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If I felt guilty about exploiting my background to appeal to colleges looking to build a well-rounded class, I also felt grateful for the opportunity.

Yet for something so widely desired, what diversity means and why people want it remain unclear

Particularly in the U.S., where universities emphasize their “holistic” evaluations of applicants and, studies show, calibrate SAT scores depending on a variety of factors including race, legacy status, and athletic recruitment, she was curious how students justified the practice. Reasoning that elite colleges tend to espouse relatively progressive views and that their students—having gained entree to the world’s most prized institutions—would presumably have little reason to resent affirmative action, she decided this sample would provide insights into “the best-case scenario in terms of support for racial inclusion.”

As I explained in an earlier Salon piece, Donald Trump, with his background in reality TV and professional wrestling, created a spectacle that rewarded him with at least $3 billion in free media coverage. Trump’s sophisticated meta game also allowed him to exploit a risk-averse news-media establishment that operates according to a clear and predictable set of rules and conventions governing “the boundaries of the approved public discourse.”

These rules and conventions consist of maintaining the appearance of “objectivity” and “fairness,” perpetuating a “both sides do it” framework when discussing Republicans and Democrats, and an obsessive need to present “all sides of an issue.” Clear statements of fact and truth are treated as mere opinions though as Paul Krugman once said, “if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”

The American corporate news media also prefers to feature generalists who understand these rules as opposed to real experts who will not obey said script. Ultimately, in covering political campaigns and elections, the American corporate news media is more interested in covering the “horse race” — because it is an easy story to communicate — than in critically evaluating the specific policy proposals and qualifications of a given candidate.

one of the leading Chinese scholars of U.S.-China relations offered a stunning proposal: If the U.S. president-elect took similar actions as president, the Chinese government should suspend the world’s most important (and precarious) partnership. “I would close our embassy in Washington and withdraw our diplomats,” said Shen Dingli, a professor at Fudan University in Shanghai. “I would be perfectly happy to end the relationship.”

What made the recommendation especially notable was that, just days earlier, Shen had been arguing that Trump’s victory was good for China—much better than the election of Hillary Clinton would have been.

The Chinese government initially reacted to the call with restraint, suggesting that Taiwan’s leaders had “tricked” Trump into challenging a U.S. policy—adopted in 1979 as a consequence of Richard Nixon’s opening to China—that the island of Taiwan be considered part of China rather than an independent country. But reports have since indicated that the call was a deliberate effort by Trump and his advisers to express solidarity with Taiwan and stake out a tough stance on China, which the U.S. president-elect accused throughout the campaign of exploiting the United States economically.

the United States government is still responding at an analog pace to a low-grade, though escalating, digital conflict.

to anyone who reads between the lines and knows a bit of the back story not included in the report, the long lag times between detection and reaction are stunning.

The delays reveal fundamental problems with American cyberdefenses and deterrence that President-elect Donald J. Trump will begin to confront in two weeks

‘Clarity is more important than money’

After winning the Booker Prize for Fiction in 1972, John Berger spoke out against the award’s historic roots in Caribbean exploitation: “This is why I have to turn this prize against itself.”

“What are the necessary social and psychological conditions that allow populists of Hitler’s ilk to gain a mass following and attain power?”

“There are certain traits you can recognize that Hitler and Trump have in common,” Ullrich says. “I would say the egomania, the total egocentricity of both men, and the inclination to mix lies and truth – that was very characteristic of Hitler.”

Like Trump, “Hitler exploited peoples’ feelings of resentment towards the ruling elite.” He also said he would make Germany great again. Ullrich also notes both men’s talent at playing the media, making use of new technology and their propensity for stage effects.

many sections of the work – on globalisation, migration and technology, to name a few pertinent topics – read differently in the light of decisions she has made since reading it, such as the treatment of Greece at the height of the eurozone crisis

If Europe was able to pull ahead of China economically in the 19th century, Osterhammel argues, it was because the Chinese empire was hampered by a “chaotic dual system” of silver and copper coins, while much of Europe had created a “de facto single currency” with the Latin monetary union of 1866.

