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If farmers must grow twice as much food to feed the 10 billion, following the ecosystem-conserving rules of Sir Albert Howard ties their hands.

Prophets smite their brows at this logic. To their minds, evaluating farm systems wholly in terms of calories per acre is folly. It doesn’t include the sort of costs identified by Vogt: fertilizer runoff, watershed degradation, soil erosion and compaction, and pesticide and antibiotic overuse.

To Borlaugians, farming is a kind of useful drudgery that should be eased and reduced as much as possible to maximize individual liberty. To Vogtians, agriculture is about maintaining a set of communities, ecological and human, that have cradled life since the first agricultural revolution, 10,000-plus years ago. It can be drudgery, but it is also work that reinforces the human connection to the Earth. The two arguments are like skew lines, not on the same plane.

Neither he nor his courtiers knew much about England

Charles V’s ambition and Mary’s suggestibility

Both the Ottoman threat and the schism would go (he thought) with Germany to his brother Ferdinand, but the French rivalry would remain to Spain

A marriage to the Queen of England provided the perfect solution – a powerbase in the north from which the Netherlands could be secured

Mary secured the English succession in July 1553

Throughout Edward’s reign (1547-53) she had attempted to defend her father’s religious settlement, and when her brother died young in July 1553 she was the heir by law, and a notorious religious conservative

She also owed, and willingly acknowledged, a debt of gratitude to Charles, who had defended her by diplomatic means over many years

There were only three candidates: Dom Luis of Portugal, the brother of King Juan; Edward Courtenay, son of the Marquis of Exeter (executed in 1539) and related through his mother to Edward IV; and Prince Philip

Elizabeth would never have come to the throne, the country would have remained Roman Catholic, and England would have been linked for an indefinite period with the Netherlands in a dynastic union

Although his support remained, there is no evidence that the Queen ever had any intention of marrying him

There were protests in Parliament which Mary brushed aside, and a briefly serious rebellion in Kent in January 1554, which was with some difficulty suppressed

As a result, the prince found himself with little more than the title of King of England

had no authority in England independent of the Queen, and must surrender his title if she should die childless

Their numerous titles had been officially proclaimed, and ‘King and Queen of England, France and Ireland …’ duly took precedence.

Whether by calculation or oversight, he found that he had two households, one Spanish, one English, and in spite of fair-minded attempts to divide his service between them, he was besieged with complaints on all sides

Mary’s much heralded pregnancy turned out to be an illusion

If Henry’s settlement was reversed, the whole process of dissolution could be declared invalid, and the land reclaimed by the Church, at the cost of immense disruption. Such a situation would be unacceptable to the English Parliament

Philip therefore used Habsburg clout in Rome to persuade Pope Julius III to do a deal. If he waived the Church’s claim to these lands, the King and Queen would reconcile England to his ecclesiastical authority

By the middle of January 1555, Philip had performed his first major service to the realm of England

The Queen consorts of Henry VIII had all been given generous settlements, but Philip got nothing

The Queen was sick, bewitched, even dead; there was a substitution plot in which Philip was implicated

On August 3rd the royal couple removed to Oatlands, and on the 5th, as soon as he could decently leave her, Philip departed for the Netherlands

Within a few weeks he had taken over his father’s authority in the Low Countries, and the real test of Charles’s intentions had arrived

Charles V abdicated in Brussels in September 1555, and handed over the Crowns of Spain to Philip in January 1556

There was talk of the council being divided into King’s men and Queen’s men, and the Duke of Alba urged him to get a grip on the appointments to English offices

The war with France, temporarily suspended by truce in February 1556, flared up again in the autumn, and Mary’s increasingly desperate pleas for Philip’s return were met with professions of affection, and bland excuses

Both his honour and his shortage of resources necessitated that England join him in his war against France. Mary was only too anxious to do something to gratify him that would not compromise her authority in England, so she was keen to oblige

Philip had left in July, and when in January 1558 the Queen announced that she was again pregnant, no one believed her. This was not only immensely sad, it was also a warning that there was something seriously wrong with her health, and Philip got the message. Ever since he had abandoned his campaign for a coronation in 1556, the King had had his eye upon Elizabeth

At first the King sought to neutralise Elizabeth by marriage to one of his loyal dependents, the Duke of Savoy

The princess was the heir by English law – the same law which had brought Mary to the throne – but the heir in the eyes of the Catholic church should have been Mary Stuart, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret. Mary was in France and betrothed to the Dauphin, so that neither Philip nor Mary wanted her on the English throne

