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The company's changes include an effort to boost the content of local news outlets, which have suffered sizable subscription and readership declines

The changes follow another major News Feed redesign, announced last week, in which Facebook said users would begin to see less content from news organizations and brands in favor of "meaningful" posts from friends and family.

Currently, 5 percent of Facebook posts are generated by news organizations; that number is expected to drop to 4 percent after the redesign, Zuckerberg said.

On Friday, Google announced it would cancel a two-month-old experiment, called Knowledge Panel, that informed its users that a news article had been disputed by independent fact-checking organizations. Conservatives had complained the feature unfairly targeted a right-leaning outlet.

More than two-thirds of Americans now get some of their news from social media, according to Pew Research Center.

That shift has empowered Facebook and Google, putting them in an uncomfortable position of deciding what news they should distribute to their global audiences. But it also has led to questions about whether these corporations should be considered media companie

"Just by putting things out to a vote in terms of what the community would find trustworthy undermines the role for any serious institutionalized process to determine what’s quality and what’s not,” he said.

rther criticism that the social network had become vulnerable to bad actors seeking to spread disinformation.

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, said that Facebook learned the wrong lesson from Trending Topics, which was to try to avoid politics at all costs

“One of the things that can happen if you are determined to avoid politics at all costs is you are driven to illusory solutions,” he said. “I don’t think there is any alternative to using your judgement. But Facebook is convinced that there is. This idea that they can avoid judgement is part of their problem.”

Facebook revealed few details about how it is conducting its trust surveys,

"The hard question we've struggled with is how to decide what news sources are broadly trusted," Zuckerberg wrote. "We could try to make that decision ourselves, but that's not something we're comfortable with. We considered asking outside experts, which would take the decision out of our hands but would likely not solve the objectivity problem. Or we could ask you -- the community -- and have your feedback determine the ranking."

Some experts wondered whether Facebook's latest effort could be gamed.

"This seems like a positive step toward improving the news environment on Facebook," Diresta said. "That said, the potential downside is that the survey approach unfairly penalizes emerging publications."

the trouble with that argument is that—like culture—power also ebbs and flows. Customs we may think of as immemorially inherent in one culture very often originated in that culture’s own history of empire and domination

All cultures have histories. Young people born in North America may imagine that their grandmother’s recipes or wardrobe emerged autochthonously in a timeless ancestral homeland. But that only reflects how thoroughly they have Americanized themselves, reducing other countries’ complexities to folklores to be fetishized rather than understood and evaluated on their own terms.

The Chinese dress young Kezia Daum wanted to wear to prom originated in a brutal act of imperialism, but not by any western people

For whatever reason it happened, the idea that clothing styles should change regularly and often for no very compelling reason is one of Europe’s most distinctive contributions to world culture. Before their encounter with European culture, nobody else saw the point of it.

With the cheongsam, fashion in the European sense came to China. In the decades from 1915 to 1950, the cheongsam changed more than women’s costume did in the previous 250 years.

Like the idea that audiences should refrain from talking while music is performed, the idea that women should be able to move about as freely and easily as men is a cultural product—popularized by the North Atlantic world in the period after the First World War.

If it’s wrong for one culture to borrow from another, then it was wrong to invent the cheongsam in the first place—because not only did the garment’s shape originate outside China, but so, too, did the garment’s purposes. It was precisely because they appreciated that they were importing Western ideas about women that the inventors of the cheongsam adapted a Western shape.

They took something foreign and made it something domestic, in a pattern that has repeated itself in endless variations since the Neolithic period.

The policemen of cultural appropriation do not think that way. They have a morality tale to tell, one of Western victimization of non-Western peoples—a victimization so extreme that it is triggered by a Western girl’s purchase of a Chinese dress designed precisely so that Chinese girls could live more like Western girls.

In order to tell that story, the policemen of cultural appropriation must crush and deform much of the truth of cultural history—and in the process demean and infantilize the people they supposedly champion.

The would-be culture police build their whole philosophy on a single assumption of extreme chauvinism: that Western culture is universal—indeed the only universal culture.

Western technology, the Western emphasis on individual autonomy and equal human dignity, and even such oddly specific Western practices as death-metal music—the cultural police take all this for granted as thoroughly as a fish takes for granted the water in its fishbowl.

It’s a free society, do what you like! But please remember, as you do so, that this “freedom” you use is itself a cultural product, with its own origins in precisely the culture you traduce.

The Western culture of personal autonomy and equal dignity is a precious thing precisely because it is not universal. Those who participate in that culture and enjoy its benefits may hope—do hope—that it may someday become universal

If anything, that culture is at present in retreat, challenged and assailed both at home and abroad. It needs defending, and to be defended effectively it is vital to understand precisely how non-universal it is.

To the extent that the cultural-appropriation police are urging their targets to respect others who are different, they are saying something that everyone needs to hear

beyond that, they can plunge into doomed tangles.

How to draw the line between that and America’s ugly tradition of minstrelsy, in which subordinated peoples are both mimicked and mocked—as Al Jolson mimicked and mocked black music in his notorious blackface career? There is no clear rule, but there is an open way: the values of respect and tolerance that draw precisely on the rationalist Enlightenment traditions both rejected and relied upon by the cultural-appropriation police

Those traditions are the spiritual core of American culture at its highest. And those values we should all hope to see appropriated by all this planet’s peoples and cultures.

When the Manchu dynasty was finally overthrown in 1911, Chinese people found themselves free for the first time in 250 years to dress as they pleased. In the decade afterward, creative personalities in the great commercial metropolis of Shanghai devised a new kind of garment for women. They called it the cheongsam.

