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more than half of all mall-based department stores would close by the end of 2021.

Many small mall retailers have clauses in their leases — so-called co-tenancy clauses — that allow them to pay reduced rent or even break the lease if two or more anchor stores leave a location.

Mr. Tibone said he was pessimistic about the ability of most malls to fill vacant spaces, especially during the pandemic. Entertainment options like Dave & Buster’s are off the table, for instance.

Macy’s, which also owns Bloomingdale’s, said in February that it would close 125 stores in “lower-tier malls” during the next three years, and Nordstrom just recently said it would close 16 of its 116 full-line department stores. While Neiman Marcus, which filed for bankruptcy in May, said it plans to reopen all its stores, landlords are watching warily.

Already this year, Victoria’s Secret said it would close 250 stores in North America, while the Gap brand is closing at least 170 stores globally. Financial troubles are plaguing mall chain companies like Ascena Retail, which owns Ann Taylor and Loft, and the owner of New York & Company. And bankruptcies since early 2019 have included mall staples like Forever 21, Things Remembered, Payless ShoeSource and GNC. Lucky Brand Dungarees filed for bankruptcy on Friday.

“Traditionally we kept our shopping separate from our living from our recreation,” said Amanda Nicholson, a professor of retail practice at Syracuse University. “That’s not what the world wants anymore. Malls need to be more creative about getting people outside their homes — it can’t just be stores, stores and more stores."

These days, the most successful malls tend to be dominated by brands that appeal to higher earners, like Nordstrom, Apple and Lululemon, as well as up-and-comers like Untuckit and Peloton. They also tend to have invested heavily in restaurants, spas and specialty gyms that keep customers coming back, week after week, even if they’re doing more of their shopping online, Saunders said.

“Everybody talks about the future of retail and the future of entertainment, and how you merge the two,” Don Ghermezian, president of Triple Five Group, said last month. “There really isn’t a center on the planet that has done it to the degree that we’ve done in here.”

The nation’s first shopping center opened in Edina, Minn., in 1956. Renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright was unimpressed, as it had “all the evils of the village street and none of its charm.

“There was an explosion of one-level malls with four anchor stores, a dreary food court and a carousel in the middle,” said Nicholson of Syracuse. “Developers realized they could put a large, flat building in the middle of a field and quickly make money — so for decades, in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, that’s what they did.

The Committee to Protect Journalists described Wednesday’s police statement and Thursday’s summoning of the media figures as the kind of “forced patriotism” that was “potentially a sign of a downward spiral of press freedom” in Kenya.

The country is known to have one of the freest and most robust news industries in Africa, but it is currently facing two new bills that could change the industry landscape

closed-circuit television video from inside the Westgate mall during the attack appeared on national and international news media showing Kenyan security agents carrying full plastic shopping bags out of the Nakumatt supermarket in the Westgate mall,

In the police briefing Wednesday, Mr. Kimaiyo said the news media “need not distribute or maybe issue statements that can amount to hate speech.”

The agencies leading and disseminating information about the investigation have also seemingly shifted in a Round Robin among the police, the army and the Internal Affairs Ministry.

Gurrola was arrested for investigation of assault with a deadly weapon, Lowe said.

sed a tree near his car for cover as he exchanged gunfire with several officers in a nearby neighborhood before he was killed, officials said at an afternoon press conference.

America’s midlife crisis has been realized in the flesh in the decaying Woodland mall: these men and women have been overwhelmed by an inherently unsatisfiable longing for freedom. To them, paying taxes, to be compelled to pay taxes, is a form of enslavement. By this definition, who among us is free? Who among us could ever be free?

Is freedom just what you could have been, rather than what you turned out to be? Is freedom just a word for youth that has passed? At the Woodland mall they know that, whatever freedom is, they are losing it. “How far are you willing to be pushed?” Finicum Finch asks. “When is your faith going to be bigger than your fear?” No political programme could ever assuage the hunger for impossible freedom it has sprung from.

Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, came to the same conclusion: “the most potent and forcible cause” of the Roman empire’s collapse was “the domestic hostilities of the Romans themselves”

Cultures commit suicide. That’s how they end. Just like with men and women, it’s not the challenges of life that break you, it’s your own internal contradiction

America’s internal contradictions are beginning to overwhelm its politics. The preppers combine all the features that have defined American existence since its beginning: the apocalyptic visions, the maniacal over-reading of the constitution, the desire to live by self-reliance but in total conformity, self-righteous violence and the evasion of taxes.

How many great American tech companies boil down to tax-and-regulation-evasion schemes? Hollywood is the world’s number one gun fetishist. Donald Trump isn’t from north-west Ohio, he’s a New Yorker – more a Billy Joel New Yorker than a Lou Reed New Yorker, sure, but a New Yorker nonetheless. The traits on display at the Woodland mall are evident everywhere. They are present in every aspect of its history. Why do you think every major columnist at the New York Times thought bombing Baghdad to rubble would solve the crisis of the Middle East? They’re bred to it. In America, the answer is violence. What was the question again?

Middle age is when the bullshit you tell yourself begins to crumble of its own accord. Middle age is when the sum total of your decisions, rather than the dreams you began with, starts to become who you are. You were once the hero of your own story but the best you can manage now is to be the punchline to your own joke. The urge to have it all burn down and start over is ferocious.

Middle age, for people and for countries, is a reckoning much more uncomfortable than a collapse: you find out who you are.

The design, restoration of the original park and construction of the new memorial will cost $42 million; the commission has $1.4 million left to raise.

Critics — many of whom fought Mr. Fountain’s concept with every tactic available — say the structure falls short in marrying a historically significant park with a big-dream memorial.

“The real question is: Did the memorial leverage the power of place in which it now resides?” said Charles A. Birnbaum, the president of The Cultural Landscape Foundation, who tried to have the park added to the National Register of Historic Places, which trimmed the memorial planners’ large-scale plans.

Representative Ted Poe, Republican of Texas, tried for years to expand the memorial effort on the National Mall before he retired. Congress considered transforming the District of Columbia War Memorial, at the end of the mall, into a national monument.

“I was doing very myopic, classical male figurative sculpture derived from Hellenistic art,” Mr. Howard said. “Neither one of us was ready. It is just insanity. You are entering into this process that could take away 15 years of your life.”

Mr. Howard said he was conscious of making the sculpture visually engaging but also educational. “My client said, ‘You have to make something that dramatizes World War I in a way in which visitors will want to go home and learn more about it,’” he said.

Accuracy gave way, however, to artistic license. The piece, which depicts Black, Latino and Native American soldiers, blurs the reality.

While Mr. Howard changed the helmets of the Black troops to reflect that, he said he was unmoved by the broader argument. “You had segregation in the Army ” he said in an interview. “However, on the battlefield, there is no distinction.”

As such, even if Black soldiers were depicted in a way that was historically incorrect, he said, “they needed to be treated as equal stature.”

The memorial is unlikely to quell longstanding criticism that too many monuments in Washington focus on war and death.

“There are stories that have been marginalized that could have been celebrated and sobering stories of the reality of the war experience that could more effectively honor sacrifice,” said Phoebe Lickwar, who was a landscape architect in the early stages of the project.

The problem was that, once the initial euphoria wore off, the public wasn’t much interested in it. Coverage in print media remained solid, but cable-news coverage of Afghanistan dropped off quickly, especially once

“America’s not at war” was a common refrain among the troops. “We’re at war. America’s at the mall.”

now those same Americans have the full withdrawal from Afghanistan they apparently want: Some 70 percent of the public supports a pullout.

Not that they care that intensely about it; as the foreign-policy scholar Stephen Biddle recently observed, the war is practically an afterthought in U.S. politics. “You would need an electron microscope to detect the effect of Afghanistan on any congressional race in the last decade,” Biddle said early this year. “It’s been invisible.”

What the public does care about, however, is using Afghanistan as raw material for cheap patriotism and partisan attacks (some right and some wrong, but few of them in good faith) on every president since 2001.

nor did they want to think about whether “draining the swamp” and modernizing and developing Afghanistan (which would mean a lot more than a few elections) was worth the cost and effort.

