily-growing immigrant populations to eschew religious extremism or phase out illiberal cultural practices. And worse, their efforts to marginalize what they considered (and still consider) the bigoted attitudes of their countrymen didn’t actually do away with anti-immigration anxieties: They just denied them a place in the political mainstream, which meant that they’ve manifested themselves instead in extreme and counterproductive outbursts (minaret bans, the political careers of Jean-Marie Le Pen and Geert Wilders, etc.).

It is notable that Europe's integration problem is worst not in first generation immigrants, but in their European born children, and I think one reason they are less successfully assimilated than their counterparts in the United States is the lack of a constitutional creed that successfully inculcates the idea that they're just as French or German or Spanish as anyone else. It's also true that American culture, disseminated largely through media, is many times more powerful than what a tiny country like Denmark can marshal to informally assimilate its immigrant population, and that the heterogeneity of our country means that no single minority group feels isolated in a land that a homogeneous majority dominates. Obviously this is a rough sketch of a diverse continent that inevitably glosses over nuances, but insofar as it holds true, it helps to explain my vexation with Mr. Douthat's reluctance to declare the constitutional understanding of American citizenship superior to the cultural understanding, even if there is some wisdom to be taken from the latter

The invocation of the European experience seems inapt to me.

A growing number of scholars believe that the ecological transformation set off by Columbus's voyages was one of the establishing events of the modern world. Why did Europe rise to predominance? Why did China, once the richest, most advanced society on earth, fall to its knees? Why did chattel slavery take hold in the Americas? Why was it the United Kingdom that launched the Industrial Revolution? All of these questions are tied in crucial ways to the Columbian Exchange.

the common nightcrawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in North America before 1492.

Intoxicating and addictive, tobacco became the subject of the first truly global commodity craze.

It is a simple idea supported by both economic theory and most people’s intuition: If welfare benefits are generous and taxes high, fewer people will work. Why bother being industrious, after all, if you can get a check from the government for sitting around

The idea may be backward.

The United States and many other nations with relatively low taxes and a smaller social safety net actually have substantially lower rates of employment.

The history of an era often seems defined by a particular commodity.

The 18th century certainly belonged to sugar. The race to cultivate it in the West Indies was, in the words of the French Enlightenment writer Guillaume-Thomas de Raynal, “the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.”

Today some 350 million people are involved in growing, transporting, weaving, stitching or otherwise processing the fibers of this plant.

In A.D. 410, Roman authority in Britain collapsed and Romano-British society disappeared from history under the invading tides of Angles and Saxons from northern Europe. Historians have been debating ever since whether the Romano-British were wiped out or survived by adopting their conquerors’ language and culture

A fine-scale genetic analysis of the British population has now provided the answer. The invaders and the existing population lived side by side and eventually intermarried extensively. The people of south and central England are now genetically well mixed, with Saxon genes accounting for only about 20 percent of the mix

The British Isles were wiped clean of people by the glaciers that descended toward the end of the last ice age, and were repopulated some 10,000 years ago by people who trekked over the broad land bridge that then joined eastern England to Europe north of the Rhine. The researchers say they can identify the genetic signature of this early migration, which survives most strongly in people from the western extremity of Wales.

From the mild-mannered Danes to crazed soccer fans, people all over the world go nuts for their national colors

People across Europe also have a passionate relationship with their flying colors, even if they are less conscious of it, and don’t normally fly the flag at fast food joints.

Think back to the dramatic Mohammed cartoon controversy of 2006, when Danish flags joined American flags in flag-burning rallies across the Muslim world after a Danish newspaper published a cartoon depicting the prophet.

European project after World War II was among the most noble in modern history. Germany, twice the cause of catastrophic wars, would not be punished but rebuilt, rehabilitated, and contained within a larger democratic European whole.

hristian Democrats called it a social market economy; social democrats thought of it as a more flexible alternative to socialism

urope would be not just a continent with common traditions, converging aspirations and open trade, but an emergent political federation. It would be more than a customs union—an economic union with a single currency, consistent economic rules, and social Europe balancing market Europe at a continental scale.

Europe hates Trump. Does it matter?

This is America's choice, not anyone else's. How would British voters feel if Texans weighed in on Brexit? This time, however, the international reaction to Donald Trump is so forceful and so unanimous in its condemnation that it is worth drawing attention to.

Back in 2004, Europeans assumed that their own well-publicised opposition to President Bush's Iraq war would make it harder for him to get re-elected. In fact, anti-Americanism had the opposite effect