The new garment was a fusion of old and new, east and west. Manchurian-style fabrics were tailored to a European-style pattern

The cheongsam was equally available to women from a wide range of statuses—and enabled Chinese women to move as their western counterparts did.

it could signal the beginning of a new era of virtual assistants that will redefine our relationships with intelligent machines.

providing someone with valuable insights about their productivity, stress levels during meetings or lifestyle habits that impact their ability to perform their job

“We set out to discover whether there was a way to move the needle from an almost backward way of assessing people’s workplace performance to using more objective measures.

research shows that conscientious people, who are often more detailed-oriented and disciplined, tend to be more productive

If it was possible to predict someone’s mental health by analyzing their social media feeds and smartphone data, Campbell wondered, could similar data be leveraged to improve employee performance evaluations?

The workers were fitted with a wearable fitness tracker that monitored heart functions, sleep, stress, and measurements such as weight and calorie consumption, as well as a smartphone app that tracked their physical activity, location, phone usage and ambient light.

Location beacons placed in the home and office measured participants time at work and breaks from their desk, giving researchers a comprehensive window into their day from one hour to the next.

The information was processed by cloud-based machine-learning algorithms that classified performance using factors such as the amount of time spent at the workplace, quality of sleep, physical activity and phone usage

“We want to use that information to empower workers to tell them whether they’re being influenced by levels of stress or sleep or other factors that may not be immediately obvious to them.”

What the research does not explain, he said, is what habits make someone conscientious in the first place, leaving a gap in knowledge that researchers hoped to fill.

“Very often when people try to detect what drives performance, they rely on personality, which actually reveals little about someone’s ability to do their job well,” he said. “Evaluations can be biased because they are infused with stereotyping of people or political influences inside an office. But when you can extract a pattern over weeks and months, we can be more certain that assessment is objective and neutral.

the results showed, perhaps not surprisingly, that high performers tended to have lower rates of phone usage.

They also experience deeper periods of sustained sleep and are more physically active than their lower performing colleagues.

Researchers discovered that high-performing supervisors tended to be more mobile during the day, but they visited a smaller number of distinct places during their working hours

High-performing non-supervisors, meanwhile, tend to spend more time at work during the weekends,

Future versions, they said, could be tailored to individual jobs and provide workers with meaningful information about changes in their mental well-being during meetings or suggestions for reducing stress each week

But they also acknowledge that the valuable private data could prove volatile if it falls into a company’s hands without employee consent. Campbell suggested there might be a middle ground, such as companies offering incentives to employees who opt into a program that treats precise assessment data as one tool among several for evaluating performance.

“If there was any point down the road where I could have an application on my phone that could provide an objective assessment of my performance, that might be an incentive for workers to use it," he said. “Imagine being able to say, ‘Here’s the evidence that I deserve to be promoted or that my boss is standing in my way.’"

“I can’t really look into a crystal ball, but I’m hopeful this passive sensing technology will be used to empower the workforce rather than used against them," he added.

“One is talking about artefacts that were put in the deep freeze 1,000 years ago, and later and earlier, and were taken out when we found them. So a textile is almost perfectly preserved, one might find arrows with the fletching perfectly preserved, with the sinew still in place, the glue that glued the feathers to the shaft. These are quite remarkable finds.”

While the objects are frequently “extraordinary”, he said, “what is really important archaeologically about them isn’t the individual objects, it’s the story that putting together all of the objects can tell you” about the pass and the people who travelled it.

a distinction ought to be drawn between Historical truth and interpretation. The first is objective and the latter is subjective. The first refers to a fact, which can be determined as true, at least in principle, by empirical study, whereas the latter entails an explanation of the fact in question

Historical narratives may reflect historical truth or not. Their aim is not necessarily to ascertain what actually happened in the past, but to justify what happens in the present.

A clear distinction ought to be drawn between historical narratives as a tool to comprehend the mind-setting behind the positions adopted by the sides concerned, and historical truth as such.

Historical truth stands alone, in its own right. Historical narratives may reflect historical truth, but, however influential they may be in historical and contemporary parlance, they occupy a separate place.

he has seen mounting evidence that using a smartphone, or even hearing one ring or vibrate, produces a welter of distractions that makes it harder to concentrate on a difficult problem or job. The division of attention impedes reasoning and performance.

Another 2015 study, appearing in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, showed that when people hear their phone ring but are unable to answer it, their blood pressure spikes, their pulse quickens, and their problem-solving skills decline.

The researchers recruited 520 undergraduates at UCSD and gave them two standard tests of intellectual acuity. One test gauged “available working-memory capacity,” a measure of how fully a person’s mind can focus on a particular task. The second assessed “fluid intelligence,” a person’s ability to interpret and solve an unfamiliar problem. The only variable in the experiment was the location of the subjects’ smartphones. Some of the students were asked to place their phones in front of them on their desks; others were told to stow their phones in their pockets or handbags; still others were required to leave their phones in a different room.

In both tests, the subjects whose phones were in view posted the worst scores, while those who left their phones in a different room did the best. The students who kept their phones in their pockets or bags came out in the middle. As the phone’s proximity increased, brainpower decreased.

In subsequent interviews, nearly all the participants said that their phones hadn’t been a distraction—that they hadn’t even thought about the devices during the experiment. They remained oblivious even as the phones disrupted their focus and thinking.

