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By 2020, the United States will overtake Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest oil producer, according to the International Energy Agency. The U.S. has already overtaken Russia as the world’s leading gas producer. Fuel has become America’s largest export item. Within five years, according to a study by Citigroup, North America could be energy independent. “OPEC will find it challenging to survive another 60 years, let alone another decade,” Edward Morse, Citigroup’s researcher, told CNBC.

Joel Kotkin identified America’s epicenters of economic dynamism in a study for the Manhattan Institute. It is like a giant arc of unfashionableness. You start at the Dakotas where unemployment rates are at microscopic levels. You drop straight down through the energy belts of the Great Plains until you hit Texas. Occasionally, you turn to touch the spots where fertilizer output and other manufacturing plants are on the rebound, like the Third Coast areas in Louisiana, Mississippi and Northern Florida.

Vanity Fair still ranks the tech and media moguls and calls it The New Establishment, but, as Kotkin notes, the big winners in the current economy are the “Material Boys” — the people who grow grain, drill for fuel and lay pipeline. The growing parts of the world, meanwhile, are often the commodity belts, resource-rich places with good rule of law like Canada, Norway and Australia.

he Republican Party’s technological deficiencies barely begin to explain why the G.O.P. has lost the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections. The party brand — which is to say, its message and its messengers — has become practically abhorrent to emerging demographic groups like Latinos and African-Americans, not to mention an entire generation of young voters.

I flew with Anderson to Columbus, Ohio, to watch her conduct two focus groups. The first consisted of 10 single, middle-class women in their 20s; the second, of 10 20-something men who were either jobless or employed but seeking better work. All of them voted for Obama but did not identify themselves as committed Democrats and were sufficiently ambivalent about the president’s performance that Anderson deemed them within reach of the Republicans.

“I’m going to write down a word, and you guys free-associate with whatever comes to mind,” she said. The first word she wrote was “Democrat.” “Young people,” one woman called out. “Liberal,” another said. Followed by: “Diverse.” “Bill Clinton.”“Change.”“Open-minded.”“Spending.”“Handouts.”“Green.”“More science-based.” When Anderson then wrote “Republican,” the outburst was immediate and vehement: “Corporate greed.”“Old.”“Middle-aged white men.” “Rich.” “Religious.” “Conservative.” “Hypocritical.” “Military retirees.” “Narrow-minded.” “Rigid.” “Not progressive.” “Polarizing.” “Stuck in their ways.” “Farmers.”

“Most people believe that the Third World War has begun, but right now we are still in the cold phase of the war, which may or may not turn into a hot war,”

After drilling into the stalagmites and pulling out cylinders of rock, the team could see an obvious transition between two layers. On one side were old minerals that were part of the original stalagmites; on the other were newer layers that had been laid down after the fragments were broken off by the cave’s former users. By measuring uranium levels on either side of the divide, the team could accurately tell when each stalagmite had been snapped off for construction.Their date? 176,500 years ago, give or take a few millennia.

Outside Bruniquel Cave, the earliest, unambiguous human constructions are  just 20,000 years old. Most of these are ruins—collapsed collections of mammoth bones and deer antlers. By comparison, the Bruniquel stalagmite rings are well-preserved and far more ancient.

Neanderthals must have been responsible. There simply wasn’t any other hominin in that region at that time.

We are different, of course. Our household gods are not Plato and Aristotle — philosophers of a fixed cosmos — but Darwin and Freud.

We know the past better than Adams did, but it speaks to us from a far greater remove. And our implicit notion of what lies at the bottom of history is not a moral but a psychological one

after five years of reading, writing, and thinking about Adams, I’ve concluded that he really wasn’t like us at all. Of course his consciousness was different, but I imagine he was different even in the workings of his subconscious. Living in a moral rather than a psychological world, a world that does not acknowledge a subconscious realm, makes you radically different, especially if, like Adams, you have fashioned your entire life around principle

In the Face of Weighty Problems, Trump Focuses on Squabbles

The morning after North Korea launched a ballistic missile into the sea, apparently to test President Trump’s resolve in his first days in office, the new commander in chief wanted to make one thing very clear to the world: Mark Cuban, the billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner, was not smart enough to have his job.

“He backed me big-time but I wasn’t interested in taking all of his calls. He’s not smart enough to run for president!”

Zhang sees a lack of innovation as a persistent problem for China. “Going forward, we need people who can invent. The reason China doesn’t have a Steve Jobs is because of the education system, which needs reform, along with health care and the political system. China does not train enough people to think.”

“In China nowadays, teachers are desperate,” Yang Lan told me over lunch. With her upswept hair and porcelain skin, Yang radiated celebrity power. “They’re worried that all the only children—‘little emperors’—are spoiled and self-centered and no longer appreciate their parents.” She told me how one school had invited 1,000 parents to sit on chairs on the playground, “then asked the kids to wash their parents’ feet in front of everyone—a sign of filial piety.”

China’s “little emperors” are coddled in a distinctly Chinese way. While doted on and catered to, they are also loaded up with the expectations of parents who have invested all their dreams—not to mention money—in their only child. These “spoiled” children often study and drill from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day.

the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

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.

fracking needs to be regulated by the Department of Energy, not just states: “Because if they don’t do it right, there could be trouble,” he says. There’s no excuse not to get it right. “There are good techniques to make it safe that should be followed properly,” he says. But, the smaller, independent drillers, “are wild.” “It’s tough to control these independents. If they do something wrong and dangerous, they should punish them.”