As her health deteriorated in the early autumn of 1558, to Mary’s intense distress, her husband concentrated on ensuring that Elizabeth’s succession would be as smooth as possible

Mary’s death was a relief to Philip. The affection in their relationship had been all on her side, and he urgently needed a fertile wife who would bear him more children. In the event he had failed to transcend the limitations of his marriage treaty, and his power in England had remained extremely limited. In the course of time, the country became a liability

he also brought it into the war which cost Calais; but he protected Elizabeth during the latter part of the reign, and made sure that she came safely to the throne. Paradoxically, that was his most lasting achievement as King of England

it’s not just aging. In a variety of different areas, the Baby Boom generation created, advanced, or preserved policies that made American institutions less dynamic

most zoning was intended to protect property values for homeowners, or to exclude certain racial g

Stricter zoning rules began to be implemented in many places in the 1940s and 1950s as suburbanization began. But then things got worse in the 1960s to 1980s

These decades, when the political power of the Baby Boomer generation was rapidly rising, saw a sharp escalation in land-use rules.

There’s debate about why this is: Some researchers say the end of formal segregation may have pushed some voters to look for informal methods of enforcing segregation. Others suggest that a change in financial returns to different classes of investment caused homeowners to become more protective of their asset values.

Even as the American population has doubled since the 1940s, it has gotten more and more legally challenging to build houses. The result is that younger Americans are locked out of suitable housing. And as I’ve argued previously, when young people have to rent or live in more crowded housing, they tend to postpone the major personal events marking transformation into settled adulthood, such as marriage and childbearing.

hey also made new rules restricting young people’s employment. Laws and rules requiring workers to have special licenses, degrees, or certificates to work have proliferated over the past few decades. And while much of this rise came before Boomers were politically active, instead of reversing the trend, they extended it.

even as higher education gets more expensive, the actual economic returns to a university degree are about flat. People who are more educated make more money than people with less education, but overall, most educational groups are just treading water

the actual enforcement mechanism for this norm is explicitly generational: older employers setting standards for younger job applicants.

these developments are part of a wider social trend toward increasing control and regulation across all walks of lif

graph tracking the rise in paperwork needed to start a new business, or the length of census questionnaires, or the length of the federal code, or virtually any measure of administrative or regulatory complexity would show the same basic trend

most glaring example of this growth in regulation and control is also the easiest one to pin on Baby Boomers: the incredible rise in incarceration rates

It’s understandable that, faced with a wave of crime, Baby Boomers might want to respond with a law-enforcement crackdown. But the scale of the response was disproportionate. The rush to respond to a social ill with control, with extra rules and procedures, with the commanding power of the state, has been typical of American policy making in the postwar period, and especially since the 1970s

Even young Americans today who are free from prison are nonetheless in bondage to debt—sometimes their own debt, in the form of rapidly growing student loans or personal and credit-card loans. But on a larger scale, the problems of entitlements, pensions, Social Security, Medicare, and federal, state, and local debt are becoming more severe all the time

Below, I show a reasonable projection of the share of national income that will have to be spent paying for these obligations in the future if there is no substantial restructuring of liabilitie

Making these payments will require fiscal austerity, through either higher taxes or lower alternative spending. Younger Americans will bear the burdens of the Baby Boomer generation, whether in smaller take-home pay or more potholes and worse schools.

Baby Boomers are living longer even as the workers who pay for their pensions are dying from an epidemic of drug overdose, suicide, car accidents, and violence

there is cause for hope. If the problem is too many senseless rules, then the solution is obvious. Strict licensure standards can be repealed. Minimum lot sizes can be reduced. Building-height ceilings can be raised. Nonviolent prisoners can have their sentences commuted. Even thorny problems such as cost control in universities can be addressed through caps on non-instructional spending

he went further and explained why America, at its best, is an inversion of that twisted racial identitarianism: “What this president doesn’t understand is that unlike every other nation on earth, we’re unable to define what constitutes ‘American’ by religion, by ethnicity, or by tribe; you can’t do it. America is an idea. An idea stronger than any army, bigger than any ocean, more powerful than any dictator or tyrant. It gives hope to the most desperate people on earth.”

more importantly, Biden was able to express all this with authority. The speech was a defense of American decency against an indecent commander-in-chief — and it echoed loudly because Biden is, so evidently, a decent human

for 25 minutes or so this week, I felt as if I were living in America again, the America I love and chose to live in, a deeply flawed America, to be sure, marked forever by slavery’s stain, and racism’s endurance, but an America that, at its heart, is a decent country, full of decent people.

decency is the heart of his candidacy. And voting for Joe Biden feels like voting for some things we’ve lost and have one last chance to regain. Normalcy, generosity, civility, experience — and a reminder that, in this current darkness, Trump does not define America.