A second experiment conducted by the researchers produced similar results, while also revealing that the more heavily students relied on their phones in their everyday lives, the greater the cognitive penalty they suffered.

the “integration of smartphones into daily life” appears to cause a “brain drain” that can diminish such vital mental skills as “learning, logical reasoning, abstract thought, problem solving, and creativity.”

Imagine combining a mailbox, a newspaper, a TV, a radio, a photo album, a public library and a boisterous party attended by everyone you know, and then compressing them all into a single, small, radiant object. That is what a smartphone represents to us. No wonder we can’t take our minds off it.

They found that students who didn’t bring their phones to the classroom scored a full letter-grade higher on a test of the material presented than those who brought their phones. It didn’t matter whether the students who had their phones used them or not: All of them scored equally poorly.

A study of nearly a hundred secondary schools in the U.K., published last year in the journal Labour Economics, found that when schools ban smartphones, students’ examination scores go up substantially, with the weakest students benefiting the most.

Social skills and relationships seem to suffer as well.

Because smartphones serve as constant reminders of all the friends we could be chatting with electronically, they pull at our minds when we’re talking with people in person, leaving our conversations shallower and less satisfying.

In a 2013 study conducted at the University of Essex in England, 142 participants were divided into pairs and asked to converse in private for ten minutes. Half talked with a phone in the room, half without a phone present. The subjects were then given tests of affinity, trust and empathy. “The mere presence of mobile phones,” the researchers reported in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, “inhibited the development of interpersonal closeness and trust” and diminished “the extent to which individuals felt empathy and understanding from their partners.”

The evidence that our phones can get inside our heads so forcefully is unsettling. It suggests that our thoughts and feelings, far from being sequestered in our skulls, can be skewed by external forces we’re not even aware o

Not only do our phones shape our thoughts in deep and complicated ways, but the effects persist even when we aren’t using the devices. As the brain grows dependent on the technology, the research suggests, the intellect weakens.

even in the history of captivating media, the smartphone stands out. It is an attention magnet unlike any our minds have had to grapple with before. Because the phone is packed with so many forms of information and so many useful and entertaining functions, it acts as what Dr. Ward calls a “supernormal stimulus,” one that can “hijack” attention whenever it is part of our surroundings — and it is always part of our surroundings.

 Scientists have long known that the brain is a monitoring system as well as a thinking system. Its attention is drawn toward any object that is new, intriguing or otherwise striking — that has, in the psychological jargon, “salience.”

The irony of the smartphone is that the qualities that make it so appealing to us — its constant connection to the net, its multiplicity of apps, its responsiveness, its portability — are the very ones that give it such sway over our minds.

We need to give our minds more room to think. And that means putting some distance between ourselves and our phones.

Social media apps were designed to exploit “a vulnerability in human psychology,” former Facebook president Sean Parker said in a recent interview. “[We] understood this consciously. And we did it anyway.”

A quarter-century ago, when we first started going online, we took it on faith that the web would make us smarter: More information would breed sharper thinking. We now know it’s not that simple.

As strange as it might seem, people’s knowledge and understanding may actually dwindle as gadgets grant them easier access to online data stores

In a seminal 2011 study published in Science, a team of researchers — led by the Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow and including the late Harvard memory expert Daniel Wegner — had a group of volunteers read forty brief, factual statements (such as “The space shuttle Columbia disintegrated during re-entry over Texas in Feb. 2003”) and then type the statements into a computer. Half the people were told that the machine would save what they typed; half were told that the statements would be erased.

Afterward, the researchers asked the subjects to write down as many of the statements as they could remember. Those who believed that the facts had been recorded in the computer demonstrated much weaker recall than those who assumed the facts wouldn’t be stored. Anticipating that information would be readily available in digital form seemed to reduce the mental effort that people made to remember it

The researchers dubbed this phenomenon the “Google effect” and noted its broad implications: “Because search engines are continually available to us, we may often be in a state of not feeling we need to encode the information internally. When we need it, we will look it up.”

as the pioneering psychologist and philosopher William James said in an 1892 lecture, “the art of remembering is the art of thinking.”

Only by encoding information in our biological memory can we weave the rich intellectual associations that form the essence of personal knowledge and give rise to critical and conceptual thinking. No matter how much information swirls around us, the less well-stocked our memory, the less we have to think with.

As Dr. Wegner and Dr. Ward explained in a 2013 Scientific American article, when people call up information through their devices, they often end up suffering from delusions of intelligence. They feel as though “their own mental capacities” had generated the information, not their devices. “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before,” the scholars concluded, even though “they may know ever less about the world around them.”

That insight sheds light on society’s current gullibility crisis, in which people are all too quick to credit lies and half-truths spread through social media. If your phone has sapped your powers of discernment, you’ll believe anything it tells you.

Data, the novelist and critic Cynthia Ozick once wrote, is “memory without history.” Her observation points to the problem with allowing smartphones to commandeer our brains

When we constrict our capacity for reasoning and recall or transfer those skills to a gadget, we sacrifice our ability to turn information into knowledge. We get the data but lose the meaning

Phone makers like Apple and Samsung and app writers like Facebook, Google and Snap design their products to consume as much of our attention as possible during every one of our waking hours

Harvard Business School professor emerita Shoshana Zuboff argues in her new book that the Valley’s wealth and power are predicated on an insidious, essentially pathological form of private enterprise—what she calls “surveillance capitalism.” Pioneered by Google, perfected by Facebook, and now spreading throughout the economy, surveillance capitalism uses human life as its raw material. Our everyday experiences, distilled into data, have become a privately-owned business asset used to predict and mold our behavior, whether we’re shopping or socializing, working or voting.