We need nationally accepted standards for controlling methane leakage, for controlling water used in fracking — where you get it, how you treat the polluted water that comes out from the fracking process and how you protect aquifers — and for ensuring that communities have the right to say no to drilling. “The key message,” said Krupp, “is you gotta get the rules right. States need real inspector capacity and compliance schemes where companies certify they have done it right and there are severe penalties if they perjure.”

In response to growing concerns over head injuries in football, Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth football organization, announced rule changes on Wednesday that will limit the amount of full-speed collisions and other contact allowed in practice.

The issue of brain injuries sustained on the football field has forced a reckoning at all levels of the sport in recent years. Pop Warner’s new rules, which will affect hundreds of thousands of youth football players, some as young as 5 years old, were seen as the latest acknowledgment that the nation’s most popular sport poses dangers to the long-term cognitive health of its athletes.

Under its new rules, effective for the coming season, which starts in August, contact will not be allowed for two-thirds of each practice — a move prompted by research showing that most of the hardest hits in youth football occur not in games, but in practice. The organization is also forbidding all drills that involve full-speed, head-on blocking and tackling that begins with players lined up more than three yards apart, as well as head-to-head contact.

To the north lay the mighty Hittite empire; to the south, Egypt was thriving under the reign of the great Pharaoh Ramses II. Cyprus was a copper emporium. Greece basked in the opulence of its elite Mycenaean culture, and Ugarit was a bustling port city on the Syrian coast. In the land of Canaan, city states like Hazor and Megiddo flourished under Egyptian hegemony. Vibrant trade along the coast of the eastern Mediterranean connected it all.

Experts have long pondered the cause of the crisis that led to the Late Bronze Age collapse of civilization, and now believe that by studying grains of fossilized pollen they have uncovered the cause.

Theories have included patterns of warfare, plagues and earthquakes.

North Korea and South Korea fired hundreds of artillery shells across their disputed western sea border on Monday, escalating military tensions a day after the North threatened to conduct more nuclear tests.

Earlier on Monday, North Korea told the South that it would conduct live-fire military drills in seven zones along the maritime border, which hugs the southern coast of North Korea.

“This is a premeditated provocation to test our will to defend the maritime border, and if the North provokes again using our response today as an excuse, we will act decisively,” Mr. Kim said. “We have increased our vigilance along the western frontier islands and boosted weapons’ readiness there.”

the number one thing is to have a real passion for your subject and to be able to convey that to your students. Obviously the content is important, but that's not as unusual as being able to really convey why you think history is important.

I'm strongly in favor of students knowing the facts of history, not just memorizing or having it drilled into their heads.

also I think what I see in college students, that seems to be lacking at least when they come into college, is writing experience. In other words, being able to write that little essay with an argument.

Russia has dropped piracy charges against 30 Greenpeace activists, replacing them with hooliganism charges, according to officials.

The new charge has a maximum penalty of seven years rather than 15. Greenpeace says it is still "wildly disproportionate".

Greenpeace's Arctic Sunrise vessel was seized by Russian forces as activists tried to scale an offshore oil platform.

They are overwhelmingly white, rich, older and male, in a nation that is being remade by the young, by women, and by black and brown voters. Across a sprawling country, they reside in an archipelago of wealth, exclusive neighborhoods dotting a handful of cities and towns. And in an economy that has minted billionaires in a dizzying array of industries, most made their fortunes in just two: finance and energy.

Now they are deploying their vast wealth in the political arena, providing almost half of all the seed money raised to support Democratic and Republican presidential candidates. Just 158 families, along with companies they own or control, contributed $176 million in the first phase of the campaign

Not since before Watergate have so few people and businesses provided so much early money in a campaign, most of it through channels legalized by the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision five years ago.

Chinese parents spend approximately 10 times as long every day drilling academic activities with their children.

What Chinese parents understand is that nothing is fun until you're good at it. To get good at anything you have to work, and children on their own never want to work, which is why it is crucial to override their preferences. This often requires fortitude on the part of the parents because the child will resist;

if done properly, the Chinese strategy produces a virtuous circle. Tenacious practice, practice, practice is crucial for excellence; rote repetition is underrated in America. Once a child starts to excel at something—whether it's math, piano, pitching or ballet—he or she gets praise, admiration and satisfaction. This builds confidence and makes the once not-fun activity fun.

Is preserving and reviving cursive handwriting retro sentimentality or neo-Luddism? No, it's good teaching and good neuroscience.

The close connections between hand and brain, whether in music or in writing, have strong support in research, as summarized here:

Neurologist Frank Wilson, author of The Hand: How its Use Shapes the Brain, Language and Human Culture, says, "Although the repetitive drills that accompany handwwriting lessons seem outdated, such physical instruction will help students to succeed.  He says these activities stimulate brain activity, lead to increased language fluency, and aid in the development of important knowledge."  He describes in detail the pivotal role of hand movements, in particular  the development of thinking and language capacities, and in "developing deep feelings of confidence and interest in the world-all-together, the essential prerequistes for the emergence of the capable and caring individual."