Maybe it would have been worth it. Or maybe such a project was impossible. We’ll never know for certain, because American political and military leaders only tried pieces of several strategies, never a coherent whole, mostly to keep the costs and casualties down and to keep the war off the front pages and away from a public that didn’t want to hear about it

Nor did Americans ever consider whether or when Afghanistan, as a source of terrorist threats to the U.S., had been effectively neutralized. Nothing is perfect, and risks are never zero. But there was no time at which we all decided that “close enough” was good enough, and that we’d rather come home than stay.

Biden’s policy, of course, is not that different from Trump’s, despite all the partisan howling about it from Republicans. As my colleague David Frum has put it: “For good or ill, the Biden policy on Afghanistan is the same as the Trump policy, only with less lying.”

But as comforting as it would be to blame Obama and Trump, we must look inward and admit that we told our elected leaders—of both parties—that they were facing a no-win political test. If they chose to leave, they would be cowards who abandoned Afghanistan. If they chose to stay, they were warmongers intent on pursuing “forever war.”

A serious people—the kind of people we once were—would have made serious choices, long before this current debacle was upon them. They would today be trying to learn something from nearly 2,500 dead service members and many more wounded

Biden was right, in the end, to bite the bullet and refuse to pass this conflict on to yet another president

His execution of this resolve, however, looks to be a tragic and shameful mess and will likely be a case study in policy schools for years to come. But there was no version of “Stop the forever war” that didn’t end with the fall of Kabul

before we move on, before we head back to the mall, before we resume posting memes, and before we return to bickering with each other about whether we should have to mask up at Starbuck’s, let us remember that this day came about for one reason, and one reason only.Because it is what we wanted.

The Bubble was his answer. If Clough vetoes it, the Hirshhorn will be back to square one, forced to reconsider the question Koshalek already answered. Or else it will retreat into itself and succumb to isolation, repetition and complacency

Ever since President Trump came into office, a record high turnover and unfilled jobs have emptied offices across wide sections of the federal bureaucracy. Now, current and former administration officials and disaster experts say the coronavirus has exposed those failings as never before and left parts of the federal government unprepared and ill equipped for what may be the largest public health crisis in a century.

Some 80 percent of the senior positions in the White House below the cabinet level have turned over during Mr. Trump’s administration, with about 500 people having departed since the inauguration

At the Department of Veterans Affairs, workers are scrambling to order medical supplies on Amazon after its leaders, lacking experience in disaster responses, failed to prepare for the onslaught of patients at its medical centers.

Equally notable may have been the resignation last year of Scott Gottlieb, the commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, who was an early advocate for broad coronavirus testing and stronger mitigation policies. He was succeeded by Dr. Stephen M. Hahn, a noted oncologist, who has struggled during Senate hearings to explain some of his positions. The agency is largely viewed as slow in engaging the private sector to develop tests for the coronavirus. Many members of Mr. Gottlieb’s team departed with him, leaving the agency with many people new to their jobs.

The Department of Homeland Security, the agency tasked with screening at airports and carrying out the travel restrictions that were Mr. Trump’s first major action to combat the coronavirus, is full of vacancies. Of the 75 senior positions listed on the department’s website, 20 are either vacant or filled by acting officials.

Even National Park Service vacancies have taken a toll. The park service — which has its own police force — in recent days closed some parking lots near the Tidal Basin on the National Mall, where the cherry blossoms attract huge crowds each year, and urged people to stay away. Mayor Muriel Bowser stepped in and limited access to the area and sent police officers and members of the National Guard to enforce the shutdown.

Even the Pentagon, which is broadly viewed as better positioned than many other agencies for the pandemic response, is not immune. More than a third of all Senate-confirmed civilian positions at the Defense Department are vacant or filled by temporary officials, a peak level for the administration outside of the transition period, according to Pentagon statistics. Of 60 senior positions, 21 lack permanent appointees.

Additionally, Sunday's incident follows a nationwide spike in fatal shootings. Last week, nine people were killed after a gunman opened fire at a rail yard in San Jose, Calif. The shooter was also reported dead.