“Currently, 66 percent of the public says ‘it would be too risky to give U.S. presidents more power to deal directly with many of the country’s problems.’ About three-in-ten adults (29 percent) offer the contrasting opinion that ‘problems could be dealt with more effectively if U.S. presidents didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts.’”

Three in ten is not a terrible place to start if you want to become an American autocrat

here’s one demographic in particular that is even more fertile territory: “The share of conservative Republicans who say that presidents could deal with problems more effectively if they ‘didn’t have to worry so much about Congress or the courts’ has doubled since March 2018. Today, about half of conservative Republicans (52 percent) hold this view, compared with 26 percent a year ago.

Brits now favor expanding security over freedom by 65 to 35 percent.

“Across all dimensions, support for security was highest among groups that the Conservative Party now relies on most heavily for its voters: older age groups, pensioners, white voters, and those with lower levels of education.” If you wonder why the Tory Party has shifted away from Thatcherite liberalism to more statist authoritarianism, this is a clue. If they didn’t, they’d disappear

“British politics is undergoing a sea change and it is for security, not freedom. Most voters are not freedom fighters who want more rampant individualism, a small state and lower taxes. They want well-funded public services, security for their family, and a strong community in the place in which they live.”

“66 percent of 25-34 year olds favor ‘strong leaders who do not have to bother with Parliament’ and 26 percent believe democracy is a bad way to run the country.”

The malaise he analyzes is the result of various forces — economic, institutional, technological, cultural, even biological — coming together to sap us of our strength and hope.

He treats each of these in turn, weighing different hypotheses that might explain us to ourselves

Progressive politics depends on cultivating a sense of solidarity and social obligation, which becomes much harder as families shrink and grow older, and individualism becomes the dominant social fact.

As birthrates decline below replacement, the population ages and there are fewer workers and family members to support retirees with health needs

Our reproductive choices are creating a world where children grow up with fewer siblings and far fewer cousins, cutting them off from natural family networks that offer social support and lessons in getting over themselves

As a genre, social prophecy assumes a pact between author and reader. The author agrees to let his or her imagination loose in the jungle of trends, developments and crises of the moment. The reader agrees to suspend questions and judgments until the end, picking up insights along the way.

In the end he accepts that below-replacement fertility “is the fundamental fact of civilized life in the early 21st century” and that it “looks like an inevitable corollary of liberal capitalist modernity.”

Apart from gay rights, where opinion has genuinely shifted, he believes left and right find themselves pretty much where they were in the 1970s, though less inclined to act.

That might imply the need for public pronatal policies

it might also reflect the paradox that, since the sexual revolution, people have found it harder to pair off into couples and start families

Many conservatives have predicted that ubiquitous internet porn would inspire bacchanalias and violence, but in fact rates of sexual assault, teen sex and teen pregnancy have dropped since its introduction. Saturation, it seems, induces numbness, not desire.

Douthat’s chapters on stagnating innovation and institutional sclerosis as elements of our decadence are more conventional, though informative and well balanced.

Douthat levels the same charge of repetitiveness against our political intellectual culture and expresses a little nostalgia for sharp and sometimes violent confrontations

he keeps digging. He claims that the family size people in the Western world desire is actually higher than that needed for replacement, which suggests that there is an unsatisfied demand for children.

How can he say that ours is a static culture in the age of connectivity, which has accelerated change and turned ours into ever more “liquid societies”? An illusion. It has simply accelerated the circulation of the same tired cultural tropes, leaving us with wheels that turn ever faster in a ditch.

What about the political radicalism and rage exacerbated by social media? Probably just “a kind of digital-age playacting in which young people dissatisfied with decadence pretend to be fascists and Marxists on the internet, re-enacting the 1930s and 1960s with fewer street fights and more memes.”

“It’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.”

The least persuasive pages are devoted to pop culture, which he rightly sees as dull and repetitiv

Untreated mental health issues can lead to addiction, domestic violence, the disintegration of families and may even make adolescents susceptible to recruitment from gangs and terror groups, he added.

There are multiple factors that affect the development of brain function and mental health in children in Syria. There is extreme stress related to violence, the loss of family members and witnessing multiple episodes of destruction of your home and neighborhood.

My suspicion is that we will see widespread incidents of mental health problems developing in the areas where children witness bombings and violence. For children, this can have a lasting impact on their lives because, left untreated, mental health issues can affect how they interact with people: They can increase domestic violence, addiction, and job loss, and make these children fertile ground for recruitment to gangs and terrorist groups who exploit mental health conditions.

