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the problem with Greece is much more profound than most politicians and analysts have so far calculated. In stark reality, and far more dangerously than its present financial crisis threatening the euro project, Greece looks like a failed EU state, which, as such, puts at risk the stability of the entire European project. This is why a European political, rather than simply economic, plan for rescuing Greece must become a most urgent priority.

failed states, according to the definition provided by the Crisis States Research Centre of the London School of Economics, can no longer reproduce the conditions of their own existence and, therefore, are under threat of imminent collapse.

Greece’s increasing difficulty in coping with border security as tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers enter each year from Turkey.

When we send young people out to help these regions, we tell them they are there to tackle “poverty,” using the sort of economic designation we’re comfortable with.

these places are not just grappling with poverty. They are marked by disorder, violence and man-inflicted suffering.

People in many parts of the world simply live beyond the apparatus of law and order. The District of Columbia spends about $850 per person per year on police. In Bangladesh, the government spends less than $1.50 per person per year on police. The cops are just not there.

In a military training class north of Kiev late last month, volunteer ­instructor Viktor Mosgovoi led 30 would-be officers through hours of jumps, breathing exercises and group massages — Ukraine’s first mandatory psychological training for recruits

Most of them followed along with blank looks or smirks on their faces. A few erupted into giggles. “Sing a song about what you see,” Mosgovoi suggested as a way to beat the battlefield blues. “And don’t drink.”

In nearly a quarter-century of independence, Ukraine’s military has seen so little combat that the country’s defense minister estimated the nation had only 6,000 battle-ready troops a year ago. Over the past 10 months, the Ukrainian army has drafted almost 70,000 soldiers in a war against pro-Russian separatists in the eastern part of the country.

thanks to rapid advances in the market (globalization), Mother Nature (climate change plus ecological destruction) and Moore’s Law (computing power), some states are just blowing up under the pressure.

spare me the “it’s all Obama’s fault.” There are plenty of reasons to criticize Obama, but everything is not about what we do. There are huge forces acting on these countries, and it will take extraordinary collaboration by the whole world of order to contain them

it increasingly appears that the post-post-Cold War world is cleaving into the world of “order” and the world of “disorder”

What will happen to American politics if, as now appears likely, the Republican Party nominates Donald Trump? Here’s one bet: It will get more violent.

The United States is headed toward a confrontation, the likes of which it has not seen since 1968, between leftist activists, who believe in physical disruption as a means of drawing attention to injustice, and a candidate eager to forcibly put down that disruption in order to make himself look tough.

The new culture of physical disruption on the activist left stems partly from disillusionment with Barack Obama.

The problem for Republicans is that they haven’t found a candidate who can appeal to Trump’s politically-disaffected supporters — whether they’re worried about immigration, jobs, terrorism or an overreaching social liberalism — without trafficking in slurs and empty bluster.

But that’s roughly what Nixon did in 1968 and 1972, when he addressed (liberal historians would say exploited, but we can have that debate another time) widespread anxieties over social change and disorder without ever repudiating racial equality or civil rights.

they’ve struggled, in part, because they lack a second Nixonian gift: An instinct for the non-ideological character of many American voters, primary voters included.

the headline grabber in the paper from the liberal thinktank CentreForum concerns ethnicity: the serial losers after 28 years of marketisation, testing, a centralised curriculum and decentralised control of schools are poor white kids.

“During the early years, white British pupils are among the highest achievers,” say the authors. “By the end of secondary school however, those white British pupils are overtaken by 10 other ethnic groups to just below average, when compared with other ethnicities.”

Thatcherite culture celebrated the chancers and the semi-crooks: people who had been shunned in the solidaristic working-class towns became the economic heroes of the new model – the security-firm operators, the contract-cleaning slave drivers; the outright hoodlums operating in plain sight as the cops concentrated on breaking strikes.

only narratives can show dilemmas across time. It’s not enough to display choices like slivers on a microscope slide. We need to see change happen, and we can do that only by reconstituting the past as histories, biographies, poems, plays, novels, or films. The best of these sharpen and shade simultaneously: they compress what’s happening in order to clarify, even as they blur, the line between instruction and entertainment. They are, in short, dramatizations. And a fundamental requirement of these is never to bore.

