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India is enjoying an extended economic boom, with near double-digit growth. But the benefits have not been equally shared, and southern India has rocketed far ahead of much of the rest of the country on virtually every score — people here earn more money, are better educated, live longer lives and have fewer children. A crucial factor is the collapse of the caste system over the last half century, a factor that undergirds many of the other reasons that the south has prospered — more stable governments, better infrastructure and a geographic position that gives it closer connections to the global economy.

“The breakdown of caste hierarchy has broken the traditional links between caste and profession, and released enormous entrepreneurial energies in the south,

This breakdown, he said, goes a long way to explaining “why the south has taken such a lead over the north in the last three decades.”

The world system is currently being challenged by two new forces: a rising superpower, called China, and a rising collection of superempowered individuals, as represented by the WikiLeakers, among others. What globalization, technological integration and the general flattening of the world have done is to superempower individuals to such a degree that they can actually challenge any hierarchy — from a global bank to a nation state — as individuals.

A China that can choke off conversations far beyond its borders, and superempowered individuals who can expose conversations far beyond their borders — or create posses of “cyber-hacktivists” who can melt down the computers of people they don’t like — are now a reality. They are rising powers. A stable world requires that we learn how to get the best from both and limit the worst; it will require smart legal and technological responses.

The alternative today to a world ordered by American power is not some cuddly multipolar system — half-Sweden and half-heaven. It is half-China and half-superempowered individuals.

Determined not to leave anything to chance, fire-eaters unleashed a storm of propaganda to persuade hesitant South Carolinians. They printed more than 150,000 pamphlets in a matter of months. Some pamphlets targeted non-slaveholders—a narrow majority of the white population—arguing that slavery served as a bulwark against the possibility of white servility. One tract insisted that non-slaveholders had even more at stake in maintaining the peculiar institution than slaveholders, for “no white man at the South serves another as a body servant, to clean his boots, [and] wait on his table…. His blood revolts against this.” A Republican victory put this racial hierarchy, so important to poor and middling whites, at risk.

Other pamphlets aimed to boil the blood of slaveholders and non-slaveholders alike. Lincoln’s election, wrote planter John Townsend, portended “emancipation…then poverty, political equality…insurrection, war of extermination between the two races, and death.” Fire-eating newspapers joined the chorus too. “Should the dark hour come, we must be the chief sufferers,” warned a “Southern-Rights Lady” in the Charleston Mercury. “Enemies in our midst, abolition fiends inciting them to crimes the most appalling…we degraded beneath the level of brutes.” The purity of Southern ladies hung in the balance. Alarmed by the specter of race war and miscegenation, whites across the state rushed to join militia units, vigilante associations and militia companies , bringing together planters, yeomen and poor whites to defend the state against the danger of Republican ascendance. Class distinctions, more formidable in South Carolina than in other states, receded as Low Country planters marched together with the rabble. The secessionists’ arguments were winning the day.

Across the world, a lot of middle- and lower-middle-class people now feel that the “future” is out of their grasp, and they are letting their leaders know it.

the world has gone from connected to hyper-connected. This is the single most important trend in the world today.

And it is a critical reason why, to get into the middle class now, you have to study harder, work smarter and adapt quicker than ever before. All this technology and globalization are eliminating more and more “routine” work — the sort of work that once sustained a lot of middle-class lifestyles.

Byzantium used to call to mind a sterile, bureaucratic and yet violent society, corrupted by fatuous complexities. The worst failings in our own societies would be described as "Byzantine."

a new generation of scholars has emerged, re-evaluating the very idea of Roman decline or Dark Ages and arguing that the barbarian forces that occupied the empire's western provinces adopted, adapted and thus perpetuated many of the Roman methods of administration. The term "Late Antiquity" embodies this long period of transition, which transformed the Roman world while integrating aspects of Latin culture with the Christian hierarchy of bishops and monks, who were themselves often recruited from the senatorial classes. At the same time, the recent emergence of an Islamic challenge to the West has urged our engagement with the Christian power that first withstood Muslim attacks and defended Europe's eastern frontier for centuries.

The excellence of Byzantine administration—hardly Byzantine at all by our usage—is nowhere clearer than in the power of the Byzantine standard gold coin, the solidus (known as the bezant in medieval Europe). First issued by Constantine I in the early fourth century, it retained its 24-carat value and was the coin of choice in international trade for more than 700 years. It took a self-conscious and creative government to manage this extraordinary achievement: one that puts to shame our present devalued currencies and monetary instability.

“Oil companies basically own the whole gulf region,” Safina writes, viewing American addiction to petroleum, indifference to greenhouse gases and political genuflection to the oil lobby as more disturbing than the failure of supposedly foolproof devices to prevent the blowout.

