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Europe’s largest invasion since World War II is a logical outcome of Vladimir Putin’s dominance of Russian politics in the 21st century, a reminder that grievance-based ethno-nationalism and authoritarianism lead inexorably to conflict.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that at precisely the time when living memory of World War II is fading away, humanity has failed to heed the lessons of our worst history.

The corruption that enriched kleptocrats isolated them from accountability, engendering cynicism and apathy within societies.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine on 24 February, many German politicians have publicly admitted they got Vladimir Putin wrong. Even German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier has apologised, saying it was a mistake to use trade and energy to build bridges with Moscow.

"It's a bitter acknowledgement that for 30 years we emphasised dialogue and co-operation with Russia," says Nils Schmid, foreign affairs spokesperson for Mr Steinmeier's party, the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD). "Now we have to recognise this has not worked. That's why we have entered a new era for European security."

That new era was dubbed "Zeitenwende" - literally meaning a turning point - by Germany's SPD Chancellor Olaf Scholz in a now-famous speech in the German parliament a few days after the invasion.

The political and pedagogical firefight encapsulates a broader debate that has erupted across the country about what to teach about race, history and the intersection of the two. It underscores how the nation’s metastasizing culture wars — now firmly ensconced in the nation’s classrooms — have broadened to strip Americans of a shared sense of history, leaving many to view the past through the filter of contemporary polarization.

“Most of our prior arguments were about who to include in the story, not the story itself,” said Jonathan Zimmerman, a University of Pennsylvania professor who studies the history of education. “America has lost a shared national narrative.”

history has become a defining topic for contenders angling for the presidency.

“To us,” she writes, “reality may appear human-sized, but in truth 95% of all animal species are smaller than the human thumb.”

The matter and life we cannot see are demonstrated with stunning effect. Bacterial cells make up 0.2kg of your body weight; one handful of soil contains more microbes than there are people on Earth; the tiny particles called neutrinos generated by the sun’s nuclear fusion are so small that they can penetrate the Earth, enabling a subterranean observatory to come up with an image of the sun.

In three sections – on biology, society and civilisation – Tong relentlessly focuses on all the things we either do not know, or decide not to pay attention to, as we carry on with our lives

Without obvious shared goals, arguably all these different prosecutors, officials and individuals are undertaking an inadvertent deterrence project, keeping alive the bad parts of the recent past and applying pressure on the central players.

We talk about a “chilling” effect with abortion laws, regulatory action against corporations and certain speech policies; these “work” by exerting pressure, making people skittish and worried about getting caught up in legal trouble.

post-Jan. 6 prosecutions and the prospect of an indictment in Georgia may be causing people to be less rowdy.

her photographs capture both the isolation and the beauty of the rural South: the dirt roads without a soul in sight, the creeks and rivers that curve away into even greater isolation, the trees choked by moss and vines, the gravestones and makeshift memorials barely visible through the trees.

The landscapes in these photographs are not so much threatening as bereft of protection. Entering such beautiful spaces is always a risk for a woman alone — not because of anything inherently dangerous about a mist-drenched stream or a bamboo-clotted riverbank or even a rocky waterfall, but because bucolic settings aren’t always as empty as they seem. And nobody would hear you scream if danger has followed you into the woods — or if danger is already there, just waiting for you to arrive.

Our deep woods are lovely, our still waters restful, but the Southern landscape has never been a safe place for a woman alone. It has never been a safe place for a Black man alone. It has never been a safe place for L.G.B.T.Q. people of any race or gender. To enter an isolated place alone has always been to take a risk, and we have known that all our lives.

Critical historians who thought they were winning the fight for control within the academy now face dire retaliation from outside the academy. The dizzying turn from seeming triumph in 2020 to imminent threat in 2022 has unnerved many practitioners of the new history. Against this background, they did not welcome it when their association’s president suggested that maybe their opponents had a smidgen of a point.

a background reality of the humanities in the contemporary academy: a struggle over who is entitled to speak about what. Nowhere does this struggle rage more fiercely than in anything to do with the continent of Africa. Who should speak? What may be said? Who will be hired?

One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.

