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In crafting an open letter in opposition to Trump’s candidacy, they are demonstrating that they’re ready to bolt the Republican Party. And it’s not just because they dislike Trump’s very inconsistent isolationism. They don’t like his illiberal attitudes about race, religion, a free press and human rights. They don’t like his cuddly attitude toward Vladimir Putin or his insults towards Mexico’s government, and they are appalled by Trump’s inability to understand that anti-Islamism makes it impossible to have any allies at all in the Middle East. They also just have a visceral distaste for his anti-intellectualism.

Their itemized objections to Trump are things that most liberals agree with or mostly agree with.

I’ve looked for signs of realignment. These are things I’d expect to see if there is going to be a landslide election. One of the things I thought I might see is a mass defection of neoconservatives.

Another appealing factor about Bernie is that he’s intellectually consistent. He has a big, overarching, simple-to-grasp vision of what’s wrong with the country and how to fix it: the billionaire class is screwing it up for the rest of us

intellectual consistency isn’t the same as intellectual honesty

He’s surely got way more of the latter than the buffoons running for president in the GOP (Ohio Governor John Kasich being an exception). And there’s a basic decency and candor about Bernie that I really admire. He says what he thinks and he doesn’t play word games or tailor his approach to different audiences.

85 percent of all online advertising revenue is funneled to either Facebook or Google—leaving a paltry 15 percent for news organizations to fight over.

Now, Zuckerberg is making it clear that he wants Facebook to take over many of the actual functions—not just ad dollars—that traditional news organizations once had.

Zuckerberg uses abstract language in his memo—he wants Facebook to develop “the social infrastructure for community,” he writes—but what he’s really describing is building a media company with classic journalistic goals: The Facebook of the future, he writes, will be “for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all.”

Steven M. Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University and author of the commendable “The Rise of the Conservative Legal Movement,” suggested in The Washington Monthly that Chief Justice Roberts was not comfortable with “sweeping uses of judicial power to limit government.” Professor Teles said that while the chief justice was “sympathetic” with his fellow conservatives, he “simply lacks the taste for the jugular that they have, either as a result of his role as chief justice or his prudential sense of how far it is reasona

Joel Alicea, in a smart post on the conservative Web site The Public Discourse, wrote that the health care decision revealed “a clash between two visions of judicial restraint and two eras of the conservative legal movement.” If Chief Justice Roberts, nearly a generation younger than Justices Scalia and Kennedy, in fact represents the old form of legal conservatism, in which the judicial role is to salvage statutes if possible rather than eviscerate them in the service of a bigger agenda, that’s a fascinating and highly consequential development.

Is John Roberts the new swing justice? I have strong doubts. The man is conservative to his bones. So the real question is what the word “conservative” means in 2012 and the decades ahead.

They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments. This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.

First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base

Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves

Middle-class French parents (I didn't follow the very rich or poor) have values that look familiar to me. They are zealous about talking to their kids, showing them nature and reading them lots of books. They take them to tennis lessons, painting classes and interactive science museums.

Yet the French have managed to be involved with their families without becoming obsessive. They assume that even good parents aren't at the constant service of their children, and that there is no need to feel guilty about this. "For me, the evenings are for the parents," one Parisian mother told me. "My daughter can be with us if she wants, but it's adult time." French parents want their kids to be stimulated, but not all the time. While some American toddlers are getting Mandarin tutors and preliteracy training, French kids are—by design—toddling around by themselves.

Parents don't have to pay for preschool, worry about health insurance or save for college. Many get monthly cash allotments—wired directly into their bank accounts—just for having kids.

France is a proud welfare state, where public spending accounts for 53 percent of GDP—the second-highest percentage in the developed world (only Sweden’s is higher). The U.S. is the third-lowest, at 36 percen

France’s health care system is a public/private hybrid: Everyone is covered to a certain extent by the government’s Assurance Maladie, but most people also have private insurance, called a mutuelle, that is either offered through their employer or bought on the private market. There’s a thriving private insurance market in France—one that the Affordable Care Act can only dream of.

my husband’s employers provided a choice of mutuelle; the top-of-the-line plan, which we signed up for, cost about 50 euros ($68) a month. By contrast, in the U.S., I’d been paying about $350 a month with an additional $50 co-pay for each doctor’s appointment.

“It’s a generational changing of the guard happening with greater speed than at any time before,” he wrote. “Afternoon and morning newspapers, TV and cable network news shows, monthly and weekly newsmagazines all had times when they reigned supreme. These days the reigns are briefer than ever because the march of technology has quickened to a trot.”

This is not a bubble,” he told me. “There are fundamental secular trends behind it — ad growth, mobile growth, page-view growth — that suggest the large media companies of tomorrow are being created right in front of us, right now.”

There used to be a bipartisan consensus in favor of tough antitrust enforcement. During the Reagan years, however, antitrust policy went into eclipse, and ever since measures of monopoly power, like the extent to which sales in any given industry are concentrated in the hands of a few big companies, have been rising fast.

, it became common to assert that the world had changed in ways that made all those old-fashioned concerns about monopoly irrelevant. Aren’t we living in an era of global competition? Doesn’t the creative destruction of new technology constantly tear down old industry giants and create new ones?

The truth, however, is that many goods and especially services aren’t subject to international competition: New Jersey families can’t subscribe to Korean broadband.

Scribd, with a generous base of 80 million visitors to its site each month, said it was positioned to become a prominent e-book subscription service, in which consumers pay a flat monthly fee for access to a large catalog of e-books.

Oysterbooks.com, a venture introduced last month, offers consumers access to more than 100,000 books for $9.95 a month.