These terror groups indoctrinate them [in a way] that makes it easier to deal with mental health issues, such as the belief in ultimate victory or promises of an afterlife. 

If we don’t address the mental health crisis early, the scars will stay for a long time and it will be [more] difficult to treat, especially in children. It is very important that when there are bombings, violence, grief over the loss of immediate family members, that psychiatric aid and counseling are provided right away.

The first known written record about kimchi itself was in the middle of the Koryeo Dynasty. Poet Lee Kyu-bo wrote the following:

both Japan and Korea went through major culinary changes.

The Portuguese introduced foods from the Americas, including potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, and chile peppers.

It became the most popular style of kimchi, replacing the radish, cucumber, and eggplant

The Earth itself is our greatest ally in this effort. Ecosystems like California’s kelp forests absorb about half of the greenhouse gases humans emit, studies show. Without them, warming would be even worse. Nature shields us from the worst consequences of our own actions, forgiving the sins we refuse to repent.

If we hope to solve climate change, humanity must also address this biodiversity crisis — restoring ecosystems and the creatures that inhabit them.

One way to revitalize ecosystems: protect the ground they grow from.Think of the soft, spongy soil of an old-growth woodland. Here, a towering oak tree draws up water and nutrients via threadlike fungi attached to its roots. In exchange, the fungi take sugar from the oak, funneling carbon from the air into the ground.Now imagine a leaf from that oak drifting slowly to the forest floor. Perhaps it becomes food for an earthworm. Then microbes attack the earthworm’s droppings, breaking down the residue further still.Eventually, the carbon that was once a leaf can become trapped in clods of earth. Other atoms may form strong chemical bonds with minerals like iron, which prevents them from reacting with oxygen and returning to the air. Under the right conditions, carbon might stay locked away in dense, dark earth for centuries. Soils contain more carbon than the entire atmosphere and all the world’s plants combined.

This makes soil both a ticking time bomb and an overlooked climate solution

“And because soil is such an important reservoir,” Berhe said, “a small change in the release of that carbon can lead to a big change in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”

A 2020 analysis in the journal Nature Sustainability found that better soil stewardship could reduce emissions by at least 5.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide each year — about 15 percent of current annual emissions.

“Once that happens,” Berhe said, “it’s not just the carbon status of the soil that’s improved. The soil literally becomes softer. It holds more water and nutrients. It’s easier for plants to grow in … and serve as a home for the most abundant and diverse group of organisms that we know of.

Enhancing carbon in soils is just the beginning. In 2017, an international team of scientists set out to determine how much carbon the planet could pull out of the atmosphere, if humans would only give it a chance. In a study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they concluded natural climate systems are capable of storing almost 24 gigatons of carbon dioxide per year — roughly two thirds of what people emit.

About half of that sequestration would be cost-effective, meaning enacting the necessary protections would cost less than the consequences of keeping that carbon in the air.

Of the climate solutions they studied, few delivered more carbon bang per buck than mangroves — lush systems of salt-tolerant shrubs and trees that thrive where freshwater rivers spill into the sea. Though these forests occupy just 0.5 percent of the Earth’s shorelines, they account for 10 percent of the coast’s carbon storage capacity.

But the unique ecosystems are too often dismissed as unproductive swamps, good for no one but the mosquitoes. In the past half-century, more than a quarter of the world’s mangroves have been destroyed — drained for development, converted for shrimp farms, poisoned by fertilizer and drowned by dammed-up streams.

Yet the Earth cannot compensate for all of humanity’s pollution, said William Schlesinger, former dean of Duke University’s School of the Environment and a co-author on the 2017 PNAS study. Unless people also reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we emit, no amount of ecological restoration will save us.

“The bottom line is we’ve got to get off of using fossil fuels in transportation and heating and lighting and everything else,”

In public talks, he puts it this way: “It’s easier to patch a hole in a bag than to pick up the marbles that fall out.”

Since the end of the last ice age, the frozen expanse at the top of the world has acted as a protective shield. During the summer, when the sun shines 24 hours a day, Arctic sea ice reflects about two-thirds of the light that hits it back into space. By contrast, the dark open ocean absorbs the majority of the sun’s heat.

If the Arctic loses its perpetual ice cover, it would add half a degree Celsius of warming to the global average temperature, studies suggest. The world is hurtling toward that milestone. Since 1979, the volume of ice left at the end of the summer has shrunk about 75 percent.