The decline of war has been a psychological as well as statistical phenomenon. Its most important feature has been a major change in the very meaning of the term “peace”. For most of history peace meant only “the temporary absence of war”.

In recent decades “peace” has come to mean “the implausibility of war”. For many countries, being invaded and conquered by the neighbours has become almost inconceivable.

It has been reflected most clearly in coldly-calculated budgets. In recent decades governments around the world have felt safe enough to spend an average of only about 6.5% of their budgets on their armed forces, while spending far more on education, health care and welfare.

Some voters, we should admit, enthused about Johnson because he made them laugh. I am haunted by the memory of a woman who told a BBC radio interviewer back in 2018: “I want Boris to become Tory leader because he will make politics fun!” But politics, and especially government, is not meant to be fun.

He is perhaps the most selfish human being I have ever met, indifferent to the welfare of anyone save himself. It is striking that he has few, if any, personal friends. He demands loyalty, but is incapable of giving it to others. He has neither principles nor personal convictions, save about his own ambitions and desires. Far from being the genial Mr Nice Guy he seeks to project, Tony Soprano would find him a tad ruthless.

He is a stranger to truth, a lifelong liar about big things and small.

John Kenneth Galbraith assessed the trajectory of America’s increasingly “affluent society.” His outlook was not a happy one. The nation’s increasingly evident material prosperity was not making its citizens any more satisfied. Nor, at least in its existing form, was it likely to do so

One reason, Galbraith argued, was the glaring imbalance between the opulence in consumption of private goods and the poverty, often squalor, of public services like schools and parks

nother was that even the bountifully supplied private goods often satisfied no genuine need, or even desire; a vast advertising apparatus generated artificial demand for them, and satisfying this demand failed to provide meaningful or lasting satisfaction.

One of the most striking positive trends in the world these days can be found in the democratic strength, character and leadership of Germany.

This came to mind as I was reading German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s speech this week in Prague, in which he promised that his country would support Ukraine “reliably and for as long as it takes.” He explained that Germany had “undergone a fundamental change” on providing military aid to Ukraine. He affirmed Germany’s support for a stronger, more integrated Europe — one that would welcome new members that aspire to Europe’s democratic values and ideals.

This is all part of what he calls a Zeitenwende in German foreign policy, a “turning of the times.”

variants evolved to evade the first line of antibody protection generated by earlier vaccines or past infections, even though protections against severe disease remained fairly strong. But the new boosters can greatly decrease that evasion

While exact numbers remain to be seen, all the immunologists I spoke with told me the updated boosters should again increase such protections.

Vaccines (and boosters) have already been shown to greatly reduce rates of long Covid among the infected, but obviously, if infection is avoided completely, that would directly sidestep the risk of long Covid

In life as it’s lived, there is no obvious plot; the arc of the past is visible only in hindsight.

But in historical fiction, the aim is to capture a story, so fidelity to literal facts and timelines is not always the goal. There’s not necessarily anything wrong with that: “Authenticity is not just what happened,” Min Jin Lee explained in 2017. “It’s about emotional truth too.”

“Successful historical fiction makes past events come alive in a more inviting or personal way than textbooks can,”

despite appearances, the conflict is not a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations. Instead, in its emboldening of traditional regional powers like Turkey, scrambling for geopolitical spoils after the retreat of superpowers, it’s a harbinger of the coming world disorder.

In the chaotic aftermath of Soviet collapse, the Armenians undertook to defend Nagorno-Karabakh by force. Instead of poetic intellectuals, the wartime generation of Armenian leaders became militia commanders. They proved earthier and, soon, brazenly corrupt. Defending the country became their sole means of legitimacy, ruling out the concessions that peace would require. By 1994 the Armenians, mobilizing around the traumatic memories of genocide, succeeded in expelling scores of Azeris from the enclave. Last month, Azerbaijan got more than even.

In that project, it had a powerful backer: Turkey. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a master of vertiginous visions, has already tried Islamic liberalism, joining Europe, leading the Arab revolts, challenging Israel and negotiating peace in Ukraine. He now has another dream: opening a geopolitical corridor from Europe through Central Asia, all the way to China. This is the “Zangezur corridor,” a 25-mile-long strip of land to be carved through Armenia as part of a peace deal imposed at gunpoint.

uses the drug ring to show how the fraternity ethos shapes elite societies as a whole, beyond the College of Charleston: with impunity.

