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Thursday the 12th was the day Mr. Trump’s flimsy, long-shot legal effort to reverse his loss turned into something else entirely — an extralegal campaign to subvert the election, rooted in a lie so convincing to some of his most devoted followers that it made the deadly Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol almost inevitable.

with conspiratorial belief rife in a country ravaged by pandemic, a lie that Mr. Trump had been grooming for years finally overwhelmed the Republican Party and, as brake after brake fell away, was propelled forward by new and more radical lawyers, political organizers, financiers and the surround-sound right-wing media.

Across those 77 days, the forces of disorder were summoned and directed by the departing president, who wielded the power derived from his near-infallible status among the party faithful in one final norm-defying act of a reality-denying presidency.

As President Donald Trump makes a hurried final push for reelection, he is relying not only on his campaign staff but on government officials to transmit his message to voters

his White House press secretary has appeared on television from campaign headquarters, identified as a campaign adviser. His top White House immigration adviser convened a campaign-organized briefing to assail Joe Biden

Seldom does a day go by in a battleground state where a Cabinet member from the Trump administration is not paying a visit -- often with a government announcement in tow.

Introduction From 1643 to 1815 France dominated much of Europe's political history and culture.  Foreigners came to France, preferring it to the charms of their own homeland.  Even today, many still consider it the place to visit in Europe and the world.  In the 1600's and 1700's there was a good reason for this dominance: population.  France had 23,000,000 people in a strongly unified state compared to 5,000,000 in Spain and England, and 2,000,000 in the Dutch Republic and the largest of the German states.  This reservoir of humanity first reached for and nearly attained the dominance of Europe under Louis XIV, the "Sun King".

Louis' early life and reign (1643-61) Louis was born in 1638 and succeeded his father, Louis XIII, as king in 1643 at the age of five.  Luckily, another able minister and Richelieu's successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued to run the government.  In 1648, encroachment by the government on the nobles' power, poor harvests, high taxes, and unemployed mercenaries plundering the countryside after the Thirty Years War led to a serious revolt known as the Fronde, named after the slingshot used by French boys.  Louis and the court barely escaped from Paris with their lives.  Although Mazarin and his allies crushed the rebels after five hard years of fighting (1648-53), Louis never forgot the fear and humiliation of having to run from the Parisian mob and fight for his life and throne against the nobles.  This bitter experience would heavily influence Louis' policies when he ruled on his own.

Louis XIV may not have said, "I am the state", but he ruled as if he had said it.  Louis was the supreme example of the absolute monarch, and other rulers in Europe could do no better than follow his example.  Although Louis wished to be remembered as a great conqueror, his first decade of active rule was largely taken up with building France's internal strength.  There are two main areas of Louis' rule we will look at here: finances and the army. Louis' finance minister, Jean Baptiste Colbert, was an astute businessman of modest lineage, being the son of a draper.  Colbert's goal was to build France's industries and reduce foreign imports.  This seventeenth century policy where a country tried to export more goods and import more gold and silver was known as mercantilism.  While its purpose was to generate revenue for the king, it also showed the growing power of the emerging nation state.  Colbert declared his intention to reform the whole financial structure of the French state, and he did succeed in reducing the royal debt by cutting down on the number of tax farms he sold and freeing royal lands from mortgage.  Colbert especially concentrated on developing France's economy in three ways.

The shows are separated by 40 years of technological advances — a progression from the over-the-air broadcast era in which Mr. Lear made it big, to the cable age of MTV and CNN and HBO, to, finally, the modern era of streaming services like Netflix. Each new technology allowed a leap forward in choice, flexibility and quality; the “Golden Age of TV” offers so much choice that some critics wonder if it’s become overwhelming.

It’s not just TV, either. Across the entertainment business, from music to movies to video games, technology has flooded us with a profusion of cultural choice.

offers a chance to reflect on what we have lost in embracing tech-abetted abundance. Last year’s presidential election and its aftermath were dominated by discussions of echo chambers and polarization; as I’ve argued before, we’re all splitting into our own self-constructed bubbles of reality.

Over the course of conducting hundreds of interviews with key players in the Bush White House, including Cheney, and examining thousands of pages of never-released notes, memos and other internal documents, I came to see a relationship that differs substantially from the commonly accepted narrative. Even in the early days, when a young, untested president relied on the advice of his seasoned No. 2, Cheney was hardly the puppeteer that critics imagined. To the extent that the vice president exerted outsize influence in the first term, he became more marginalized over the course of the second, as Bush sought new paths to right his troubled presidency.