There is just one way to save it, she said: by stopping global warming. Only by ending the use of fossil fuels and eliminating greenhouse gas emissions can people prevent the Arctic from heating further and give the ice a chance to recover.

If we do nothing, models indicate, it will be a matter of decades before the summertime Arctic is ice-free for the first time in human history. Sea levels will surge, coastal communities will be deluged, and we will no longer have the planet’s air conditioning unit to help us cool our world down.

Our species evolved and our civilization was built under fairly stable climate conditions. When things changed, they changed slowly, giving us time to adapt.

The rapid transformation of our planet doesn’t just endanger ecosystems; humanity will suffer. People have never lived on a planet without mangroves, or peatlands, or summertime ice. We’ve never had to go without the benefits the Earth provides.

Millions of Americans were already skeptical of the vaccines before the Johnson & Johnson news, and a vast online network exists to feed that skepticism with bad information and conspiracy theories.

"The social media companies have taken a hard line against disinformation; they have not taken a similarly hard line against fallacies."

Now, Roberts said, whenever the CDC comes out with guidance about the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, health officials will be fighting ingrained doubts.

The Johnson & Johnson pause is also fertile ground for conspiracies because it is a developing topic with a number of unanswered questions.

Because health officials are still investigating the clotting issue, and determining guidance about the vaccine, there isn't much trustworthy information the government or credible outlets can provide to fill that void.

Many anti-vaccine activists have adopted this tactic as a way of getting around social media networks' policies designed to halt the spread of false information

"Every time there's going to be a new bit of negative [vaccine] information or circumstances that sow doubt, it's like we're caught on the back foot and we have to come together again and push forward,"

A study by the C.D.C., published in February, examined the Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna vaccines and found that 79 percent of the reports to the agency of side effects came from women, even though only 61 percent of the vaccines had been administered to women.

Even among those of us who boldly proclaim our dissent from Catholic teachings on abortion, the church still holds great power. That power has been on display since President Biden, a devout Catholic, won the 2020 election. The U.S. bishops immediately fell back on the trope of threatening to deny him and other elected officials, like the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, access to communion because they support abortion rights.

Though these punishments have long existed as idle warnings, the issue recently escalated: The U.S. bishops plan to vote at their next assembly in June on whether they can formalize this response. To its credit, even the Vatican, under Pope Francis, has expressed reservations about the American bishops’ latest maneuver.

It’s no accident that Mr. Biden still has not uttered the word “abortion” since his election and his administration often uses euphemisms like “women’s health care,” “choice,” “bodily autonomy” and “reproductive rights.”

Abortion isn’t the only issue where there is a chasm between what the clergy preaches and what the laity believes and practices. The Catholic Church is the only major religious institution that opposes the use of contraception and reproductive technologies like in vitro fertilization.

Catholic organizations have spent years in the Supreme Court making claims to religious liberty that have stripped away U.S. women’s rights to free contraceptives, workplace protections and access to health care.

It’s the basis for the hierarchy’s demand that a woman be forced to carry a pregnancy to term, even one that resulted from rape or one that threatens her life. It’s also the specter that makes women forgo hysterectomies because, we are told, it’s better to endure suffering than lose the possibility of giving birth.

Women, in other words, are reduced to vessels, one in which the potential, theoretical life that might be is privileged over the living, breathing person at risk.

Understanding the motivations behind these doctrines is important, even for the unchurched, because giving pregnant people the legal right to have control and agency over their bodies translates to other aspects of their lives, namely the capacity to claim political, economic and social autonomy.

It was the rare silver lining of a troubled time: About 20 or 30 newcomers to a dwindling town of 140 souls, where even the tiny school on the town plaza got a second chance after parents started enrolling their children there.

“If it weren’t for Covid, the school would have closed,” said Josep Tomás Puig, 67, a retired mail carrier in Gósol who spent his life watching the younger generation depart to Spain’s cities.

Rafael López, a former renewable energy entrepreneur whose business collapsed in Spain’s 2008 financial crisis, was interested. “My mom said she saw this on TV,” said Mr. López. “And I said, ‘Well, what do you say if we take the car and go have a look, see what’s there?’”

For decades in Spain, a landscape of walled cities, stone bridges and ancient winding roads has become mostly abandoned as generations of young people left for cities. La España Vacía, or “the Empty Spain,” is the phrase that was coined to describe the blight.

Yet tiny Gósol had fared better than many others, residents say.It sits in the wealthy autonomous region of Catalonia, in a majestic valley in the Pyrenees Mountains that brought tourists and part-time residents in the summer months.

By 2015, the situation had gotten critical. The number of permanent residents was 120 and falling. The mayor went on television warning, among other things, that the school was about to close because it was down to five students.

