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we’re failing dismally on both the epidemiological and the economic fronts. But why?

Trump and allies were so eager to see big jobs numbers that they ignored both infection risks and the way a resurgent pandemic would undermine the economy. As I and others have said, they failed the marshmallow test, sacrificing the future because they weren’t willing to show a little patience.

In their vision, unrestricted profit maximization by businesses and unregulated consumer choice is the recipe for a good society.

NAIROBI — The top headline last week on a popular Kenyan news website could barely contain its sarcasm: "America, with 270K deaths, 13M infections, warns citizens not to travel to Kenya over high risk of COVID-19."

To many here, American fears of catching the coronavirus in Africa seem particularly ludicrous.

Almost every one of the continent’s 54 countries, while home to some of the least developed health-care systems in the world, have registered fewer deaths from the virus in the last nine months than the United States now suffers per day.

The most frequently cited means of discovering the Oath Keepers is Facebook, with variants of the platform’s name mentioned in almost 1,000 entires. YouTube and related terms were cited roughly 800 times. The entries usually don’t provide details about what content served by the platforms motivated the signups.

Beyond media, the most common entry points in the spreadsheet separately obtained by Mother Jones were coworkers, friends and family, and in-person events.

The word “officer” shows up in more than 200 explanations, usually in front of the name of a new member’s coworker, or of a police officer they claim a personal relationship with. That lines up with reporting about Oath Keepers’ deep entrenchment in law enforcement agencies.

Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.

The preponderance of the evidence now available is disturbing enough to warrant action.

The toxicity comes from the very nature of a platform that girls use to post photographs of themselves and await the public judgments of others.

Anagnorisis is that moment of recognition when a character in a play finally understands their predicament and who they really are.

It is Shakespeare’s Cardinal Wolsey in Henry VIII realizing that he has “ventured … this many summers in a sea of glory, But far beyond my depth,” or Richard II saying, “I have wasted time and now doth time waste me.”

Three explanations loom. One has to do with personalities and characters.

The authors combine these questions into a “scale capturing the strength of white identity and found that it was strongly related to Republicans’ support for Donald Trump.”“Strongly related” is an understatement. On a 17-point scale ranking the strength of Republican primary voters’ white identity from lowest to highest, support for Trump grew consistently at each step — from 2 percent at the bottom to 81 percent at the highest level

We assess claims that Donald Trump received a particularly large number of votes from individuals with antagonistic attitudes toward racial outgroups

however, we show that in 2016 Trump’s largest gains in support, compared to Mitt Romney in 2012

Political biases are omnipresent, but what we don’t fully understand yet is how they come about in the first place.

In 2014, Michele J. Gelfand, a professor of psychology at the Stanford Graduate School of Business formerly at the University of Maryland, and Jesse R. Harrington, then a Ph.D. candidate, conducted a study designed to rank the 50 states on a scale of “tightness” and “looseness.”

Gelfand and Harrington predicted that “‘tight’ states would exhibit a higher incidence of natural disasters, greater environmental vulnerability, fewer natural resources, greater incidence of disease and higher mortality rates, higher population density, and greater degrees of external threat.”

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.’”

A central roadblock, the psychologist Keith Payne writes, is that people employ “flexible reasoning.” By conceding here and asserting there, they evade our queries, leading us into mazes of rationalization. Once we’re in the maze, it can seem as though these people don’t have stable beliefs, or don’t believe things in the usual way.

In “Good Reasonable People: The Psychology Behind America’s Dangerous Divide,” Payne recounts arguing with his brother, who supported Trump, about whether the 2020 election was stolen. “I didn’t know how I could relate to him if he embraced Trump’s lie,” Payne recalls. To Payne’s great relief, his brother rejected Trump’s denialism, writing, on Facebook, that “by the letter of the law, yes, Biden won.” Yet his brother went on to say, “I think there was some malfeasance there in areas, I do. But it can’t be proven.” Like many people, Payne concludes, his brother had arrived at a kind of semi-belief, which allowed him both to acknowledge reality and “to hold on to the larger feeling that Biden’s victory was, deep down, illegitimate.”

It’s tempting to assume that only one’s political opponents are this slippery. But flexible reasoning, in Payne’s view, is “a bipartisan affair.

“In social movements … conspiracy theories that may be absurd and specious on their face nevertheless contain valid information about the motivations, grievances, insecurities, and even panics among their promoters, so they cannot be simply dismissed,” the historian Linda Gordon wrote in The Second Coming of the KKK

“Among Klan leaders, conspiracy theories also did a great deal of organizing work: they provided identifiable and unifying targets, supplying a bonding function that explanations based on historical analyses do not deliver.”

when elites cultivate and indulge conspiracism—when they exploit it—they can create the conditions for authoritarianism and political violence.

Mandates aren’t quite “myths”, as political scientist Robert Dahl argued in a 1990 article, but neither are they readily identifiable entities about which we can make confident assertions. Arguing whether Mr Obama has a mandate is like debating whether somebody has mojo, or whether basketball star LeBron James is "in the zone" on a given night: there’s a discussion to be had, but no way to come to a definite conclusion.

in claiming that President Obama “has” a mandate or “lacks” one, we are just giving voice to our conception of what a mandate is and whether we’d like to confer one on a given president. The mandate is in the eye of the beholder.