Osterhammel says he can see “she is very serious about the way world order (or disorder) has been evolving in the long run. She seems to understand, for instance, that migration and mobility have a historical dimension.”

In college at New York University, in 2013, I had spent a semester of study abroad in the United Arab Emirates; I am now a master’s candidate at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, and at the time of Wahedk87’s email I was a week away from traveling to Qatar. My “dirty mission” was my thesis research, and the “confidential information” I sought was about the labor conditions of migrant workers in the capital, Doha.

When I landed in Qatar in June, Wahedk87’s threat became clear. I was denied entry and detained at the airport in Doha. Qatari immigration officers informed me that my name appeared on a “blacklist” maintained by member states of the Gulf Cooperation Council because I had “made trouble” in the U.A.E. Later, Emirati officials told the State Department that they had placed me on the blacklist for unspecified “security-related reasons.”

From this, I suspect that it was the U.A.E., an ally of the American government, that hacked my email and shared its intelligence about my research plans with the Qatari authorities

What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump’s rhetorical techniques.

Adams believes Trump will win because he’s “a master persuader.”

His stated credentials in this arena, says Adams — who holds an MBA from UC Berkeley — largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric.

House Speaker Paul D. Ryan finds himself in the middle of yet another Republican civil war as the battle over LGBT rights has come to Congress, threatening to divide an already fractured GOP.

Democrats won an opening salvo late Wednesday night, when the House approved on a vote of 223 to 195, a measure by Rep. Sean Maloney (D-N.Y.) to deny payment to federal contractors who discriminate against LGBT employees.

Maloney’s victory does not mean that House conservatives — angry over what they view as overreaching by President Obama — will not continue to wage the fight.

Horizontal inequality is the term of art for inequality measured, not between individuals, but between racially or culturally defined groups.

like it or not, horizontal inequality, racial inequality above all, will define the general election.

Defining oneself at least in part by membership in a group is part of human nature. Even if you try to step away from such definitions, other people won’t.

Mr. Ailes would pick one or two “hot” stories, add numerous live guests and stick to that story throughout the day.

Many cable viewers, it turned out, were not interested in television news’s bread and butter — a diverse newscast of multiple dispassionate stories — no matter how important. Despite what they might tell pollsters, viewers were clearly looking for a great yarn, and Mr. Ailes knew how to spin one.

Mr. Ailes was equally adept at knowing what not to cover. It was around this time that the American public was becoming increasingly disillusioned, even despondent over the war in Iraq. So while MSNBC and CNN were focusing on the challenges and failures of the war, Fox covered the story far less often, and when they did so, in a far more sanguine way, highlighting successes from the field.

Farage proved to be the Mephistopheles of the Tory leavers. He offered them victory in return for what paltry souls they possessed. Going hard on immigration was the only way to win, he said. After a glance at the polls, “progressive” Tories agreed. On 3 June, a triumphant Farage could boast that their conversion was the “turning point”; the moment when Ukip’s wining stance on immigration became “mainstream”. It is still not true to say that race and immigration were all that mattered to everyone who voted leave. But they were all that mattered to Vote Leave. Mainstream Tories accepted that creating and exploiting fear would take them to victory. They played with fire and you can hear the flames crackling.

If they were sincere, they would have spoken with care throughout the campaign. But how could they? If they had insisted that Poles living here were welcome, they would have alienated the “demographic” Farage correctly identified would take them to victory. If they had said that immigration would continue as it is now when we left the EU, Johnson and many Tory politicians would have been expressing their honestly held view

But they would have exposed the lie at the heart of the Leave campaign as they spoke their minds. It pretended we could slash immigration and boost the economy together, and that was a “having it all” fantasy.

Of all the reasons it once seemed unthinkable that Donald J. Trump might be the Republican nominee, one of the strongest was the G.O.P.’s reputation as the party of religious conservatives.