“And if the school closed, the town might as well have closed too.”

Over the next months, hundreds of people came to Gósol to kick the tires. They said they were impressed by the quaint homes and the ruined castle atop the hill.

As the coronavirus began to spread last year, Spain entered another economic crisis, this one on a scale even greater than the collapse that had brought Mr. López in 2008.

In Castelldefels, a seaside town southwest of Barcelona, life was starting to look upside-down for Ms. Calvar, the bar owner who came to Gósol in September.

The path seemed clear when, passing through Gósol one day, Ms. Calvar learned that the owner of the grocery store on the plaza was at looking to sell the business.

The schoolhouse sits along the plaza, a place of kid-sized chairs and tables, paper planets hanging from the ceiling and an incubator warming eggs.

Classes ended at 5 p.m. and Ms. Otero, the telecommuting web designer who had moved to Gósol from Barcelona last June, was waiting for two of her children, 6 and 7.

There was a note of regret in her voice when she thought about the end of the pandemic, and the pressure that she knew would inevitably build to return to Barcelona. She didn’t want Gósol to disappear yet, she said.

King Djoser asked Imhotep, an architect, priest and healer, to design a funerary monument for him; the result was the world’s first major stone building, the Step-Pyramid at Saqqara, near Memphis. Egyptian pyramid-building reached its zenith with the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza, on the outskirts of Cairo.

During the third and fourth dynasties, Egypt enjoyed a golden age of peace and prosperity. The pharaohs held absolute power and provided a stable central government; the kingdom faced no serious threats from abroad; and successful military campaigns in foreign countries like Nubia and Libya added to its considerable economic prosperity

until about 2160 B.C., when the central authority completely dissolved, leading to civil war between provincial governors. This chaotic situation was intensified by Bedouin invasions and accompanied by famine and disease.

The kingdom also built diplomatic and trade relations with Syria, Palestine and other countries; undertook building projects including military fortresses and mining quarries; and returned to pyramid-building in the tradition of the Old Kingdom. The Middle Kingdom reached its peak under Amenemhet III (1842-1797 B.C.); its decline began under Amenenhet IV (1798-1790 B.C.

The controversial Amenhotep IV (c. 1379-1362), of the late 18th dynasty, undertook a religious revolution, disbanding the priesthoods dedicated to Amon-Re (a combination of the local Theban god Amon and the sun god Re) and forcing the exclusive worship of another sun-god, Aton. Renaming himself Akhenaton (“servant of the Aton”), he built a new capital in Middle Egypt called Akhetaton, known later as Amarna. Upon Akhenaton’s death, the capital returned to Thebes and Egyptians returned to worshiping a multitude of gods.

In 525 B.C., Cambyses, king of Persia, defeated Psammetichus III, the last Saite king, at the Battle of Pelusium, and Egypt became part of the Persian Empire.

The last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt–the legendary Cleopatra VII–surrendered Egypt to the armies of Octavian (later Augustus) in 31 B.C. Six centuries of Roman rule followed, during which Christianity became the official religion of Rome and the Roman Empire’s provinces (including Egypt). The conquest of Egypt by the Arabs in the seventh century A.D. and the introduction of Islam would do away with the last outward aspects of ancient Egyptian culture and propel the country towards its modern incarnation.

For Tyler and other proponents of manifest destiny, that expansive vision did not stop at the nation’s borders. He opposed tariffs, believing that free trade would help project American power throughout the world. With U.S. foreign policy, Tyler would establish a “commercial empire,” joining the ranks of the world’s great powers by sheer force of economic will.

Webster wanted to secure, in a formal treaty, the same benefits now available to the Europeans—and to do so peacefully. In a message to Congress, written by Webster, Tyler asked for funding for a Chinese commissioner, boasting of an “empire supposed to contain 300,000,000 subjects, fertile in various rich products of the earth.”

One answer was extraterritoriality: Cushing sought a guarantee that Americans accused of crimes on Chinese soil would be tried in American courts. At the time, says Haddad, the idea seemed noncontroversial. American merchants and missionaries living in China could protect themselves against potentially harsh punishments from local authorities, and the Chinese were happy to let foreign authorities deal with any badly-behaving sailors.

But the policy of extraterritoriality would later become a symbol of Chinese resentment against various nineteenth-century trade deals with foreign powers, which have long been known as the “Unequal Treaties” in China. “Neither side understood that it could become a tool that enabled imperialism,” Haddad said.

They compared the 18 counties where Mr. Trump held rallies with as many as 200 counties with similar demographics and similar trajectories of confirmed Covid-19 cases before the rally date.

