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economists can now track what they call “business dynamism” in ways they couldn’t before. As researchers have dug into these numbers, they’ve found that most metrics of dynamism and upheaval in American business have actually been declining for decades, with the downturn steepening after 2000. Fewer new businesses are being launched in the United States, the average age of businesses is increasing, job creation and job destruction are on the wane, industries are being consolidated, and fast-growth businesses are rarer.

There was in fact plenty of upheaval in the top ranks of the business world in the 1980s and ’90s, as newcomers crashed the Fortune 500 list with increasing frequency. And the high tech sector was, as widely perceived, a hotbed of entrepreneurship and growth. All of that activity seems to have peaked, however, a year or two after the stock market did in 2000. Measures of big-business volatility began to drop.High-tech start-up activity and what economists call the skewness of growth—how quickly the fastest-growing companies in a sector are outpacing the median company—declined below the levels of the mid-’90s and stayed there.

spectacular rise in living standards that began in Europe and North America just over 200 years ago is thus largely the work of disruptive innovations. Without a new burst of them, we may face “secular stagnation”—an extended period of slow growth.

to denounce Wikipedia is like denouncing the Enlightenment. Nay more: Wikipedia is the Enlightenment realized, for better or worse.

The Internet has concentrated once widely dispersed aspects of a human life into one and the same little machine: work, friendship, commerce, creativity, eros. As someone sharply put it a few years ago in an article in Slate or something like that: our work machines and our porn machines are now the same machines. This is, in short, an exceptional moment in history, next to which 19th-century anxieties about the railroad or the automated loom seem frivolous. Looms and cotton gins and similar apparatuses each only did one thing; the Internet does everything. 

Sometimes as I’m walking down the street hitting ‘refresh’, I am made abruptly aware of the intrusion of physical reality, of midsized physical objects in motion, and I wish my body were better protected from them. I wish they would go away. They belong to a sputtering, wheezing world of rusty old buggies and abandoned factories. They have no place in 2011. Of course, their world is not the world, and it never was all that was meant by ‘reality’. Theirs is only the human social world, the world we’ve built up by art and artifice, the world of nature transformed for our vain and largely illusory purposes. If then there is a certain respect in which it makes sense to say that the Internet does not change everything, it is that human social reality was always virtual anyway. I do not mean this in some obfuscating Baudrillardian sense, but rather as a corollary to a thoroughgoing naturalism: human institutions only exist because they appear to humans to exist; nature is entirely indifferent to them. And tools and vehicles only are what they are because people make the uses of them that they do.

In addition to a list of people’s most-used words and other straightforward stats like follower counts, ThinkUp shows subscribers more unusual information such as how often they thank and congratulate people, how frequently they swear, whose voices they tend to amplify and which posts get the biggest reaction and from whom.

ThinkUp is something like Elf on the Shelf for digitally addled adults — a constant reminder that someone is watching you, and that you’re being judged.

Every morning the service delivers an email packed with information, and in its weighty thoroughness, it reminds you that what you do on Twitter and Facebook can change your life, and other people’s lives, in important, sometimes unforeseen ways.

“Dear White People” brilliantly uses the complexities of Obama-era racial consciousness to explore a basic paradox of interpersonal interaction. We are all stereotypes in one another’s eyes and complicated, unique individuals in our own minds. Somehow, within the compass of a compact, modestly budgeted (and independently financed) feature, Mr. Simien holds the antics of an astonishing variety of recognizable human types up to critical scrutiny. At the same time, he explores the desires and frustrations of a motley collection of plausible human beings with amused compassion.

“Dear White People” does not point the way toward a happy, huggy, post-racial future. Nor does it prophesy a revolutionary fire next time. And it does not pretend that “race” is a symmetrical problem to be solved by acts of reciprocal good will on both sides. This is in part a movie about racism, about how deeply white supremacy is still embedded in institutions that congratulate themselves on their diversity and tolerance. It is, in other words, about how the distance from a place like Winchester to a place like Ferguson, Mo., is not as great as some of us might wish or suppose.

Mr. Simien serves harsh medicine with remarkable charm and good humor. He is an incisive writer and a disciplined and decorous filmmaker, framing and cutting his scenes with clean, almost classical economy.

Auschwitz trial: guard entreated by survivor to reveal role

A 94-year-old former Auschwitz concentration camp guard has gone on trial in western Germany accused of being an accessory to the murders of 170,000 victims of the Holocaust.

“Mr Hanning, we are more or less the same age, and soon we will both be before the highest court,” he said. “Speak here about what you and your comrades did.” His hands and the paper he was holding trembled as he spoke.