Scribd’s e-book subscription service already includes books from smaller publishers, including Rosetta Books, Workman and Sourcebooks. The addition of HarperCollins means subscribers will have access to literary fiction (“The Family Fang: A Novel” by Kevin Wilson), humor (“The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee” by Sarah Silverman) and memoirs

By every metric that mattered, HP was in far worse shape when she was fired than when she was hired. The company’s stock price dropped more than 50 percent during her tenure, compared to a 7 percent drop in the S.&P. 500. And net earnings dropped to $2.4 billion from $3.1 billion during that same time. The Compaq merger, meanwhile, was a misguided fiasco; today, virtually all remnants of it have disappeared from HP. Fiorina’s me-me-me leadership style demoralized the company and its shareholders. When she walked out the door in February 2005 — with a $21 million severance package — the stock jumped nearly 7 percent.

As for the casino bankruptcies, Trump likes to characterize them as shrewd business moves, and stresses that he never filed for personal bankruptcy. But those corporate bankruptcies were costly; he wound up having to give up many of his real estate holdings, and was even put on a monthly budget for a time.

if, in 1988, he had simply put his money in a stock index fund, it would be worth $13 billion today. In effect, his post-1988 business career has cost him $5 billion.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”

his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

The Idealist. The author’s revisionist thesis is that Kissinger was not in fact a realist, as he is so frequently portrayed

The ideals and deepest hopes of mankind? Kissinger and Nixon bombed Cambodia to pieces in a secret four-year campaign that annihilated some 100,000 civilians. “Anything that flies, on anything that moves,” were the parameters Kissinger gave to Alexander Haig. He countered African liberation movements by embracing the white supremacists of Rhodesia and South Africa, a policy known as the “Tar Baby option.” Kissinger facilitated the overthrow of the governments of Chile and Argentina by right-wing generals, and then worked tirelessly to deflect criticism of the new governments’ torture and murder. A declassified memorandum of his meeting with Augusto Pinochet in 1976 shows Kissinger in a particularly unflattering light: “We welcomed the overthrow of the Communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.” In 1975 Kissinger and President Ford met with Indonesian strongman Suharto and authorized him to invade East Timor, which he promptly did the following day; another 100,000 lost their lives. “It is important that whatever you do succeeds quickly,” Kissinger advised.

[A]rguments that focus on loss of life in strategically marginal countries—and there is no other way of describing Argentina, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, and East Timor—must be tested against this question: how, in each case, would an alternative decision have affected U.S. relations with strategically important countries like the Soviet Union, China, and the major Western European powers?

prominent human rights group accused the Syrian government Wednesday of using toxic chemicals during a recent surge in attacks involving barrel bombs on rebel-held areas in northern Syria.

Assad’s government has been accused by Western countries of using chemical weapons over the course of the four-year conflict, including an attack involving sarin gas in 2013 that killed hundreds of people in a suburb of the capital.

Regime opponents and ­activists allege that Assad’s forces have punished residents in rebel-controlled areas with barrages of the crude bombs, which are built from oil barrels or gas cylinders and can be filled with toxic chemicals such as chlorine gas

The largest podcasting operations are attracting sizable audiences and advertising revenue. The ads work. Large and small advertisers report a significant upside to the campaigns they run on podcasts, and ad rates on top-tier podcasts approach $100 per thousand listeners, which is many times what it costs advertisers to reach audiences in most other digital formats.

the overall audience for podcasts is growing very slowly. In February, Edison Research reported that 17 percent of Americans had listened to one podcast in the previous month. That is up just slightly from Edison’s 2012 survey, when 14 percent of Americans had done so. The business also has some problems, including a labor-intensive ad-buying process, a shortage of audio producers and the inability to accurately measure who is listening.

it is that rarest thing in the technology industry: a slow, steady and unrelentingly persistent digital tortoise that could eventually — but who really knows? — slay the analog behemoths in its path.

“Everybody should understand that we are living in a totally different world than two years ago,” said Alexander M. Golts, an independent Russian military analyst.“In that world, which we lost, it was possible to organize your security with treaties, with mutual-trust measures,” he said. “Now we have come to an absolutely different situation, where the general way to ensure your security is military deterrence.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story

“The Russian Army is returning to normal combat activities and training,” said Igor Korotchenko, the editor in chief of National Defense, a monthly Russian magazine. “We are doing exactly what our Western partners are doing.”

From a Western point of view, Russia shattered the postwar, and certainly post-Cold War, European order by seizing Crimea and destabilizing Ukraine with a not-terribly-covert military program. That left former Soviet client states next door feeling vulnerable.

I study race and the Greek-letter system on North American campuses. I have interviewed hundreds of members of historically white fraternities and sororities, at big state universities and smaller liberal arts colleges, on the East Coast and in the South. My research indicates that nonwhite students who successfully pledge those groups — roughly 3 to 4 percent of fraternity or sorority members — live a harsh existence of loneliness and isolation.

Without attention to the internal power dynamics and racism inside these organizations, we place an inordinate burden on the few students of color in them to carry our torch of idealism while we ignore the banal hostility they face.

Nearly all the nonwhite members told me of their white fraternity and sorority brothers’ and sisters’ expectation that they conform to demeaning racial stereotypes. If they failed, they were seen as not fully belonging; if they succeeded, they were understood to be “too” black, Latino or Asian to fit in. This, known as the paradox of participation, governed their acceptance. But to outsiders, the color line was broken.

It appears we’re in the midst of yet another Twitter backlash. Marquee users have been slowly backing away from their feeds (or slipping off the grid entirely)

last week, Twitter’s stock plunged by more than 20 percent after the company reported a decline in monthly users

The arguments for defection are at this point familiar: Twitter is a dark reservoir of hatred, home to the diseased national id. It turns us into our worst selves — dehumanizing us, deranging us, keying us up, beating us down, turning us into shrieking outrage monkeys