Lax federal regulation, BP’s obsession with profit over safety, and management arrogance led, Safina writes, to a “chain disaster” in which several problems, none of which alone would have been fatal, amplified one another. In his book “Normal Accidents,” the sociologist Charles Perrow argued that when complex technology meets large corporate and government hierarchies, lack of accountability will lead inexorably to destructive failures of systems that might have been operated safely. The gulf oil spill surely was that.

As “A Sea in Flames” progresses, its author undergoes several conversions. Expecting to find evidence of terrible harm to the gulf biosphere, instead he finds only mild problems. Expecting to discover that the dispersants caused widespread marine death, instead he discovers that by breaking up crude, these chemicals speeded the oil’s natural decomposition. After Allen and Lubchenco grant him an interview, Safina switches ground and decides they are not as bad as he thought.

today’s young people simply don’t drive like their predecessors did. In 2010, adults between the ages of 21 and 34 bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985. Miles driven are down, too. Even the proportion of teenagers with a license fell, by 28 percent, between 1998 and 2008.

What if Millennials’ aversion to car-buying isn’t a temporary side effect of the recession, but part of a permanent generational shift in tastes and spending habits? It’s a question that applies not only to cars, but to several other traditional categories of big spending—most notably, housing. And its answer has large implications for the future shape of the economy—and for the speed of recovery.

Half of a typical family’s spending today goes to transportation and housing

email, long dismissed as a festering petri dish of marketing come-ons, has cleaned up its act. Gmail, in particular, has stamped out a lot of spam and segmented the inbox into personal, social and promotional streams that make email much less a mess than it used to be.

It makes sense. My personal digital hierarchy, which I assume is fairly common, goes like this: email first, because it is for and about me; social media next, because it is for and about me, my friends and professional peers; and finally, there is the anarchy of the web, which is about, well, everything.

With an email, there is a presumption of connection, of something personal, that makes it a good platform for publishers.

The authors of the report compiled an inventory of 3,959 victims of “racial terror lynchings” in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.

Next comes the process of selecting lynching sites where the organization plans to erect markers and memorials, which will involve significant fund-raising, negotiations with distrustful landowners and, almost undoubtedly, intense controversy.The process is intended, Mr. Stevenson said, to force people to reckon with the narrative through-line of the country’s vicious racial history, rather than thinking of that history in a short-range, piecemeal way.

Around the country, there are only a few markers noting the sites of lynchings. In several of those places, like Newnan, Ga., attempts to erect markers were met with local resistance. But in most places, no one has tried to put up a marker.

A high-ranking member and spiritual leader of Al-Shabaab has pledged allegiance to ISIS, a move that further fractures the Somali-based jihadi group and spreads the reach of ISIS farther into Africa.

The Al-Shabaab-linked source told CNN that members of the group now fear for their lives as other political leaders systematically try to root out possible ISIS supporters within their ranks.

For weeks, Al-Shabaab's secret police, known as the Amniyat, have been arresting and jailing members within the insurgent group who they believed would switch their allegiance from al Qaeda to ISIS.

Aside from the thicket of legal issues raised by the case, does Apple have a moral obligation to help the government learn more about the attack? Or does it have a moral obligation to protect its customers’ privacy? Or how about its shareholders? And which of these should take precedence?

Timothy D. Cook, Apple’s chief executive, has long spoken about running his company based on certain values. He has used his position to advocate gay rights, for example, and pushed the company to be more “green,” once going so far as to tell a shareholder who questioned the return on investment of taking such stances, “If you want me to do things only for R.O.I. reasons, you should get out of this stock.”

The debate over Apple’s stance is just the latest in a series of questions about corporate patriotism. In recent years, questions have been directed at companies that renounce their United States citizenship to move to a country with a lower tax rate. Others, including Apple, have faced questions about tax strategies to shelter income abroad. And companies’ social responsibility programs, say for clean energy or water efficiency, have been scrutinized

stereotypical ideals have long been found not just in advertising, but in commerce at large: For most of American consumer history, makeup brands made few dark shades, and most clothing brands didn’t make any adjustments in their designs for different body sizes, gender presentations, or disabilities, among other things. Hemmed in by limited mall options, women had little choice but to make their best effort to work within whatever physical standards brands set, and brands were free to be as strict with their expectations as they wanted to be.

The internet, and particularly social media, has changed that. Suddenly, the hierarchy of who speaks and to whom in the brand-consumer relationship has shifted beneath the feet of corporate behemoths such as L Brands, and now frustrated women can launch negative mainstream press cycles on their own. For generations, clothing and personal-care marketing could dictate how American women should look without any pretense of kindness. Now, faced with the unfiltered reactions of their customers for the first time, most of those same brands have decided to make nice. Where they could once profit by making women feel worse, the money now is in promising them a way to feel better.