Bringing Syrian refugees to the U.S. has become an especially contentious issue. In Canada, however, they're being welcomed with open arms.

Roughly 600 Syrians from refugee camps in Jordan and Lebanon will arrive by plane in Canada this evening. They're the first of 25,000 Syrians the new Canadian government wants to resettle by the end of February.

Toronto's major newspaper, the Toronto Star, gave them an emotional welcome on the front page of Thursday's edition. It reads, in part: "You're with family now. ... "You're in Canada now, with all the rights and protections and possibilities that confers. "You'll find the place a little bigger than Damascus or Aleppo, and a whole lot chillier. But friendly for all that. We're a city that cherishes its diversity — it's our strength. Canadians have been watching your country being torn apart, and know that you've been through a terrifying, heartbreaking nightmare. But that is behind you now. And we're eager to help you get a fresh start."

Despite threats of a walkout or even schism over the issue of gay marriage, the archbishops of the Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest body of churches, managed to keep their church intact after a week of tense meetings that ended with a symbolic washing of one another’s feet.

In interviews, the American archbishop said his church would not reverse its decision to bless same-sex marriages, and the Canadian archbishop said his church would proceed with a vote this summer to consider approving same-sex marriages.

The Most Rev. Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury, said at a news conference on Friday that it was necessary to impose “consequences” on the Episcopal Church for breaking with church doctrine that marriage is only between a man and a woman. He also acknowledged that the move would send a painful message to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people.

US President Donald Trump has stepped up his war of words over trade tariffs, threatening to "apply a tax" on imports of cars from the European Union.

EU trade chiefs have reportedly been considering slapping 25% tariffs on around $3.5bn (£2.5bn) of imports from the US, following Mr Trump's proposal of a 25% tariff on imported steel and 10% on aluminium.They would target iconic US exports including Levi's jeans, Harley-Davidson motorbikes and Bourbon whisky, European Commission head Jean-Claude Juncker said.

Germany is responsible for just over half of the EU's car exports, so new US tariffs would hurt the car industry there. But German carmakers also build hundreds of thousands of cars in the US every year - providing many US jobs that German officials say Mr Trump overlooks.

In its June issue, National Geographic magazine has published a selection of startling photos highlighting the vast amounts of discarded plastic choking the world's oceans, shorelines and rivers.

Wildlife, particularly marine animals, are at risk when they become entangled in plastic waste, or ingest it.

Plastic bottles choke the Cibeles fountain, in central Madrid. An art collective called Luzinterruptus filled this and two other Madrid fountains with 60,000 discarded bottles as a way of calling attention to the environmental impact of disposable plastics.

Trudeau seemed particularly aggrieved by the national-security grounds on which the Trump administration imposed the tariffs. He said Canada was America’s “most steadfast ally” in war and peace, calling the tariffs “an affront to the … thousands of Canadians who have fought and died alongside American comrades-in-arms.” But what he said next perhaps illustrates just how poor relations between the two neighbors have become.

“In closing, I want to be very clear about one thing: Americans remain our partners, friends, and allies. This is not about the American people. We have to believe that at some point their common sense will prevail,” he said in the type of language that successive U.S. administrations have used to describe recalcitrant regimes such as Iran. “But we see no sign of that in this action today by the U.S. administration.”

via Twitter, Trump added: “Canada has treated our Agricultural business and Farmers very poorly for a very long period of time. Highly restrictive on Trade! They must open their markets and take down their trade barriers! They report a really high surplus on trade with us. Do Timber & Lumber in U.S.?” (The U.S. has a $8.4 billion trade surplus in goods and services with Canada.)

The United States and its traditional allies are on the brink of a full-scale trade war after European and Canadian leaders reacted swiftly and angrily to Donald Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on steel and aluminium producers.

A spokesman for Number 10 said the government was “deeply disappointed” the US had decided to apply the tariffs and that Theresa May would raise the issue with Trump at next week’s meeting of the G7 industrial nations in Canada.

he French president, Emmanuel Macron, called the US tariffs illegal and a mistake, while the Canadian prime minister, Justin Trudeau, issued an immediate like-for-like response – announcing tariffs of up to 25% on US imports worth up to 16.6bn Canadian dollars (£9.6bn), which was the total value of Canadian steel exports to the US last year. The tariffs will cover steel and aluminium as well as orange juice, whiskey and other food products

Behavior like this is unusual, a point that journalists across the political spectrum have made. “This is not normal,” Megan McArdle wrote in late August. “And I don’t mean that as in, ‘Trump is violating the shibboleths of the Washington establishment.’ I mean that as in, ‘This is not normal for a functioning adult.’” James Fallows observed, also in August, that Trump is having “episodes of what would be called outright lunacy, if they occurred in any other setting,” and that if he “were in virtually any other position of responsibility, action would already be under way to remove him from that role.”