By reengineering the economy and society to their own benefit, Google and Facebook are perverting capitalism in a way that undermines personal freedom and corrodes democracy.

Under the Fordist model of mass production and consumption that prevailed for much of the twentieth century, industrial capitalism achieved a relatively benign balance among the contending interests of business owners, workers, and consumers. Enlightened executives understood that good pay and decent working conditions would ensure a prosperous middle class eager to buy the goods and services their companies produced. It was the product itself — made by workers, sold by companies, bought by consumers — that tied the interests of capitalism’s participants together. Economic and social equilibrium was negotiated through the product.

By removing the tangible product from the center of commerce, surveillance capitalism upsets the equilibrium. Whenever we use free apps and online services, it’s often said, we become the products, our attention harvested and sold to advertisers

this truism gets it wrong. Surveillance capitalism’s real products, vaporous but immensely valuable, are predictions about our future behavior — what we’ll look at, where we’ll go, what we’ll buy, what opinions we’ll hold — that internet companies derive from our personal data and sell to businesses, political operatives, and other bidders.

Unlike financial derivatives, which they in some ways resemble, these new data derivatives draw their value, parasite-like, from human experience.To the Googles and Facebooks of the world, we are neither the customer nor the product. We are the source of what Silicon Valley technologists call “data exhaust” — the informational byproducts of online activity that become the inputs to prediction algorithms

internet companies operate in what Zuboff terms “extreme structural independence from people.” When databases displace goods as the engine of the economy, our own interests, as consumers but also as citizens, cease to be part of the negotiation. We are no longer one of the forces guiding the market’s invisible hand. We are the objects of surveillance and control.

re’s no perfect way to measure the frequency with which the filibuster has been used over time. Senators are not required to formally register their objection to ending debate until a cloture motion actually comes up for a vote. If Senate leaders know that at least 41 senators plan to oppose a cloture motion on a given measure or motion, they often choose not to schedule it for floor consideration.

Senators have two options when they seek to vote on a measure or motion. Most often, the majority leader (or another senator) seeks “unanimous consent,” asking if any of the 100 senators objects to ending debate and moving to a vote. If no objection is heard, the Senate proceeds to a vote. If the majority leader can’t secure the consent of all 100 senators, the leader (or another senator) typically files a cloture motion, which then requires 60 votes to adopt. If fewer than 60 senators—a supermajority of the chamber—support cloture, that’s when we often say that a measure has been filibustered

The most straightforward way to eliminate the filibuster would be to formally change the text of Senate Rule 22, the cloture rule that requires 60 votes to end debate on legislation. Here’s the catch: Ending debate on a resolution to change the Senate’s standing rules requires the support of two-thirds of the members present and voting. Absent a large, bipartisan Senate majority that favors curtailing the right to debate, a formal change in Rule 22 is extremely unlikely

Importantly, this approach to curtailing the filibuster—colloquially known as the “nuclear option” and more formally as “reform by ruling”—can, in certain circumstances, be employed with support from only a simple majority of senators.

CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.

second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

Both of these observations are true at least some of the time

The problem is that the second—sometimes referred to as “standpoint epistemology”—contends that only minorities have standing to articulate a view on race and racism.

In her book What Does It Mean to Be White?, Robin DiAngelo puts it this way: “Sometimes I am asked, ‘But what if the person of color is wrong and what they think is racism isn’t racism at all?’ To this I say that people of color are much more qualified than we are to make this determination. My not being able to see racism is unrelated to its reality.” Anyone who proffers an alternative perspective can be accused of “privilege.”

Given America’s history of racism, we do have a special obligation to listen closely when marginalized people talk about their experience: The victims of racism will indeed have insights that others cannot possibly glean on their own.

Calling on those deemed privileged to mute themselves permanently on issues of race and racism only engenders resentment.

it tends to go like this: Defer to my lived experience; my lived experience reveals that critical race theory is true; you, too, must abide by critical race theory.

First, insisting that large swaths of people keep quiet is not a sustainable moral undertaking

There’s a difference between listening to someone’s experience and tying oneself to their entire worldview. Challenging someone’s viewpoint should not be taken as invalidating their feelings.

We will never effectively address our problems, however, if one set of voices claims unique insight and seeks to shut out the rest from the discussion.

Second, oppressed people, like all people, are sometimes wrong.

Lived experience, while important, is just one data point in understanding social reality. Being oppressed doesn’t give anyone a monopoly on wisdom, even about oppression. Indeed, our experience can bias our insight

Third, marginalized communities are diverse.

“The spectrum of thought amongst African Americans is and has always been much broader and multifarious than commonly perceived,” he writes. “Neglect of that fact has led to a homogenization that has tended to submerge African American individuality.”

Today, Black people are no less diverse in their political views than they’ve been through the ages.

Who alone speaks for a marginalized people? I, for one, will listen to anyone willing to talk with me.

Fourth, oppressed people around the world hold claims that directly contradict those of other oppressed people.

If you agree that one oppressed group has standing to define reality, it’s hard to argue that all oppressed people around the world don’t have similar standing to define their narratives of oppression, some of which conflict with each other.

Fifth, once you allow someone else to define reality for you, you never know where it will take you. You’ve now outsourced your analysis to a third party, who may down the line make absurd statements or engage in untenable behavior that you now feel compelled to defend

But I cannot agree that, in making space for marginalized voices, everyone else should defer to whatever ideological claims members of a minority group attach to their definition of racism.

The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.

