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if this particular incident is exceedingly strange––almost a caricature of how conservatives think identitarian leftists behave––it also illuminates how the fight over anti-racism could roil many other institutions all across the country.

I asked Tanikawa about the impasse. Trying to capture why she finds it difficult to work with Maron, she recalled a time when she believed that something was racist, and Maron disagreed, rather than deferring to her perspective. “She thinks she can deny my experience as a person of color, and I don’t want to spend a lot of one-on-one time with somebody who denies my reality,” she said, alleging a “seeming lack of acknowledgment that [Maron] has privilege” as the biggest hurdle.

“Within the anti-racist sphere that I work in, we don’t always agree on the same policies. It’s not about disagreement over what to do or how to fix the problem. It’s really the fundamental understanding of the framework we want to operate in, which is the framework of anti-racism.”

The first institution Maoists captured was not the academy, it was the state. The seeds of the Cultural Revolution were not in the academy, but in the perceived weakness of the communist party in China, and Mao’s position within the party, after the failures of the Great Leap Forward. Maoists took over the state first, and 17 years later launched a campaign to force cultural change in the academy and elsewhere.

Cultural power, and related concepts like “privilege,” aren’t nothing, but they’re vaguer and less impactful than the state, which can credibility threaten, authorize, excuse, and utilize force.

State-backed violence made the Cultural Revolution, and if you think the social justice movement is similar, you misunderstand it.

Students, meanwhile, have blasted those administrators for saying too much or too little. They’ve complained about feeling stranded.

The tense situation largely reflects the intense differences of opinion with which many onlookers, including students, interpret and react to the rival claims and enduring bloodshed in the Middle East. But it tells another story, too: one about the evolution of higher education over the past quarter-century, the promises that schools increasingly make to their students and the expectations that arise from that.

Many students now turn to the colleges they attend for much more than intellectual stimulation. They look for emotional affirmation. They seek an acknowledgment of their wounds along with the engagement of their minds

The show is fiction, but the broader story of shame, fragility and violence plays out so often in history that it starts to feel like not just a rhyme, but a chorus.

I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.”

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review

a zombie idea is a proposition that has been thoroughly refuted by analysis and evidence, and should be dead — but won’t stay dead because it serves a political purpose, appeals to prejudices, or both. The classic zombie idea in U.S. political discourse is the notion that tax cuts for the wealthy pay for themselves

the big question: How did we get into the mess we’re in? The financial crisis of 2008 and its painful aftermath, which we’re still dealing with, were a huge slap in the face for free-market fundamentalists. Circa 2005, the usual suspects — conservative publications, analysts at right-wing think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute and the Cato Institute, and so on — insisted that deregulated financial markets were doing just fine, and dismissed warnings about a housing bubble as liberal whining. Then the nonexistent bubble burst, and the financial system proved dangerously fragile; only huge government bailouts prevented a total collapse.

What about responding to the crisis? Four years ago, right-wing economic analysts insisted that deficit spending would destroy jobs, because government borrowing would divert funds that would otherwise have gone into business investment, and also insisted that this borrowing would send interest rates soaring. The right thing, they claimed, was to balance the budget, even in a depressed economy.

When you do it once, it’s just a victory. When you do it twice, it’s a realignment.The coalition that Barack Obama put together to win the presidency handily in 2008 looked a lot like the emerging Democratic majority that optimistic liberals had been discerning on the political horizon since the 1990s. It was the late George McGovern’s losing coalition from 1972 finally come of age: Young voters, the unmarried, African-Americans, Hispanics, the liberal professional class – and then more than enough of the party’s old blue collar base to hold the Rust Belt for the Democrats.But 2008 was also a unique political moment, when George W. Bush’s immense unpopularity was compounded by a financial collapse, and when the possibility of electing the country’s first black president fired the imagination of the nation (and the nation’s press corps). So it was still possible to regard the Obama majority of ’08 as more flukish than transformative – or at the very least, to see it as a fragile thing, easily shattered by poor choices and adverse developments.

the lesson of the election is that the Obama coalition was truly vulnerable only to a Republican Party that took Obama seriously as an opponent – that understood how his majority had been built, why voters had joined it and why the conservative majority of the Reagan and Bush eras had unraveled.Such understanding eluded the Republicans this year.

In part, that failure can be blamed on their standard-bearer, Mitt Romney, who mostly ran as a kind of vanilla Republican instead of showing the imagination necessary to reinvent his party for a new era.

As Europe and Asia Hoard Cash, Economists See Echoes of Crisis

European and Asian investors have been rushing into the United States bond market, spurred by a global glut of savings that has reached record levels.

A growing number of economists are concerned that this flood of money may inflate the value of these securities well beyond what they are worth, potentially leading to a market bubble that eventually bursts.

There is no question of ethics, political philosophy or theology to which Trump is the answer. It is simply childish to trust this contemptible parody of a father figure.

As a conservative, I am not one to deny the challenges of modern, liberal societies — the fragility of families, the brittleness of institutions, the economic struggles that result from globalization, the pulverization of community in some sad and dangerous places.