Some Bush advisers objected even to the word “partnership,” since that implied equality. Cheney said he never forgot that he was the vice president, and by all accounts he made a point of showing deference to Bush. While Bush called him “Dick,” Cheney always called Bush “Mr. President” and with others referred to him as “the Man.” (Karl Rove, though, reportedly referred to Cheney as “Management” — as in, “Better check with Management” — suggesting an influence not generally associated with vice presidents.)

Cheney is just five years older than Bush, but he carried himself with the gravitas of a much more experienced man, and the president treated him with more respect than anyone else in the inner circle. In any meeting, though, it was clear who was in charge

A Kuhnian paradigm is a set of assumptions that allows scientists in a particular field to avoid time-wasting arguments over the basics and spend their days solving small but useful puzzles

Scientific assumptions are never perfect mirrors of reality, though (“all models are wrong; but some are useful“). When evidence piles up that contradicts the paradigm, a science sometimes needs to go through the painful process of a paradigm shift.

Financial economics adopted its own, narrower paradigm, in which the starting point was that the prices prevailing on financial markets were more or less correct (a belief that in those days went under the name Efficient Market Hypothesis

During the early years of the study, Myrdal also began to give thought to the way that he would synthesize this mountain of information into a final manuscript of his own. Since the goal of the project was to produce a solution to the race problem, he took particular note of the group of Americans he thought had power to effectuate change in the country: elite, white northerners. He hypothesized that these Americans viewed the race problem as a conflict between actual practice and the “the American state religion” of justice, equality, and freedom. He intended to write a manuscript with their value system in mind. He hoped to motivate them to abandon all the forms of racial discrimination that he planned to outline in the book.

In writing Contact with America, they set out to disprove stereotypes about the United States that their fellow countrymen seemed to hold. In particular, they sought to explain that the U.S. was not just a heterogeneous group of people who treated racial minorities (particularly black Americans) as cruelly as Germans treated Jews. Rather, Americans (like Swedes) were a common folk united by egalitarian national ideals. They argued that, unlike Germans who discriminated against Jews, Americans were a morally conscious people who sought to correct their discrimination against black Americans to meet their egalitarian ideals. Americans, the couple explained, welcomed criticism of their race problem because they aspired to be a better people.

In 1941, the Myrdals returned to the United States and secluded themselves in Princeton, New Jersey, where Gunnar Myrdal wrote the final manuscript of the American project. Years later, he remembered the urgency they felt for writing the manuscript: “Particularly we Swedes were deeply conscious of the sufferings of young people in Europe. Many were killed in the war or became imprisoned, tortured or liquidated by the Nazis, while we were living here in beautiful Princeton. The work on the book became to us in a way our ‘war effort’ and our moral duty, where there could be no excuse for resting an hour.” By the time Myrdal returned to the United States, he viewed his American study as a war project. He would use the American Creed not only in order to motivate leading white Americans to take action, but also to present a positive image of Americans on the global stage.

Left with no other allies, he turned to Singapore’s own people, who were immigrants like himself. Because they were so divided by what he called “the most hideous collection of dialects and languages,” he quickly concluded that, if full democracy were implemented, everyone would simply vote for their own ethnic group and overlook the common interests of the country.

Impressed by the economic growth enjoyed by Asian countries such as Japan, Korea, Taiwan and finally China, Lee began wondering if their common Confucian heritage was not the foundation of their success. He was soon propounding the Confucian virtues that came to be known as “Asian values”—family, diligence, filial piety, education and obedience to authority. He viewed these values as binding agents for developing countries that needed to find a way to maintain order during times of rapid change.

there was an irony in Lee’s latter-day conversion to Chinese traditionalism and Asian authoritarianism, especially in his insistence that they could serve as agents of modernization. After all, it was only a few decades earlier that reform-minded Chinese intellectuals (including Communists like Mao Zedong) had identified such Confucian “Asian values” as the very cause of their country’s backwardness and weakness, and then sought to extirpate them from Chinese thinking.

Will the Olympics Finally Embrace Trans Athletes?

The International Olympic Committee (IOC), which previously required transgender athletes to undergo gender-reassignment surgery in order to compete, is now expected to recognize that distinction by allowing all transgender men to compete in the male category “without restriction” and allowing transgender women to compete in the female category after a year of hormone replacement therapy (HRT).

To date, no openly transgender athlete has competed in the Olympics,

President Obama sent Congress a plan on Tuesday to close the United States military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, his latest attempt to deliver on an unfulfilled promise of his presidency, which faces near-certain rejection by Congress.