Marshall shows how being asked to join a fraternity means having a safe place to behave badly between high school and the job that frat puts you on the fast track towards. In his book, he quotes a Cornell Greek life website: “While only 2% of America’s population is involved in fraternities, 80% of Fortune 500 executives, 76% of US senators and congressmen, 85% of supreme court justices, and all but two presidents since 1825 have been fraternity men.”

the former fraternity members Marshall interviewed for Among the Bros said their experience selling drugs in college was good prep for their careers: “They’d say things like, ‘I learned supply chain economics, salesmanship, delegation and marketing.’” As a reader, it’s hard to not feel pangs of anger at how for some (“some” being young white men), recklessness could be a stepping stone to a six-figure salary.

I spoke to Mina about what seeing Covid as a textbook virus tells us about the nature of the pandemic off-ramp — and about everything else we should’ve known about the disease from the outset.

you can get exposed or you can get vaccinated. But either way, we have to keep building our immune system up, as babies do. That takes years to do. And I think it’s going to be a few more years at least.

And in the meantime?We’ve seen a dramatic reduction in mortality. We’ve even seen, I’d say, a dramatic decline in rates of serious long Covid per infection.

“I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.

Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”

what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind

Many millions around the world watch the Israel-Palestine conflict in the same way: as a binary contest in which you can root for only one team, and where any losses suffered by your opponent – your enemy – feel like a win.

You see it in those who tear down posters on London bus shelters depicting the faces of the more than 200 Israelis currently held hostage by Hamas in Gaza – including toddlers and babies. You see it too in those who close their eyes to the consequences of Israel’s siege of Gaza, to the impact of denied or restricted supplies of water, food, medicine and fuel on ordinary Gazans – including toddlers and babies. For these hardcore supporters of each side, to allow even a twinge of human sympathy for the other is to let the team down.

Thinking like this – my team good, your team bad – can lead you into some strange, dark places. It ends in a group of terrified Jewish students huddling in the library of New York’s Cooper Union college, fleeing a group of masked protesters chanting “Free Palestine” – their pursuers doubtless convinced they are warriors for justice and liberation, rather than the latest in a centuries-long line of mobs hounding Jews.

In the mid-1800s, the most prolific slaver in Brazil was a man named José Bernardino de Sá. The transatlantic slave trade was banned in Brazil and abroad, but Bernardino nonetheless financed the trafficking of nearly 20,000 Africans to Brazil — and became one of the country’s wealthiest people.

He used that wealth to buy farms, build roads — and, historians say, fund the Banco do Brasil. It’s just one of several links that ties this country’s oldest and most prominent bank to the slave trade. Not only was its initial capital drawn from slavery, historians say; its original vice president and director were also notorious slavers.

That history, and what should be done about it, is now at the center of a remarkable legal filing by government attorneys in Rio de Janeiro — an action that’s asking some of the most fundamental questions about Brazil, its history and the long shadow the transatlantic slave trade casts over it.

Numerous other Osage had died suspiciously — the cause of death often cloaked behind alcoholic poisoning or wasting illness or as simply unknown. Despite evidence that the victims had been murdered for their oil money, the cases were never properly investigated. Moreover, they could not be linked to the same killer caught by the bureau. The history of the Reign of Terror was less a question of who did it than who didn’t do it.

It was about a widespread culture of killing. It was about prominent white citizens who paid for killings, doctors who administered poisons, morticians who ignored evidence of bullet wounds, lawmen and prosecutors who were on the take and many others who remained complicit in their silence — all because they were profiting from what they referred to openly as the “Indian business.” The real death toll was undoubtedly higher than 24. One bureau agent admitted: “There are so many of these murder cases. There are hundreds and hundreds.”

The Osage had these events seared in their memories. Yet most Americans had excised even the bureau’s sanitized account from their consciences. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred during the same period, the Osage Reign of Terror was generally not taught in schools, even in Oklahoma