Trump was a different kind of figure: Not merely lukewarm or unorthodox, but a proud flouter of the entire Judeo-Christian code — a boastful adulterer and a habitual liar, a materialist and a sensualist, a greedy camel without even the slightest interest in squeezing through the needle’s eye

And yet: Despite his transparent irreligiosity, Trump has won easily across the South, one of the most religious portions of the country. Among both self-identified evangelicals and Catholics, he’s consistently polled as well as the evangelical Ted Cruz and the Roman Catholic Marco Rubio.

Flaws in Apple’s mobile devices can typically fetch $1 million. Last September, a boutique firm in Washington, called Zerodium, which sells flaws to governments and corporations, announced a $1 million bounty for anyone who would turn over an exploit in Apple’s iOS 9 mobile operating system — the same operating system used to power the iPhone used by the San Bernardino shooter. By November, Zerodium said a team of undisclosed hackers had successfully claimed the bounty.

“For every Zerodium, there are a thousand other organizations like Zerodium that are far less vocal about doing what they do and will pay researchers who find this stuff to keep it a secret,”

Some security researchers said no bounty Apple could offer now would match the reward they could expect from the underground market. Apple has waited so long that the black market for its flaws has become extremely lucrative, perhaps making any bug bounty program the company would create seem late to the game.

rump has become the hillbilly vehicle for revenge upon the elites who have manipulated them for decades.After 52 years of abuse by their rulers, this “base” has finally turned on its leaders. The irony is that the only option for the now-former dominant Republicans is going to be to fall in line with them behind Trump.

They have no place else to go: They will follow those they had so easily manipulated for so long; they will support Trump. If they don’t, their influence will disappear.

This is not new. Small-town Americans had fallen completely out of media favor by 1960

American politics have careened out of control, lurching from a role model of sensible policy making and civil discourse to gridlock over even modest proposals with bipartisan buy-in, and to a presidential campaign with the kind of angry populist bluster, coarse language and sectarian division formerly associated with Peron-style banana republics.

On the policy front, the Republican Congress has made the unprecedented decision to portray a president with almost a year left in his term as not simply a “lame duck” but utterly bereft of any legitimacy to carry out the responsibilities of his office

On the campaign front, the emergence of Donald Trump and Ted Cruz as the leaders of the Republican presidential pack—one a demagogic populist outsider who has never served in public office and had no role in the party, the other an extreme right-wing ideologue whose twin calling cards are engineering a government shutdown and going on the Senate floor and calling his own leader a liar—turned conventional presidential politics on its head, leaving a Republican political establishment reeling and a broader group of concerned Americans frightened about the future.

the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”

the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business.

the question of what Mr. Trump might yet do by political methods against the media matters a great deal less than what he is attempting to do by ideological and philosophical methods.

so far his economic policies are all about empowering ethically challenged businesses to cheat and exploit the little guy.

In particular, he and his allies in Congress are making it a priority to unravel financial reform — and specifically the parts of financial reform that protect consumers against predators.

Last week Mr. Trump released a memorandum calling on the Department of Labor to reconsider its new “fiduciary rule,” which requires financial advisers to act in their clients’ best interests

drugs, when used consistently, constantly, destructively, are all anesthesia from pain. The Mexican drug cartels crave money, but they make that money from the way Yankees across the border crave numbness. They sell unfeeling. We buy it. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing so, and by some estimates about a third to a half of that money goes back to Mexico.

We want not to feel what’s happening to us, and then we do stuff that makes worse things happen–to us and others. We pay for it, too, in a million ways, from outright drug-overdose deaths (which now exceed traffic fatalities, and of which the United States has the highest rate of any nation except tiny Iceland, amounting to more than thirty-seven thousand deaths here in 2009 alone) to the violence of drug-dealing on the street, the violence of people on some of those drugs, and the violence inflicted on children who are neglected, abandoned, and abused because of them–and that’s just for starters.  The stuff people do for money when they’re desperate for drugs generates more violence and more crazy greed

Then there’s our futile “war on drugs” that has created so much pain of its own.