Like Biden, Harris is determined to take the oath of office outside, on the West Front of the U.S. Capitol, despite security concerns that have led to the garrison of soldiers inside the building for the first time since the Civil War.

And, like Biden, Harris is equally determined to move forward with an ambitious legislative agenda despite the fact that the early weeks of their administration will likely also see a second Senate impeachment trial of Trump.

Harris spoke to NPR on the day Biden unveiled a $1.9 trillion rescue package that would expand unemployment benefits, issue another round of direct stimulus payments, spend billions on coronavirus vaccination and testing efforts, and raise the federal minimum wage to $15, among many other provisions.

I want to start with last week with the Capitol attack. You were in Washington, D.C. What was that day like from your vantage point?It was horrific. It was a day that wherein we witnessed an assault on America's democracy, a day when we witnessed the terror that a few can wreak on so many.

Why is it so important to you to stick with the planned ceremony and take the oath outside?I think that we cannot yield to those who would try and make us afraid of who we are.

Ticking through some of the details — $20 billion for vaccinations, $50 billion for expanded testing, $130 billion for schools to reopen safely. If this is passed and signed into law, how quickly can Americans expect to see life to return to normal?Let me be very clear that the president-elect and I know this is not going to be easy, but we are putting everything we've got into this, and to deal with it as soon as possible, which is why we're prepared right now to, on day one, push through and get this package, so that it hits the ground and hits the streets and we get relief to the American people.

How quickly can this get passed? Democrats have the narrowest of narrow majorities in both chambers.Well, let me tell you, it's our highest priority. It is our highest priority.

But there is going to be so much else going on, including now a Senate impeachment trial. So you have not only this bill, you have to confirm the Cabinet through the Senate. There is an impeachment trial. How does that affect everything you're trying to do beyond legislation and confirmations?

We know how to multitask [laughs]. There's a reason that word exists in the English language. That's what's going to be required. We have to multitask, which means, as with anyone, we have a lot of priorities and we need to see them through.

This proposal has billions of dollars to fund vaccine distribution, but it's not just funding. There are distribution problems, information sharing problems. There are trust problems, supply problems. What can the federal government do immediately in the coming weeks to start to fix these?Well, part of it is pass our plan because we are, for example, putting $50 billion into increased testing and tracing, as you mentioned earlier. We need to increase the supply of PPE.

This is a major stimulus package coming through. Are you going to be a point person in getting it passed or in any of these areas once it starts going to effect, if he does sign it into law?Let me tell you something, on every decision that we have made as an incoming administration, we're in the room together, Joe and I, the president-elect and I. And on every, you know, I can't even tell you how many meetings we've been in together that range from this to many other topics that are priorities for us. And so all of the priorities are going to be a priority for me and for the president-elect, obviously.

Efforts to acquire materials from the unrest are restricted to the National Mall, while authorities in the Capitol Building are leading their own cleanup efforts and aiding a federal investigation into the violence that took place. However, curators expect that in the near future they will be able to work with government agencies, congressional offices and the curator for the Architect of the Capitol to make acquisitions from inside the building.

Harris will make history as the first female, first Black and first South Asian vice president, and she will be sworn in by the first Hispanic and third female justice in US Supreme Court history.

President-elect Joe Biden and Harris will take their oaths of office on the West Front of the US Capitol during a significantly scaled-down event on January 20.

Authorities are bracing for more extremist violence in the coming days after supporters of President Donald Trump stormed and breached the US Capitol on January 6 in a violent riot that left five people dead. The National Park Service announced Friday that the National Mall will be closed to the general public on Inauguration Day due to security concerns.

An armed standoff ensued in the House chamber, with police officers drawing their weapons. A pro-Trump protester casually monkeyed around at the dais of the Senate.

It began around 1 p.m., when a mass of Trump supporters, some in camouflage and armed with baseball bats or knives, left the National Mall and, encouraged by President Trump, ascended on the Capitol complex.

“I don’t trust any of these people,” said Eric Martin, 49, a woodworker from Charleston, S.C., as he marveled at the opulence of the Capitol and helped a friend wash pepper spray from his eyes. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

The Capitol Police fatally shot a woman inside the building, according to Chief Robert J. Contee of the Metropolitan Police Department, and multiple officers were injured.