For more than two decades, Mr. Jones has built a big business on specious claims and fear-mongering. When pressed on false claims by critics, his classic response tends to be that he’s merely asking questions others are too afraid to ask.

“That’s Alex Jones’s M.O.,” Owens said of the deposition. “To flood any topic with confusion and doubt so no one can grab onto anything.”

Near the end of the questioning, Mr. Jones suggested his claims about the Sandy Hook massacre were the result of a mental disorder. He said he “almost had like a form of psychosis back in the past where I basically thought everything was staged, even though I’m now learning a lot of times things aren’t staged.”

The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren't, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real

The first force is Donald Trump, who represents a threat to the American systems of governance

I don’t know if his actions meet the legal standard of obstruction of justice, but they certainly meet the common-sense standard of interference with justice.

there is a credible argument that, given soaring inequality, and globalization’s disproportionate impact on the middle classes and working poor, tax relief for many in the lower half of the earning population is a good idea. I agree. So why not give it to them, rather than the obscenely wealthy? And why not make it revenue-neutral or even debt-reducing as well as helpful to social stability?

You could indeed pay for big middle class tax cuts or an increase in tax credits for the working poor if you doubled the estate tax, or adding a new tax bracket - say, 45 percent - for those earning over $1 million a year. This would be a political master-stroke for the Trump administration (which is why Steve Bannon was rumored to favor something on these lines). It would instantly rebrand the GOP. It might even get buy-in from the Democrats. It could pass without using reconciliation rules in the Senate, thus helping entrench it in the system. It would help defuse our dangerous tribalism. It would do a lot to restore generational fairness, and counter the emergence of a rich caste of people who are fabulously wealthy for doing nothing. It would support work rather than privilege, a meritocracy rather than an oligarchy.

If the Democrats were smart, they would propose something like this themselves - and get ahead of the GOP, using it as a platform for 2018. And if the Republicans could abandon zombie Reaganism, they could rescue themselves from the electoral oblivion they so richly deserve. There’s a win-win here for both parties and the country.

“I’m almost in the job world, and it really weighs down on me,” said the government major, who keeps up with his fellow students by looking at their résumés on LinkedIn. “Everyone tries to put themselves in competition with everyone else. . . . There’s more of a focus on the professional aspect rather than on having fun or doing things that are focused on the college experience.”

Over the past decade or so, rates of depression, psychological distress and suicidal thoughts and actions have risen significantly among people 26 and younger, with some of the highest increases among women and those at higher income levels, according to a stud

in the past 10 to 12 years, the number of people reporting symptoms indicative of major depression increased 52 percent among 12- to 17-year-olds and 63 percent among 18- to 25-year-olds; the rate for both groups is now 13.2 percent.

there is one quirk that consistently puzzles America’s fans and critics alike. Why, they ask, does it experience so many mass shootings?

Perhaps, some speculate, it is because American society is unusually violent. Or its racial divisions have frayed the bonds of society. Or its citizens lack proper mental care under a health care system that draws frequent derision abroad.

Though seemingly sensible, all have been debunked by research on shootings elsewhere in the world. Instead, an ever-growing body of research consistently reaches the same conclusion.

I’m asking students around the country: Who are your heroes? There’s always a long pause after I ask. But eventually one of the students suggested Steven Pinker. Another chimed in Jonathan Haidt. There was general nodding around the table.

Both men are psychology professors, at Harvard and N.Y.U., who bravely stand against what can be the smothering orthodoxy that inhibits thought on campus, but not from the familiar conservative position.