Simply put, Trump’s ingrained and extreme behavioral characteristics make it impossible for him to carry out the duties of the presidency in the way the Constitution requires. To see why first requires a look at what the Constitution demands of a president, and then an examination of how Trump’s behavioral characteristics preclude his ability to fulfill those demands.

Though the Constitution’s drafters could hardly have foreseen how the system would evolve, they certainly knew the kind of person they wanted it to produce. “The process of election affords a moral certainty,” Hamilton wrote, “that the office of President will never fall to the lot of any man who is not in an eminent degree endowed with the requisite qualifications.

The core of the movement was made up of the public intellectuals, political operatives, and once and future political appointees whom the party depends on to run campaigns and to govern after successful ones. Eliot A. Cohen (now an Atlantic contributing writer), Bryan McGrath, and John Bellinger were among the ringleaders of the nearly unanimous resistance by the GOP’s foreign-policy establishment.

New publications have also sprouted up, including The Bulwark, the go-to source for anti-Trump commentary on the center-right, and The Dispatch, founded by two leading conservative journalists, Jonah Goldberg and Stephen Hayes. These stalwarts have kept up rearguard efforts to expose the perfidy of the current administration and to wrest their former allies away from Trumpian populism.

A small but vocal contingent within the Republican political-operative class also joined the effort.

White House Official’s Political Tweet Was Illegal, Agency Says

WASHINGTON — Dan Scavino Jr., the White House director of social media, violated a federal law that prohibits political activity by government employees, the federal agency empowered to enforce the law has concluded, citing the tweet Mr. Scavino sent in April calling for the defeat of a Republican member of Congress who has been critical of President Trump.

The feud between Mr. Scavino and Representative Justin Amash, Republican of Michigan, escalated during the debate over the effort to roll back President Barack Obama’s health care program, as Mr. Amash was among the conservative Freedom Caucus members who questioned the initial proposal.

White House social media director Dan Scavino warned after tweet

enior White House aide Dan Scavino was reprimanded by the US Office of Special Counsel for violating the Hatch Act in a tweet, according to a letter posted by a Washington watchdog group.The letter addressed to the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington states that Scavino, the White House director of social media, violated the Hatch Act on April 1 when he sent a tweet calling for the defeat of GOP Rep. Justin Amash in a primary.

n a decision that marked an important victory for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s climate change agenda, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled that the federal government’s imposition of carbon taxes in provinces that oppose them was constitutional.

“This matter is critical to our response to an existential threat to human life in Canada and around the world,” the court wrote in a 6-to-3 decision. “Climate change is real. It is caused by greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activities and it poses a grave threat to humanity’s future.”

The concept of carbon pricing has been widely endorsed by economists, and according to the World Bank, some form of it has been carried out or is in development in 64 countries, either through direct taxes on fossil fuels or through cap-and-trade programs.

Donald Trump's push to route his supporters' money through his own political apparatus, rather than traditional Republican campaign committees, has ignited fears among GOP donors and operatives that the former president could hamstring the party's efforts to win House and Senate majorities in next year's midterm elections.

Letters in recent days from Trump's lawyers to the Republican National Committee and the party's House and Senate campaign arms have warned against using Trump's name to raise money.

"No more money for RINOS," Trump said in a Monday evening statement. "They do nothing but hurt the Republican Party and our great voting base--they will never lead us to Greatness. Send your donation to Save America PAC at DonaldJTrump.com. We will bring it all back stronger than ever before!"

The Guantánamo story may finally be coming to an end, and as the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approaches, the question is who will write the last chapter, the White House or the Supreme Court?

President Biden has vowed to close the island detention center, through which nearly 800 detainees have passed since it opened in early 2002 to house some of the “worst of the worst,” in the words of the Pentagon at the time

President Barack Obama also wanted to close Guantánamo but couldn’t manage to do it. Circumstances are different now

He backed away from creating a third party and has soured on the costly prospect of launching his own TV empire or social media startup.

And though he was supposed to build a massive political apparatus to keep his MAGA movement afloat, it’s unclear to Republicans what his PAC is actually doing, beyond entangling itself in disputes with Republican icons and the party’s fundraising arms.

Ex-president Donald Trump finds himself adrift while in political exile. And Republicans, and even some allies, say he is disorganized, torn between playing the role of antagonist and party leader.