But I am a traditionalist with a healthy respect for the achievements of modernity, because I can imagine myself in the position of a woman, a gay person or a minority 50 years ago. The lives of countless millions have been improved. For them, the nostalgia of conservative white men is not a rallying cry.

Syrian opposition: Shelling in water-rich valley kills 7

Syrian opposition activists say government shelling has struck a village in a rebel-controlled area near Damascus, killing at least seven civilians and injuring several others, in violence that has tested the country's fragile cease-fire.

Fighting has raged in the valley that provides the Syrian capital with most of its water supply, restricting the flow since Dec.22, despite talks to stem the violence.

“Vice is a monster of so frightful mien, / As, to be hated, needs but to be seen,” the poet Alexander Pope wrote, in lines that were once, as they said back in the day, imprinted on the mind of every schoolboy. Pope continued, “Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face, / we first endure, then pity, then embrace.

The three-part process by which the gross becomes the taken for granted has been on matchlessly grim view this past week in the ascent of Donald Trump.

we do appear to be getting, in place of the once famous Big Lie of the nineteen-thirties, a sordid blizzard of lies. The Big Lie was fit for a time of processionals and nighttime rallies, and films that featured them. The blizzard of lies is made for Twitter and the quick hit of an impulse culture. Trump’s lies arrive with such rapidity that before one can be refuted a new one comes to take its place.

the real reason to support the TPP wasn't economics so much as geopolitics. It was about keeping an economic foot firmly planted in China's backyard, and writing the trade rules so they couldn't.

this kind of logic was a part of almost all our trade deals the past 70 years. Initially, these were about setting a system to promote prosperity abroad so fragile postwar democracies could resist Communist pressure. But even after the Berlin Wall came down, they were still a way to not only open up markets, but also reward countries for reforming their economies like we wanted.

that was why NAFTA made more sense than any economic model would have told you. If we rejected Mexico's liberalizing government, it might have collapsed — and an anti-American one could have taken its place.

After racking up historic gains in regional elections in March, the party this month adopted a new manifesto insisting that “Islam is not part of Germany.”

A meeting between the AfD and Muslim leaders broke down this week after the president of the Central Council of Muslims refused to retract previous comments comparing the AfD to Nazis.

It called for empowering national governments to ditch the euro, limiting state bailouts, and mandating national referenda for certain EU policies, alongside scintillating stipulations about European Central Bank maneuvers and alternative funding for renewable-energy subsidies.

Yussuf, who has lived here most of his life, has to leave by November because Kenya is shutting all its refugee camps, displacing 600,000 people. The government said the camps have become infiltrated by terrorists

Now the Kenya government wants to repatriate Dadaab refugees to Somalia. The government also wants to close another camp, Kakuma, that houses refugees from South Sudan, where a fragile cease-fire has taken hold in that country’s civil war.

Kenya announced in May that it would will shutter the camps by November and send refugees back to Somalia and elsewhere after numerous attacks staged by al-Shabab, a Somalia terrorist group linked to al-Qaeda.

dvancing along the Mediterranean coast toward the Islamic State stronghold of Surt, signaling the first major assault on territory that

the terrorist group’s largest base outside of Iraq and Syria.

reduced the length of Libyan coastline controlled by the Islamic State to 100 miles from about 150 miles

Fighters aligned with Libya’s United Nations-backed unity government are advancing along the Mediterranean coast toward the Islamic State stronghold of Surt

first major assault on territory

reduced the length of Libyan coastline controlled by the Islamic State to 100 miles from about 150 miles.

Minsky started with an explanation of investment. It is, in essence, an exchange of money today for money tomorrow. A firm pays now for the construction of a factory; profits from running the facility will, all going well, translate into money for it in coming years.

Put crudely, money today can come from one of two sources: the firm’s own cash or that of others (for example, if the firm borrows from a bank). The balance between the two is the key question for the financial system.

Minsky distinguished between three kinds of financing. The first, which he called “hedge financing”, is the safest: firms rely on their future cashflow to repay all their borrowings. For this to work, they need to have very limited borrowings and healthy profits. The second, speculative financing, is a bit riskier: firms rely on their cashflow to repay the interest on their borrowings but must roll over their debt to repay the principal. This should be manageable as long as the economy functions smoothly, but a downturn could cause distress. The third, Ponzi financing, is the most dangerous. Cashflow covers neither principal nor interest; firms are betting only that the underlying asset will appreciate by enough to cover their liabilities. If that fails to happen, they will be left exposed.

How do people reconcile a belief in individual autonomy with nationwide wage stagnation?

“Many middle-class wage earners are victims of the economy, and, perhaps, of that great, glowing, irresistible American promise that has been drummed into our heads since birth: Just work hard and you can have it all.”

This sentiment taunts at two sacred and quintessentially American convictions—that success is self-determined and that advancement is inevitable for anyone with a serious work ethic. According to a 2014 Pew Global Attitudes Study, people in the United States are much more likely to hold these two beliefs than many of their European counterparts.