In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”

Shelly Eversley’s The Real Negro suggests that in the latter half of the 20th century, the criteria of what constitutes “authentic” black experience moved from perceptible outward signs, like the fact of being restricted to segregated public spaces and speaking in a “black” dialect, to psychological, interior signs. In this new understanding, Eversley writes, “the ‘truth’ about race is felt, not performed, not seen.”

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

The New York-based Signature Bank announced that it would close down Trump’s personal accounts that have about $5.3 million due to the “displeasure and shock” management experienced following the Capitol riots. 

Earlier this week, Bloomberg News reported that Deutsche Bank would not conduct future business with Trump or his company besides monitoring the payment of existing loans amounting to more than $300 million. 

The deadly riots resulted in at least five deaths, including a Capitol Police officer and a woman shot by a plain clothes Capitol Police officer.

The New York bank also called on the president to resign and said it would not make future agreements with lawmakers who contested the Electoral College results after the riots.

“We witnessed the President of the United States encouraging the rioters and refraining from calling in the National Guard to protect the Congress in its performance of duty,” the statement continued.

Eric TrumpEric TrumpLet's make Wednesday, Jan. 6, 2021 the day Trumpism died Ivanka Trump urges 'patriots' storming Capitol to 'stop immediately' in now-deleted tweet Eric Trump warns of primary challenges for Republicans who don't object to election results MORE, one of the president’s sons put in charge of day-to-day operations of the Trump Organization, told The Associated Press that banks and other companies ending their relationship with the business after the riots exemplifies a liberal “cancel culture.”

“If you disagree with them, if they don’t like you, they try and cancel you.”

Several companies, in addition to the banks, have distanced themselves from the president after last week’s events, including Shopify, which took down trumpstore.com, and PGA of America, which moved a 2022 championship away from Trump property.

New York City declared on Wednesday that it would end contracts with the Trump Organization to run attractions in the city’s park, with Mayor Bill de BlasioBill de BlasioRepublican Staten Island candidate apologizes for Hitler reference New York City considering ending business contracts with Trump Columnist Ross Barkan discusses the slow vaccination process in the state of New York MORE (D) saying, “New York City doesn’t do business with insurrectionists.”

Trump remains broadly popular within the GOP. But the riot has led a small group of House Republicans -- including Rep. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 in GOP leadership in the chamber -- to support his impeachment.

The Florida Republican told CNN that he wished Trump "responded faster" to quell the violence, calling the riot "unacceptable" and "un-American" and for some of the insurrectionists to be prosecuted.

he did not hold Trump accountable for the attack

The US Chamber of Commerce, corporate political action committees and major conservative donors are reevaluating whether they will donate to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the presidential election on the day of the attack in a deluded bid to overturn the results. Those members include Scott and House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy, who cited voter integrity concerns.

Business PACs are significant players in politics, accounting for more than $360 million in federal contributions during the 2020 cycle -- with about 57% of the money flowing to GOP candidates, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.

"Corporations, individuals, they have a choice," the senator said. "If you believe in a big government, less freedoms, socialism, you ought to actually put all your money into supporting the Democrats. If you want opportunity, and lower taxes and less government, you're going to support Republicans."

Some major American companies, including Amazon and CNN's owner AT&T, have announced they will withhold PAC donations to those who objected to certifying the election results.

The donor revolt is "going to make every Republican's job that much harder," said Ken Spain, a GOP strategist. Spain said the corporate pushback now under way illustrates a fissure between corporate America and rank-and-file Republicans on issues such as free trade that has only grown wider in recent years.

"Lawmakers' actions leading up to and during last week's insurrection will weigh heavy in our evaluation of future support," said AFP CEO Emily Seidel in a statement.

"We will take into account the totality of what candidates and elected officials do, including the actions of last week, and importantly, the actions in the days ahead in determining whether or not we support them," said Neil Bradley, the chamber executive vice president, on Tuesday. "I actually want to be very clear: There are some members, who by their actions, will have forfeited the support of the US Chamber of Commerce."

Some major conservative donors have also focused their ire on the individual Republicans they view as having helped to instigate last week's events, particularly Hawley. Missouri businessman Sam Fox, who donated $300,000 to a super PAC that aided Hawley's election in 2018, said in a statement that the senator "can certainly forget about any support from me again" after last week's events.

The senator wrote an op-ed for the Southeast Missourian newspaper explaining why he continued to object after the violence in the Capitol. "The reason is simple: I will not bow to a lawless mob, or allow criminals to drown out the legitimate concerns of my constituents," Hawley wrote.

Dan Eberhart, an Arizona-based energy executive considering a bid against Democrat Sen. Mark Kelly in 2022, said, "I have been a big donor to Rick Scott in the past and plan to continue to be."

Eberhart said disaffected donors will "make up with Republicans pretty quickly" if the Democrats, who will soon control the White House and both chambers in Congress, "overreach" in their agenda. "Donors will want the counterweight that Republican provide. More money may go to the leadership PACs, but it will still go to Republicans if those are the policies donors support," he added.

After House Republicans picked up seats in 2020 and with the Senate split 50-50 -- and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris set to be the tiebreaker -- eyes will turn to next year's midterms. The party out of power typically does well in midterms, and in 2022, Senate Republicans will have more seats to defend than the Democrats, including in battleground states like Florida, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Wisconsin.

But Trump and his legacy will continue to shape the perceptions of the party in the next election. Already, Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, announced on Wednesday that the party is going up with a six-figure ad buy that blames Johnson for inciting the riot at the Capitol.

When asked if he blamed Trump for losing the Senate, Scott said, "My focus is on 'how do we go forward?' "

we have been able to piece together a comprehensive prehistory of the valley beginning several millennia ago.