“This is what the president has caused today, this insurrection,” Senator Mitt Romney, Republican of Utah, said as he and other senators were hustled off to a secure location.

The few police officers standing on the steps of the Capitol were overwhelmed. Their flash bang grenades only invigorated the protesters. Around 2:30, an entrance near the west side of the Capitol descended into chaos as a wave of Trump supporters wearing Make America Great Again apparel pressed past police barricades.

For about an hour, the Trump loyalists went in and out of at least one entrance of the Capitol with little disruption from the police.

Soon, a nervous energy pulsed through the room. The police began to close the gallery doors, which had remained open to allow for better ventilation as lawmakers streamed in. Congressional leaders were quickly ushered out, as staff aides urged lawmakers in the gallery and on the floor to remain calm.

In the House, just after 2:30 p.m., a police officer stepped on the dais and informed lawmakers that they might need to duck under their chairs.

Frantic shouting filled the room as lawmakers struggled to unfold the plastic bags that they were instructed to prepare to put over their heads in case of tear gas.

In a surreal scene of chaos and glee, hundreds of Trump loyalists roamed the halls, taking photos and breaking into offices. No police officers were in view.

“We’re claiming the House, and the Senate is ours,” a sweaty man in a checked shirt shouted, stabbing his finger in the air.

“You guys just need to go outside,” he said to a man in a green backpack. Asked why the police were not forcing the mob out, the officer said, “We just got to let them do their thing for now.”

One protester came up to him and shouted in his face, “Traitor!” When another man approached to apologize to the officer, the officer replied, “You’re fine.”

Around 3:30 p.m., about 25 police officers had entered the Crypt and started asking people to move back. A few minutes later, dozens more, wearing riot gear and some in gas masks, ejected the roughly 150 protesters in the Crypt.

Protesters repeatedly exited the building bearing trophies that they had torn off walls. A few carried “Area Closed” signs that they had snatched and then stormed past.

By 7 p.m., the presence of police officers and federal agents had drastically increased along the National Mall. Officers pushed back against aggressive protesters as they prepared for the possibility of more unrest overnight.

“We want to go back,” Mr. Crow said. “And finish the business of the people to show that we are a democracy, and that the government is stronger than any mob.”

the pandemic increasingly looks like one of the defining events of our time. The best-case scenarios are now out of reach

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if a vaccine remains out of reach for years, the long-term changes could be truly profound. Any industry that depends on close human contact would be at risk.

Large swaths of the cruise-ship and theme-park industries might go away. So could many movie theaters and minor-league baseball teams. The long-predicted demise of the traditional department store would finally come to pass. Thousands of restaurants would be wiped out

In this scenario, a vaccine will arrive sometime in 2021. Until then, the world will endure waves of sickness, death and uncertainty.

is a loss of the gains we’ve made over the past 20 years in the access for first-generation and minority students.”

“It’s only when the tide goes out,” Warren Buffett likes to say, “that you learn who’s been swimming naked.”

Local newspapers will be one casualty. They were already struggling

Traditional department stores are another example. In recent years, they have lost significant business to online retailers and quietly lost even more to big-box stores

If they do, they will create spillover victims — the hundreds of malls that rely on department stores for rent and foot traffic

enrollment and tuition revenue are likely to drop sharply, creating existential crises for many less selective private colleges and smaller public universities.

“The biggest danger that we face as a sector

It could easily be the most important global experience since World War II and the Great Depression

for many white-collar workers, the remote-work experiment shows no sign of ending — a trend that could depress the commercial real-estate market and business travel long after a vaccine is available.

Consolidation, in turn, tends to increase income and wealth inequality, in part because the largest companies are run by highly paid executives, typically based in major metro areas, and the companies’ stock is disproportionately owned by the affluent.

“My basic fear,” Heather Boushey, a leading progressive economist, said, “is that it leads to a rule by the oligarchs.”

“Even Republicans — younger Republicans — have recognized that the center of gravity is shifting on the relationship between the state and the market.” The virus, he added, “will only accelerate that.”