Based on their models, the researchers concluded that on average, the 18 events produced increases in confirmed cases of more than 250 per 100,000 residents.

Public health officials in states and counties where Mr. Trump has held rallies said in interviews this week that it was impossible to tie particular infections or outbreaks to the gatherings for several reasons: Caseloads are rising over all, rally attendees often travel from other locations, contact tracing is not always complete, and contact tracers do not always know where infected people have been.

A little more than two weeks after the event, Tulsa recorded 206 new confirmed coronavirus cases in a single day, a record high at the time

Around the country, state and local public health officials have also wrestled with the question of whether Mr. Trump’s rallies have become so-called superspreader events. With thousands of people gathered together in close quarters, many not wearing masks, the gatherings provide a fertile environment for the virus to spread.

In Minnesota, for example, state officials traced 16 coronavirus infections and two hospitalizations to a Trump rally on Sept. 18 in the city of Bemidji, in Beltrami County.

Assessing the risk of campaign rallies is “a noisy process,”

Professor Bernheim said, and focusing on a single event is misleading.

Based on their models, the researchers concluded that on average, the 18 events produced increases in confirmed cases of more than 250 per 100,000 residents. Extrapolating that figure to the 18 rallies, they concluded that the gatherings ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19 and that the rallies had “likely led to more than 700 deaths,” though those deaths would not necessarily have occurred solely among attendees.

Around the country, state and local public health officials have also wrestled with the question of whether Mr. Trump’s rallies have become so-called superspreader events. With thousands of people gathered together in close quarters, many not wearing masks, the gatherings provide a fertile environment for the virus to spread.

In Minnesota, for example, state officials traced 16 coronavirus infections and two hospitalizations to a Trump rally on Sept. 18 in the city of Bemidji, in Beltrami County. Mr. Trump’s Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., who wears masks and encourages his supporters to do so, held his own campaign even that same day in Duluth; it resulted in one coronavirus infection, but no hospitalizations.

But Doug Schultz, a spokesman for the Minnesota Department of Health, said that the full extent of the spread that had resulted from those cases was difficult to quantify, because many people who develop Covid-19 are asymptomatic or have mild symptoms and do not seek treatment, and even those who test positive may not respond to contact tracing inquiries.

“What we are seeing in Beltrami County are indicators of transmission, and this is likely just the tip of the iceberg,”

Italy in the 14th century was fertile ground for a cultural revolution. The Black Death had wiped out millions of people in Europe – by some estimates killing as many as one in three between 1346 and 1353. 

By the simplest laws of economics, it meant that those who survived were left with proportionally greater wealth:

Advances in chemistry led to the rise of gunpowder, while a new model of mathematics stimulated new financial trading systems and made it easier than ever to navigate across the world. 

Renaissance art did not limit itself to simply looking pretty, however. Behind it was a new intellectual discipline: perspective was developed, light and shadow were studied, and the human anatomy was pored over – all in pursuit of a new realism and a desire to capture the beauty of the world as it really was. 

Families such as the Medici of Florence looked to the Ancient Roman and Greek civilisations for inspiration – and so did those artists who relied on their patronage. 

Even as the artists were creating a bold new realism, scientists were engaged in a revolution of their own. Copernicus and Galileo had developed an unprecedented understanding of our planet’s place in the cosmos, proving that the Earth revolved around the Sun. 

If the Renaissance was about rediscovering the intellectual ambition of the Classical civilisations, it was also about pushing the boundaries of what we know – and what we could achieve. 

olumbus discovered America, Ferdinand Magellan led an expedition to circumnavigate the globe. 

Even as our world shrank in size and significance when placed in the context of our new understanding of the universe, so it grew in physical terms, as new continents were found, new lands colonised, new cultures discovered whose own beliefs and understandings were added to the great intellectual firestorm raging across Europe. 

Never before (or since) had there been such a coming together of art, science and philosophy

The seeds of the modern world were sown and grown in the Renaissance. From circumnavigating the world to the discovery of the solar system, from the beauty of Michelangelo’s David to the perfection of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, from the genius of Shakespeare to the daring of Luther and Erasmus, and via breathtaking advances in science and mathematics, man achieved new heights

Texas was “seconds and minutes” from complete energy system collapse — the kind where the system needs to be rebuilt, not just rebooted.

Climate change promises far more violent events to come. But this is what it looks like when we face a rare-but-predictable stretch of extreme weather, in a rich state in a rich country. The result was nearly 80 deaths — and counting — including an 11-year-old boy found frozen in his bed. I can barely stand to write those words.