One significant time period is known as Paracas; it lasted from roughly 800 to 200 B.C. This is the time when the first complex societies developed in the region, the origin of civilization in this part of the ancient world.

he Paracas peoples built linear geoglyphs: designs etched into the desert landscape that they lined with small field stones.

Our research indicated that a number of these small structures and many of the lines pointed to the June solstice sunset.

We concluded that these sites were the endpoints of ritually significant social events that were timed by the solstices and possibly other astronomical phenomena.

Excavations by Tantaleán and his team in one of these patios yielded a rich trove of artifacts, including textiles, foodstuffs, pottery, decorated gourds, stone objects, reeds, miscellaneous objects and human offerings.

Cerro del Gentil, in fact, was a classic archaeological example of a very significant feasting place

there was plenty of evidence that from time to time many people were present to eat, drink and even make human sacrifices together, probably at particular special times of the astronomical calendar.

This case study demonstrates that the earliest successful complex societies in the south coast of Peru circa 400 B.C. involved a wide catchment of people and objects.

that cooperation in non-state societies is achieved by “ritualizing” the economy.

They therefore promote sustained group behavior toward common goals and solve what is famously known as the “collective action problem” in human social life—how do you get everyone to work together toward something that’s in everyone’s long-term self-interest? Feasting is a key component of this kind of sociality and cooperation.

U.S. natural gas is far less damaging to the environment than coal. It has become so cheap that it is displacing coal in electricity generation, driving down emissions. To others, Cove Point is an environmental catastrophe. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, and burning it releases lots of greenhouse-gas emissions, which cause climate change. Both arguments are right.

society must eliminate its carbon dependency. It cannot burn vast amounts of any fossil fuel for “decades and decades,” as Mr. Farrell hopes, unless there is a revolution in emissions capture technology. Even in the short term, U.S. emissions are rising, despite the restraint that stepped-up natural-gas burning has provided. The government must demand more change, more quickly.

One objection is that carbon pricing is not powerful enough. The European Union’s carbon pricing program has not worked well. But that is a failure of design and political will. A carbon price equal to the challenge would start high and rise higher, sending a much stronger price signal.

carbon pricing is still the best first-line policy

A high-enough carbon price would shape millions of choices, small and large, about what to buy, how to invest and how to live that would result in substantial emissions cuts. People would prioritize the easiest changes, minimizing the costs of the energy transition. With a price that steadily rose, market forces would steadily wring carbon dioxide out of the economy — without the government trying to dictate exactly how, wasting money on special-interest boondoggles.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found last year that an average carbon price between 2030 and the end of the century of $100, $200 or even $300 per ton of carbon dioxide would result in huge greenhouse-gas emissions cuts, could restrain warming to the lowest safety threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius and would almost certainly prevent the world from breaching the traditional warming limit of 2 degrees Celsius

Republicans never embraced the market-based idea, even though conservative economists admit its appeal, because they never accepted the need to act at all. Some environmentalists, meanwhile, are increasingly wary of carbon pricing. The Democrats’ Green New Deal, which is noncommittal on the policy, reflects the accelerating drift from the obvious.

Another criticism is that carbon pricing hurts the poor, who would suffer most when prices rose. But the revenue from carbon pricing could be recycled back to Americans in a progressive way, and most people would end up whole or better off.

A third objection is that carbon pricing is politically impossible, because it reveals the cost of fighting global warming in the prices people pay

This is a leadership challenge, not a policy challenge. More than 40 governments globally, including several states, have found the political will to embrace carbon pricing programs, which is the only option that would plausibly be bipartisan.

One objection does have merit: Though carbon pricing would spur huge change in infrastructure and power generation, that alone would not be enough. It would not stimulate all the innovation the nation needs in the climate fight, nor would it change behaviors in circumstances where the desired price signal is muted or nonexistent

Start with carbon pricing. Then fill in the gaps.

, economists know that companies that invest in research and development do not get rewarded for the full social value of their work. Others benefit from their innovations without paying. Consequently, firms do not invest in research as much as society should want

It would take only a small fraction of the revenue a carbon pricing system would produce to fund a much more ambitious clean-energy research agenda. Basic scientific research and applied research programs such as ARPA-E should be scaled up dramatically

The government must also account for the fact that not all greenhouse-gas emissions come from burning the fuels that a carbon pricing program would reach — coal, oil and gas. How would the government charge farmers for the methane their cows emit or for the greenhouse gases released when they till their soil? How about emissions from cement, ammonia and steel production? The federal government would have to tailor programs to the agricultural and industrial sectors, which might include judicious use of incentives and mandates.

only government can ensure adequate mass transit options. Local governments could help with zoning laws to encourage people to live in denser, more walkable communities. The federal government should also press automakers to steadily improve fuel efficiency.

That starts with making sure that emissions-cutting efforts at home do not have unintended consequences. If the United States puts a price on greenhouse-gas emissions, other countries would lure U.S. manufacturers with the promise of lax environmental rules. Relocated manufacturers could then export their goods to the United States. The net effect would be no benefit for the planet but fewer U.S. manufacturing jobs.

One response is a kind of tariff on goods entering the country from places with weaker carbon-dioxide policies. That would both eliminate the incentive to offshore manufacturing and encourage countries to strengthen their own rules.

Participating in the agreement would give the United States a forum — and a basis — to press other nations to reduce emissions.

Foreign aid to prevent deforestation could be among the most cost-effective climate-preserving measures. Helping other countries to replace archaic cooking stoves that produce noxious fumes would help cut emissions and improve quality of life across the developing world.