That agenda is shaping up to have two defining features

The first is reducing inequality — through higher taxes on the rich, greater scrutiny of big companies, new efforts to reduce racial injustice and more investments and programs for the middle class and poor, including health care, education and paid leave

The second is acting on climate change, which could cause even more global misery than the coronavirus. “Climate change cannot be solved by the private sector,”

while Mr. Obama’s team had only a couple of months to plan for taking office amid a national crisis, Mr. Biden’s team would have almost a year. “There is a whole vision that I think is ready,” Ms. Boushey added. “And there is a lot more runway.”

If there is a single lesson of the current era of American politics, it’s that change can happen more quickly than we imagined.

Hirschman was suggesting that doubt could be a source not of paralysis and death but of creativity and self-renewal. One of his last books, published when he was about eighty, is called A Propensity to Self-Subversion. In the title essay, Hirschman celebrates skepticism about his own theories and ideas, and he captures not only the insight but also the pleasure, even the joy, that can come from learning that one had it wrong.

Hirschman’s work changes how you see the world. It illuminates yesterday, today, and tomorrow. His categories become your categories.

Hirschman sought, in his early twenties and long before becoming a writer, to “prove Hamlet wrong.” In Shakespeare’s account, Hamlet is immobilized and defeated by doubt. Hirschman was a great believer in doubt—he never doubted it—and he certainly doubted his own convictions. At a conference designed to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of his first book, who else would take the opportunity to show that one of his own central arguments was wrong

Who else would publish an essay in The American Economic Review exploring the “overproduction of opinionated opinion,” questioning the value of having strong opinions, and emphasizing the importance of doubting one’s opinions and even one’s tastes? Hirschman thought that strong opinions, as such, “might be dangerous to the health of our democracy,” because they are an obstacle to mutual understanding and constructive problem-solving.

The Rhetoric of Reaction (1991) is a study of the reactionary’s tool kit, identifying the standard objections to any and all proposals for reform. The objections are “perversity” (the reform will make the problem even worse), “futility” (the reform will do nothing to solve the problem), and “jeopardy” (the reform will endanger some hard-won social gain). Hirschman shows that these objections are stupefying, mechanical, hyperbolic, and often wrong

He insisted that human history provides “stories, intricate and often nonrepeatable,” which “look more like tricks history has up its sleeve than like social-scientific regularities, not to speak of laws.” He was interested in “the many might-have-beens of history,” including “felicitous and surprising escapes from disaster.

Hirschman was delighted by paradoxes, unintended consequences (especially good ones), the telling detail, inventories of actual practices (rather than big theories), surprises, and improvisation. In his view, “history is nothing if not farfetched.”

He invented the term “possibilism,” meant to draw attention to “the discovery of paths, however narrow, leading to an outcome that appears to be foreclosed on the basis of probabilistic reasoning alone.” In his lifetime, one of many such outcomes was the abrupt collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, which almost no one anticipated.

Shifting Involvements—a small masterpiece that illuminates the Tea Party, Occupy Wall Street, and protest movements of diverse kinds. Hirschman emphasized that human beings are often choosing between private and public life, and thus between the different forms of happiness that are associated with each of them. He described “pendular motions of collective behavior,” in which people swing from happiness to disappointment in one kind of activity, and then to the other. For example, the disappointments and frustrations of the student rebellions of the late 1960s encouraged a return to private life in the 1970s and 1980s. Rejecting the highly influential idea that the problem of collective action has a kind of invariable, ahistorical “logic,” Hirschman drew attention to the immense importance of history and timing as, in Adelman’s words, “people leave the streets and plazas disenchanted with politics to seek happiness in the shopping malls”—and vice versa.

The Rhetoric of Reaction, written in his mid-seventies, was an outgrowth of the conservative ascendancy of the 1980s, and it speaks directly to our current debates. Hirschman was struck by the routine, stylized, even mechanical character of much conservative thinking—and its close connection, in its rhetoric, to arguments that have been made for hundreds of years. Indeed, conservative rhetoric is the book’s target, perhaps above all in the person of Edmund Burke,

But if The Passions and the Interests was his favorite, and Exit, Voice, and Loyalty his most important, there can be no question about his most characteristic: The Rhetoric of Reaction. The sustained attack on intransigence, the bias in favor of hope, the delight in paradox, the insistence on the creative power of doubt—all these prove a lot of people wrong, not just Hamlet.