Victoria’s Secret took the old strategy to its logical extreme. It made superstars out of an army of wing-clad Angels, all perfectly thin, busty, and long-legged in the same impossible way. For years, Victoria’s Secret has been the brand equivalent of the stereotypical cool-girls’ table in a high-school cafeteria: hot, unfriendly, and definitely not interested in bolstering your self-worth. And as in a teen movie, the less popular brands took as many cues as possible from the queen bee.

I think ideals of diversity and meritocracy are two different ways of shaping an elite, which can advance together but which are just as often separable, or even in tension with each other.

I think it was a good and necessary thing that the American upper class diversified, and that more African-Americans and Jews and Catholics (like myself) and women now share privileges and powers once reserved for Protestant white men.

But I think that same upper class was unwise to abandon an aristocratic self-conception in favor of a meritocratic one

Collusion”, despite the legal imprecision people now complain about, seemed to have a life of its own, an organic power. How else to explain it being happened upon independently at least twice almost immediaely and then quickly becoming canonical with virtually no effort to contest it or use a different word to describe what was being discussed? A particular need existed and it filled that need. If the Examiner hadn’t used the word, someone else would have.

at the outset things were much more amorphous and confused. It wasn’t at all clear what had happened or just what the hierarchies of different severities would be. The novelty and incredibility of what was being discussed was at war with the kind of precision or legal terminology many now crave.

Trumpism, at its core, is a rebellion against changes in American society that undermine traditional hierarchies. It’s based on the belief that these changes, rather than promoting fairness for historically oppressed groups, actually promote “political correctness”: the oppression of white, native-born Christian men.

From 2013 to 2018, according to the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), the percentage of Republicans who said that in the U.S. “there is a lot of discrimination against women” fell by half, from 28 to 14 percent. (Among Democrats during the same period it rose from 55 to 71 percent). By contrast, from 2012 to 2016, the percentage of Republicans who said men face a “great deal” or a “lot” of discrimination doubled, from 9 to 18 percent. (Among Democrats it declined slightly). And in 2016, according to PRRI, 68 percent of Donald Trump supporters said American society is becoming “too soft and feminine.”

If you’re already inclined to believe that America increasingly victimizes men simply for acting like men, the accusations against Kavanaugh confirm your fears. First, because if these charges can sink Kavanaugh, they can sink lots of other men, too. “Is there any man in this room that wouldn’t be subjected to such an allegation?” asked Republican Representative Steve King of Iowa earlier this week.

Emancipation should have laid waste to the Southern aristocracy. The economy was built on the forced labor of enslaved Africans, and almost half the Confederacy’s wealth was invested in owning humans. Once people could no longer be treated as chattel, that wealth evaporated.

But less than two decades after the Civil War, Southern slave-owning dynasties were back on top of the economic ladder, according to an ambitious new analysis

by 1880, the sons of slave owners were better off than the sons of nearby Southern whites who started with equal wealth but were not as invested in enslaved people.

This view implies that hierarchy is natural.

Japanese find it awkward, even unbecoming, when a person does not behave in accordance with status expectations.

the book did not surprise me, as such, but it still stunned, shocked, and disgusted me. You simply cannot unread it, or banish what is quite obviously true from your mind

It helps explain more deeply the rants of Pope Francis about so many of his cardinals, especially his denunciations of “Pharisees” and “hypocrites,” with their sexual amorality and their vast wealth and power. “Behind rigidity something always lies hidden; in many cases, a double life,”

The only tiny consolation of the book is the knowledge that we now have a pope — with all his flaws — who knows what he’s dealing with, and has acted, quite ruthlessly at times, to demote, defrock, or reassign the most egregious cases to places where they have close to nothing to do

“I’m almost in the job world, and it really weighs down on me,” said the government major, who keeps up with his fellow students by looking at their résumés on LinkedIn. “Everyone tries to put themselves in competition with everyone else. . . . There’s more of a focus on the professional aspect rather than on having fun or doing things that are focused on the college experience.”

Over the past decade or so, rates of depression, psychological distress and suicidal thoughts and actions have risen significantly among people 26 and younger, with some of the highest increases among women and those at higher income levels, according to a stud

in the past 10 to 12 years, the number of people reporting symptoms indicative of major depression increased 52 percent among 12- to 17-year-olds and 63 percent among 18- to 25-year-olds; the rate for both groups is now 13.2 percent.

Those breakdowns fall under the description of what the 9/11 Commission described as failures of policy, capabilities, management and imagination. They also involved simple errors that could have been fixed by collecting and connecting the dots of possible breakdowns. The current partial government shutdown has undermined this focus on prevention by creating a wave of uncertainty with potentially long-term damage

On failures of policy, skeleton staffs are all that stands between the public and breakdowns in fighting financial fraud, dealing with the opioid epidemic, maintaining food safety and keeping air travel safe

On failures of management, the shutdown has exposed the lack of effective leadership across the federal hierarchy. Today’s government organization chart has never had more layers