One way Pinker does it is by refusing to be pessimistic.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, replied to my inquiry with a detailed critique of the A.P.A. guidelines.“The report is blinkered by two dogmas. One is the doctrine of the blank slate” that rejects biological and genetic factors, Pinker wrote, adding thatThe word “testosterone” appears nowhere in the report, and the possibility that men and women’s personalities differ for biological reasons is unsayable and unthinkable.The other dogma, Pinker argued,is that repressing emotions is bad and expressing them is good — a folk theory with roots in romanticism, Freudian psychoanalysis, and Hollywood, but which is contradicted by a large literature showing that people with greater self-control, particularly those who repress anger rather than “venting,” lead healthier lives: they get better grades, have fewer eating disorders, drink less, have fewer psychosomatic aches and pains, are less depressed, anxious, phobic, and paranoid, have higher self-esteem, are more conscientious, have better relationships with their families, have more stable friendships, are less likely to have sex they regretted, are less likely to imagine themselves cheating in a monogamous relationship.

In Pinker’s view, the A.P.A. guidelines fail to recognize thata huge and centuries-long change in Western history, starting from the Middle Ages, was a “Civilizing Process” in which the ideal of manhood changed from a macho willingness to retaliate violently to an insult to the ability to exert self-control, dignity, reserve, and duty. It’s the culture of the gentleman, the man of dignity and quiet strength, the mensch. The romantic 1960s ethic of self-expression and escape from inhibitions weakened that ethic, and the A.P.A. report seems to be trying to administer the coup de grâce.

There is a strikingly different approach to the debate over masculinity in a different branch of academic inquiry. As David Autor, an economist at M.I.T., wrote in response to my inquiry:The greatest adverse shock to the psychosocial welfare of U.S. men has not stemmed from dysfunctional notions of masculinity (not that these are above reproach) nor from #MeToo (which was long overdue) but from deep secular labor market forces — both technological and trade-induced — that have over nearly four decades reduced the demand for skilled blue collar work.The effects of these economic changes, Autor wrote, have been devastating:These forces have dramatically eroded the earnings power, employment stability, social stature, and marriage market value of non-college men. The ensuing dysfunction touches not just in earnings and employment but also male idleness, dysfunctional and destructive behavior (e.g., drug and alcohol abuse), and the erosion of two-parent families, which, research suggests, facilitate children in becoming successful adults.

I also have legitimate, nonpartisan, nonpolitical concern about Trump’s stability, fitness and basic intellectual capacity? Of course I can, and so should everyone else.

Let’s start here: From everything I have ever read about the man, he is not particularly smart. This is sometimes hard for people to understand. They equate financial gain with intellectual gifts, but the two are hardly synonymous.

He is also not a reader. That is not to say that he can’t read, but rather that, given his druthers, he won’t.

The Republican Party is learning what should have been obvious from the outset: Mr. Trump’s chaotic personality can’t be contained. Indeed, combining it with the awesome power of the presidency virtually guaranteed he would become more volatile and transgressive. His presidency is infecting the entire party.

policy is hardly the whole story. When it comes to the Republican Party and Mr. Trump, the most profound and dangerous shift has occurred not in policy but in the province of disposition and demeanor, temperament and cast of mind. This arena is more amorphous than policy but can be at least as important.

At the national level the Republican Party has become a destructive and anarchic political force in American life.

There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.

Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth

YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”

From a French diplomat, I received a worried letter. President Trump’s scuttling of the Iran nuclear deal was “the best illustration of the Jacksonian moment the United States is going through, a mix of unilateralism and isolationism” that contribute to “a new world disorder” where there is “no more American power willing or able — or both — to be the last-resort enforcer.” In the vacuum, he could discern “no minimum level of convergence between the key players.

Europe is beginning to digest the severity of the schism. Federica Mogherini, the European Union’s senior foreign policy official, heaped scorn on Trump recently, saying that “screaming, shouting, insulting and bullying, systematically destroying and dismantling everything that is already in place, is the mood of our times.” Without naming the president, she warned that “this impulse to destroy” leads nowhere good. Hers was a requiem for “respect” and “dialogue” — in effect the post-1945 order

What eats at America — and so its place in the world — is moral rot: unrelenting blight that emanates from on high