“He’s crazy. No one knows what he’s doing or thinking. He’s completely crazy. Whatever he says today, he will say something different tomorrow.”

In Istanbul, the protests turned violent on Saturday as police forces tried to disperse people with tear gas and some protesters pelted them with rocks, calling them “murderers” and “fascists.”

An older man standing nearby, overhearing the conversation, yelled, “Dictator!”

When he first came to power, he was a good persuader and a good speaker

Many of the protesters complained about the lack of coverage on Turkish television, and said the silence of much of the local news media would help the protest movement grow because people, unable to see events on television, would want to see them for themselves. Some newspapers also were largely silent on the protests: on Saturday morning, the lead story in Sabah, a major pro-government newspaper

Another: A study of Old Order Amish in southern Canada in 2004 recruited nearly a hundred adults to wear pedometers for a week. This is a little like using pedometers in the 19th century; the Amish don’t have cars or tractors, and still get around in large part by foot and horse-drawn carriage. The average number of steps per day for Amish men, it turned out, came in at 18,425. For women it was 14,196 steps.

What do we lose by walking less, and breaking up our walks into Halloween-candy sized missions? We lose that opportunity to tightly stitch together our world. A long walk — it takes about three hours to walk 10 miles, and without breaking a sweat — gives us time with our thoughts, and establishes the right speed to appreciate the complexity of the world around us. It gives us time to plait the warp of random observations and the woof of random thought. We create a narrative and a place. Americans drive an average of 13,400 miles each year, or about 36 miles a day. The one time people spend long periods alone with their thoughts tends to be in a car — on long drives or stuck in traffic. But it’s not the same. In a car, we’re cocooned, isolated from a complex environment that can engage u

And as traffic historian Tom Vanderbilt has noted, our highway system today essentially mimics “a toddler’s view of the world, a landscape of outsized, brightly colored objects and flashing lights” as we speed along “smooth, wide roads marked by enormous signs.” Heading down an on-ramp to merge onto a highway, it’s as if we’re entering a day care center for adults. We push on pedals and turn a big wheel. We communicate with others by blaring a horn that plays a single note, or by employing a hand signal that involves a single finger.

Nicholas Carr in his 2010 book, The Shallows, suggested, essentially, that Google was making us stupid. He cited one researcher who noted, “the digital environment tends to encourage people to explore many topics extensively, but at a more superficial level.” Carr went on to add, “skimming is becoming our predominant mode of reading,” and we are adept at “non-linear reading.” We lose our capacity for “in-depth reading.”

We also seem to be losing our capacity for in-depth walking. Walking is now short-term scanning. Thoreau liked to spend four hours every day rambling, free of tasks and immediate goals. He lamented that his fellow townsmen would recall pleasant walks they’d taken a decade ago, but had “confined themselves to the highway ever since.” “The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing,” Ralph Wa

the real America is, in fact, a nation of metropolitan areas, not small towns.

two-thirds of Americans live in metro areas with half-a-million or more residents.

we are still, at root, a nation that believes in democracy, even if we don’t always act on that belief.

Almost none of us are farmers; few of us hunt; by and large, we sit in cubicles on weekdays and visit shopping malls on our days off.

We’re no longer an Anglo-Saxon nation; we’re only around half-Protestant; and we’re increasingly nonwhite.

America remains uniquely democratic in its mannerisms, in the way people from different classes interact.

we are, objectively, the most class-ridden nation in the Western world — the country where children of the wealthy are most likely to inherit their parents’ status. It’s also a place where everyone celebrates the right to vote, yet many politicians work hard to disenfranchise the poor and nonwhite.

The wealthy may defend their privileges, but given the temper of America, they have to pretend that they’re doing no such thing. The block-the-vote people know what they’re doing, but they also know that they mustn’t say it in so many words. In effect, both groups know that the nation will view them as un-American unless they pay at least lip service to democratic ideals