The prison has come to symbolize the darker side of the nation’s antiterrorism efforts, but the series of steps that Mr. Obama outlined at the White House were as much an acknowledgment of the constraints binding him during his final year in office as they were a practical blueprint for transferring prisoners.

n presenting them, the president made little secret of his frustration that his quest to close Guantánamo, once regarded as a bipartisan moral imperative, had become a divisive political issue.

First, the good news: On Saturday afternoon, world leaders ratified a universal pact to slow global warming, ending a decades-long political stalemate and, according to the best possible science, lowering the risk of ecological collapse.

The decisive moment arrived inside a high-security airplane hangar on the outskirts of Paris, where delegates from nearly 200 nations fought over the deal line-by-line for two weeks. Finally, the French foreign minister called an all-hands meeting, and asked if there were any objections to the final 31-page agreement.

Seeing and hearing none, he banged a tiny green gavel, sealing the deal into international law. The room erupted in a man-on-the-moon-like moment of rapturous applause. The online world followed.

suddenly, Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius of France asked for opposition to the deal and, hearing none, gaveled the session closed.

The new accord changes that dynamic by requiring action in some form from every country, rich or poor. The echoes of those divides persisted during the negotiations, however.

Mr. Fabius, who has presided over the assembly, made an emotional appeal.

Stripped to his undershirt and covered in filth, the world’s most notorious drug lord dragged himself out of the sewers and into the middle of traffic.

The Mexican marines had been on Mr. Guzmán’s trail for more than six months, ever since he humiliated the nation by escaping its most secure prison through a tunnel that led into the shower floor of his cell.

But it had come at a cost. The authorities had swept through 18 of his homes and properties in his native lands. Days on end in the inhospitable mountains, where even a billionaire like Mr. Guzmán was forced to rough it, left him yearning for a bit of comfort.

They call it the Fatherland Liberation War. We call it the Korean War. (It’s easy to forget that the names of wars are merely decided by people, and not always agreed upon.) And while they celebrate July 27 as the Day of Victory in the Great Fatherland Liberation War (and built the Victorious War Museum), the war, for North Korea, is not truly over.

The official hymn to North Korean leader Kim Jong-un–each leader has gotten one–is called “Onwards Toward The Final Victory.” “Final victory” and “final confrontation” are oft-used phrases in North Korean state rhetoric

The American photographer Lewis Hine is perhaps most famous for his compelling images of child labor across the United States in the early 20th century. In 1918, Hine was hired by the American Red Cross to document their work in Europe, as they provided aid to wounded soldiers and refugees affected by World War I. The photographs were also intended to drum up support for the Red Cross, and appeal to an American audience back home who had grown weary of the war, even as it crawled toward a close. Hine traveled across France, photographing refugee families, orphaned children, wounded and shell-shocked soldiers, the nurses and volunteers who cared for them all, the ruined buildings they fled, and the temporary homes they filled. Take a moment to step back in time 100 years, for a visit to France in the final year of World War I, seen through the lens of Mr. Lewis Hine, with original (sometimes dated) captions included when available.

Jeanne Septvents is a beautiful French girl, 10 years old, whose father, for nearly a year a prisoner in Germany, has given his life for France. Jeanne has been adopted by Company 'E,' 6th Battalion of the 20th Engineers. When the American Red Cross photographer found her in the garden of her little stone house at Caen, she was playing with knuckle-bones that she had painted red, white, and blue in honor of her godfathers.

Group of refugee children who have been received by a French organization, aided by the American Red Cross at St. Sulpice, Paris. They are about to start for Grand Val, the country home which has been opened for them on a large estate near Paris, where an outdoor life will build up their health. August, 1918.

Terrifying though the coronavirus may be, it can be turned back. China, South Korea, Singapore and Taiwan have demonstrated that, with furious efforts, the contagion can be brought to heel.

for the United States to repeat their successes will take extraordinary levels of coordination and money from the country’s leaders, and extraordinary levels of trust and cooperation from citizens. It will also require international partnerships in an interconnected world.

This contagion has a weakness.

it is natural enough to look at Taiwan’s example and wonder why we didn’t do what they did, or, more pertinently, could we have done what they did?

we keep seeing the culturally embedded assumption that East Asian-style state social control just won’t fly in the good old, individualist, government-wary, freedom-loving United States.

The New York Times: People in “places like Singapore … are more willing to accept government orders.” Fortune: “There seems to be more of a willingness to place the community and society needs over individual liberty.” Even WIRED: “These countries all have social structures and traditions that might make this kind of surveillance and control a little easier than in the don’t-tread-on-me United States.”