The most common mistake in politics is to believe there is some level of suffering that will force responsible governance. There isn’t

Similarly, once climate change can no longer be ignored, Republicans may tighten their embrace of fossil fuels rather than admitting decades of policy error.

“When people are presented with a crisis like in Texas, they often grasp for stability,” Julian Brave NoiseCat, vice president of policy and strategy at Data for Progress, told me. “This is something the right is good at — they offer the security of tradition, of the familiar.”

Texas kept its grid disconnected from the regional grids so it didn’t have to follow federal regulations. In a world of aggressive climate action, it’s easy to imagine more states, and countries, receding from compacts and multilateral institutions because they don’t like the new rules, or the loss of sovereignty. Indeed, America just experienced this dance as President Donald Trump withdrew us from the climate accords, before President Biden signed us back up. A global crisis that demands cooperation and even sacrifice will be fertile soil for nationalists and demagogues.

“Medical care is one of the less important determinants of life expectancy,” said Joseph Newhouse, a health economist at Harvard. “Socioeconomic status and other social factors exert larger influences on longevity.”

The United States has relied more on market forces, which have been less effective.

For spending, many experts point to differences in public policy on health care financing. “Other countries have been able to put limits on health care prices and spending” with government policies

One result: Prices for health care goods and services are much higher in the United States.

“The differential between what the U.S. and other industrialized countries pay for prescriptions and for hospital and physician services continues to widen over time,”

The degree of competition, or lack thereof, in the American health system plays a role

periods of rapid growth in U.S. health care spending coincide with rapid growth in markups of health care prices. This is what one would expect in markets with low levels of competition.

Although American health care markets are highly consolidated, which contributes to higher prices, there are also enough players to impose administrative drag. Rising administrative costs — like billing and price negotiations across many insurers — may also explain part of the problem.

The additional costs associated with many insurers, each requiring different billing documentation, adds inefficiency

“We have big pharma vs. big insurance vs. big hospital networks, and the patient and employers and also the government end up paying the bills,”

Though we have some large public health care programs, they are not able to keep a lid on prices. Medicare, for example, is forbidden to negotiate as a whole for drug prices,

once those spending constraints eased, “suppliers of medical inputs marketed very costly technological innovations with gusto,”

, all across the world, one sees constraints on payment, technology, etc., in the 1970s and 1980s,” he said. The United States is not different in kind, only degree; our constraints were weaker.

Mr. Starr suggests that the high inflation of the late 1970s contributed to growth in health care spending, which other countries had more systems in place to control

These are all highly valuable, but they came at very high prices. This willingness to pay more has in turn made the United States an attractive market for innovation in health care.

The last third of the 20th century or so was a fertile time for expensive health care innovation

being an engine for innovation doesn’t necessarily translate into better outcomes.

international differences in rates of smoking, obesity, traffic accidents and homicides cannot explain why Americans tend to die younger.

Some have speculated that slower American life expectancy improvements are a result of a more diverse population

But Ms. Glied and Mr. Muennig found that life expectancy growth has been higher in minority groups in the United States

even accounting for motor vehicle traffic crashes, firearm-related injuries and drug poisonings, the United States has higher mortality rates than comparably wealthy countries.

The lack of universal health coverage and less safety net support for low-income populations could have something to do with it

“The most efficient way to improve population health is to focus on those at the bottom,” she said. “But we don’t do as much for them as other countries.”

The effectiveness of focusing on low-income populations is evident from large expansions of public health insurance for pregnant women and children in the 1980s. There were large reductions in child mortality associated with these expansions.

A report by RAND shows that in 1980 the United States spent 11 percent of its G.D.P. on social programs, excluding health care, while members of the European Union spent an average of about 15 percent. In 2011 the gap had widened to 16 percent versus 22 percent.

“Social underfunding probably has more long-term implications than underinvestment in medical care,” he said. For example, “if the underspending is on early childhood education — one of the key socioeconomic determinants of health — then there are long-term implications.”

Slow income growth could also play a role because poorer health is associated with lower incomes. “It’s notable that, apart from the richest of Americans, income growth stagnated starting in the late 1970s,”

History demonstrates that it is possible for the U.S. health system to perform on par with other wealthy countries

That doesn’t mean it’s a simple matter to return to international parity. A lot has changed in 40 years. What began as small gaps in performance are now yawning chasms

“For starters, we could have a lot more competition in health care. And government programs should often pay less than they do.” He added that if savings could be reaped from these approaches, and others — and reinvested in improving the welfare of lower-income Americans — we might close both the spending and longevity gaps.