There are a lot of bad ideas out there.

The Green New Deal that some Democrats have embraced is case in point. In its most aggressive form, the plan suggests the country could reach net-zero greenhouse-gas emissions by 2030, an impossible goal

that would be more spent every three years than the total amount the country spent on World War II.

At the same time, the Democratic plan would guarantee every American “high-quality health care” and “a job with a family-sustaining wage, adequate family and medical leave, paid vacations, and retirement security.” These expensive aspirations, no matter how laudable, would do nothing to arrest greenhouse-gas emissions.

Massive social reform will not protect the climate. Marshaling every dollar to its highest benefit is the strongest plan.

“You’ll see the same associate staffed on all the great cases and think, ‘Why am I not getting those same opportunities?’ ” said Duvol Thompson, a partner at Holland & Knight LLP. He recently helped compile a survey of 60 Black male lawyers that concluded: “The consistent challenge is attempting to rise through the ranks based on knowledge, experience and ability rather than being minimized, diminished or judged based on the color of our skin.”

“What gets done is what gets rewarded,” said Shannon Klinger, chief legal officer of pharmaceutical company Novartis AG , which withholds 15% of legal fees if diversity benchmarks aren’t met.

In any given year, a handful of the nation’s largest law firms have no Black partners. Elite law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP, which has 500 lawyers, has had one Black partner in its centurylong history.

Attrition rates for minority associates were 22%, compared with 17% for white associates, according to a study this year by the NALP Foundation, an industry research group, and legal recruiting firm Major, Lindsey & Africa.

“For a profession that’s supposed to be all about equality, opportunity and justice,” he said, “we should be first, not last.”

He then unveiled a peculiar defense strategy, arguing that objecting to the outcome of an election and attempting to block certification is a regular practice in American politics.

But the Democrats' objections back then to some electoral votes came nowhere near the legislative or political effort to overturn the election that Trump and his Republican allies staged around the 2020 presidential election.

"Please come to order," Biden said at the time. "The objection cannot be received."

"To litigate questions of election integrity within this system is not incitement," van der Veen said. "It is the democratic system working as the founders and lawmakers have designed."

The House Democrats argue that Trump knowingly and willing whipped up a frenzied pro-Trump crowd and urged them to lay siege to the seat of American government to block lawmakers from certifying Biden's electoral victory and keep Trump in power.

House impeachment managers argued that if senators don't convict Trump, he may incite further violence.

17 Republicans would have to vote with all 50 Democrats to reach the two-thirds threshold to convict and effectively bar Trump from holding federal office in the future. That outcome, however, seems unlikely.

Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.

This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades

Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand.

In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.

that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism.

The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.

It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority.

“It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized about remaking the world in its image, only to reveal an ugly image of itself to the world.

“We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity.

To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end.

“The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network among U.S. officials

The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, almost suffocating feel to them, as though every turn invariably leads to the first crush of steel and glass.

With the system “blinking red,” as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not enough? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

A last-minute flight change. A new job at the Pentagon. A retirement from the fire station. The final tilt of a plane’s wings before impact. If the books about the lead-up to 9/11 are packed with unbearable inevitability, the volumes on the day itself highlight how randomness separated survival from death.

Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.

Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. “It increased the floor space available for rent . . . by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit,” the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.

The towers embodied the power of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that day, both conditions proved fatal.

Garrett Graff quotes Defense Department officials marveling at how American Airlines Flight 77 struck a part of the Pentagon that, because of new anti-terrorism standards, had recently been reinforced and renovated

“In any other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would have flown right through the middle of the building.” Instead, fewer than 200 people were killed in the attack on the Pentagon, including the passengers on the hijacked jet. Chance and preparedness came together.

The bravery of police and firefighters is the subject of countless 9/11 retrospectives, but these books also emphasize the selflessness of civilians who morphed into first responders

The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”

The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana

Such episodes, led by ordinary civilians, embodied values that the 9/11 Commission called on the nation to display. Except those values would soon be dismantled, in the name of security, by those entrusted to uphold them.

Lawyering to death.The phrase appears in multiple 9/11 volumes, usually uttered by top officials adamant that they were going to get things done, laws and rules be damned

“I had to show the American people the resolve of a commander in chief that was going to do whatever it took to win,” Bush explains. “No yielding. No equivocation. No, you know, lawyering this thing to death.” In “Against All Enemies,” Clarke recalls the evening of Sept. 11, 2001, when Bush snapped at an official who suggested that international law looked askance at military force as a tool of revenge. “I don’t care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass,” the president retorted.

The message was unmistakable: The law is an obstacle to effective counterterrorism

Except, they did lawyer this thing to death. Instead of disregarding the law, the Bush administration enlisted it. “Beginning almost immediately after September 11, 2001, [Vice President Dick] Cheney saw to it that some of the sharpest and best-trained lawyers in the country, working in secret in the White House and the United States Department of Justice, came up with legal justifications for a vast expansion of the government’s power in waging war on terror,

Through public declarations and secret memos, the administration sought to remove limits on the president’s conduct of warfare and to deny terrorism suspects the protections of the Geneva Conventions by redefining them as unlawful enemy combatants. Nothing, Mayer argues of the latter effort, “more directly cleared the way for torture than this.”