Patricia Conley, a political scientist at Northwestern University, examines the concept in terms of how mandates are used by presidents. Wittgenstein would approve of this approach; “the meaning of a word”, he wrote, “is its use in the language.”

profits have surged as a share of national income, while wages and other labor compensation are down. The pie isn’t growing the way it should — but capital is doing fine by grabbing an ever-larger slice, at labor’s expense.

Increasingly, profits have been rising at the expense of workers in general, including workers with the skills that were supposed to lead to success in today’s economy.

there are two plausible explanations, both of which could be true to some extent. One is that technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage; the other is that we’re looking at the effects of a sharp increase in monopoly power. Think of these two stories as emphasizing robots on one side, robber barons on the other.

A stressor, she explains, is a “sudden change in circumstances or environment that interacts with a complicated psychological profile in a way that leads a previously quiescent person to become violent.” The stressor is never the only explanation for the crime, but it is inevitably an important factor in a complex set of variables that lead to a disaster

the essays make a strong case that the interplay between climate change, food prices (particularly wheat) and politics is a hidden stressor that helped to fuel the revolutions and will continue to make consolidating them into stable democracies much more difficult.

in 2010-11, in tandem with the Arab awakenings, “a once-in-a-century winter drought in China” — combined, at the same time, with record-breaking heat waves or floods in other key wheat-growing countries (Ukraine, Russia, Canada and Australia) — “contributed to global wheat shortages and skyrocketing bread prices” in wheat-importing states, most of which are in the Arab world.

Young Britons have turned strikingly liberal, in a classical sense

They are relaxed, almost to the point of ennui, about other people’s sexual preferences, drug habits and skin colour.

The young want Leviathan to butt out of their pay cheques as well as their bedrooms. Compared with their elders, they are welfare cynics. Almost 70% of the pre-war generation, and 61% of baby-boomers, believe that the creation of the welfare state is one of Britain’s proudest achievements. Under 30% of those born after 1979 agree. The young are deficit-reduction hawks.

In the 1980s, on an 800-point SAT-type test scale, the average difference in test scores between two such children would have been about 90 points; today it is 125 points. This is almost twice as large as the 70-point test score gap between white and black children. Family income is now a better predictor of children’s success in school than race.

e proportion of students from upper-income families who earn a ba

chelor’s degree has increased by 18 percentage points over a 20-year period, while the completion rate of poor students has grown by only 4 points.

Even though the situation was bad in the summer of 1945, the leaders of Japan were not willing to consider giving up their traditions, their beliefs, or their way of life. Until August 9. What could have happened that caused them to so suddenly and decisively change their minds? What made them sit down to seriously discuss surrender for the first time after 14 years of war?

It could not have been Nagasaki.

Hiroshima isn't a very good candidate either. It came 74 hours -- more than three days -- earlier. What kind of crisis takes three days to unfold? The hallmark of a crisis is a sense of impending disaster and the overwhelming desire to take action now. How could Japan's leaders have felt that Hiroshima touched off a crisis and yet not meet to talk about the problem for three days?

After several well-publicized cases involving writers buying or manipulating their reviews, Amazon is cracking down. Writers say thousands of reviews have been deleted from the shopping site in recent months. Amazon has not said how many reviews it has killed, nor has it offered any public explanation. So its sweeping but hazy purge has generated an uproar about what it means to review in an era when everyone is an author and everyone is a reviewer

Nowhere are reviews more crucial than with books, an industry in which Amazon captures nearly a third of every dollar spent. It values reviews more than other online booksellers like Apple or Barnes & Noble, featuring them prominently and using them to help decide which books to acquire for its own imprints by its relatively new publishing arm.

“My sister’s and best friend’s reviews were removed from my books,” the author M. E. Franco said in a blog comment. “They happen to be two of my biggest fans.” Another writer, Valerie X. Armstrong, said her son’s five-star review of her book, “The Survival of the Fattest,” was removed. He immediately tried to put it back “and it wouldn’t take,” she wrote.

In a poll released last year by the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of Americans agreed that there were “strong conflicts between the rich and poor” — up substantially from when the question was asked in 2009

Americans are increasingly worried about the gap between rich and poor, but are hesitant to have the government do anything about it.

Our work identified a possible explanation for this seeming disconnect, and it is a sad one: the more people focused on inequality, the less they trusted the government.

for African-Americans, the pain continues — over 13 percent of black workers are unemployed, nearly twice the national average. And that’s not a new development: regardless of the economy, job prospects for African-Americans have long been significantly worse than for the country as a whole.

The most obvious explanation for this entrenched disparity is racial discrimination. But in my research I have found a somewhat different culprit: favoritism.

The mechanism that reproduces inequality, in other words, may be inclusion more than exclusion. And while exclusion or discrimination is illegal, inclusion or favoritism is not — meaning it can be more insidious and largely immune to legal challenges.

No other country looms so large in the Russian psyche. To Kremlin ideologists, the very concept of Russia’s sovereignty depends on being free of America’s influence.

Anti-Americanism has long been a staple of Vladimir Putin, but it has undergone an important shift. Gone are the days when the Kremlin craved recognition and lashed out at the West for not recognising Russia as one of its own

, it wants to exorcise all traces of American influence.