Tactics such as cramped confinement, sleep deprivation and waterboarding were rebranded as “enhanced interrogation techniques,” legally and linguistically contorted to avoid the label of torture. Though the techniques could be cruel and inhuman, the OLC acknowledged in an August 2002 memo, they would constitute torture only if they produced pain equivalent to organ failure or death, and if the individual inflicting such pain really really meant to do so: “Even if the defendant knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent.” It’s quite the sleight of hand, with torture moving from the body of the interrogated to the mind of the interrogator.

the memo concludes that none of it actually matters. Even if a particular interrogation method would cross some legal line, the relevant statute would be considered unconstitutional because it “impermissibly encroached” on the commander in chief’s authority to conduct warfare

You have informed us. Experts you have consulted. Based on your research. You do not anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Department relies on information provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to proceed with its interrogations. It’s a perfect circle of trust.

In these documents, lawyers enable lawlessness. Another May 2005 memo concludes that, because the Convention Against Torture applies only to actions occurring under U.S. jurisdiction, the CIA’s creation of detention sites in other countries renders the convention “inapplicable.”

avid Cole describes the documents as “bad-faith lawyering,” which might be generous. It is another kind of lawyering to death, one in which the rule of law that the 9/11 Commission urged us to abide by becomes the victim.

Similarly, because the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment is meant to protect people convicted of crimes, it should not apply to terrorism detainees — because they have not been officially convicted of anything. The lack of due process conveniently eliminates constitutional protections

Years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee would investigate the CIA’s post-9/11 interrogation program. Its massive report — the executive summary of which appeared as a 549-page book in 2014 — found that torture did not produce useful intelligence, that the interrogations were more brutal than the CIA let on, that the Justice Department did not independently verify the CIA’s information, and that the spy agency impeded oversight by Congress and the CIA inspector general.

“The CIA’s effectiveness representations were almost entirely inaccurate,” the Senate report concluded. It is one of the few lies of the war on terror unmasked by an official government investigation and public report, but just one of the many documented in the 9/11 literature.

Officials in the war on terror didn’t deceive or dissemble just with lawmakers or the public. In the recurring tragedy of war, they lied just as often to themselves.

“The decision to invade Iraq was one made, finally and exclusively, by the president of the United States, George W. Bush,” he writes.

n Woodward’s “Bush at War,” the president admitted that before 9/11, “I didn’t feel that sense of urgency [about al-Qaeda], and my blood was not nearly as boiling.”

A president initially concerned about defending and preserving the nation’s moral goodness against terrorism found himself driven by darker impulses. “I’m having difficulty controlling my bloodlust,” Bush confessed to religious leaders in the Oval Office on Sept. 20, 2001,

Bloodlust, moral certainty and sudden vulnerability make a dangerous combination. The belief that you are defending good against evil can lead to the belief that whatever you do to that end is good, too.

Draper distills Bush’s worldview: “The terrorists’ primary objective was to destroy America’s freedom. Saddam hated America. Therefore, he hated freedom. Therefore, Saddam was himself a terrorist, bent on destroying America and its freedom.”

The president assumed the worst about what Hussein had done or might do, yet embraced best-case scenarios of how an American invasion would proceed.

“Iraqis would rejoice at the sight of their Western liberators,” Draper recaps. “Their newly shared sense of national purpose would overcome any sectarian allegiances. Their native cleverness would make up for their inexperience with self-government. They would welcome the stewardship of Iraqi expatriates who had not set foot in Baghdad in decades. And their oil would pay for everything.”

It did not seem to occur to Bush and his advisers that Iraqis could simultaneously hate Hussein and resent the Americans — feelings that could have been discovered by speaking to Iraqis and hearing their concerns.

few books on the war that gets deep inside Iraqis’ aversion to the Americans in their midst. “What gives them the right to change something that’s not theirs in the first place?” a woman in a middle-class Baghdad neighborhood asks him. “I don’t like your house, so I’m going to bomb it and you can rebuild it again the way I want it, with your money?

The occupation did not dissuade such impressions when it turned the former dictator’s seat of government into its own luxurious Green Zone, or when it retrofitted the Abu Ghraib prison (“the worst of Saddam’s hellholes,” Shadid calls it) into its own chamber of horrors.

Shadid hears early talk of the Americans as “kuffar” (heathens), a 51-year-old former teacher complains that “we’ve exchanged a tyrant for an occupier.”

Shadid understood that governmental legitimacy — who gets to rule, and by what right — was a matter of overriding importance for Iraqis. “The Americans never understood the question,” he writes; “Iraqis never agreed on the answer.

When the United States so quickly shifted from liberation to occupation, it lost whatever legitimacy it enjoyed. “Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed, proof that America was at war with Islam, that we were the new Crusaders come to occupy Muslim land,” Clarke writes. “It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush, chanting ‘invade Iraq, you must invade Iraq.’ ”

The foolishness and arrogance of the American occupation didn’t help. In “Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq’s Green Zone,” Rajiv Chandrasekaran explains how, even as daily security was Iraqis’ overwhelming concern, viceroy L. Paul Bremer, Bush’s man in Baghdad, was determined to turn the country into a model free-market economy, complete with new investment laws, bankruptcy courts and a state-of-the-art stock exchange.

a U.S. Army general, when asked by local journalists why American helicopters must fly so low at night, thus scaring Iraqi children, replied that the kids were simply hearing “the sound of freedom.”Message: Freedom sounds terrifying.

For some Americans, inflicting that terror became part of the job, one more tool in the arsenal. In “The Forever War” by Dexter Filkins, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel in Iraq assures the author that “with a heavy dose of fear and violence, and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them.”

Chandrasekaran recalls the response of a top communications official under Bremer, when reporters asked about waves of violence hitting Baghdad in the spring of 2004. “Off the record: Paris is burning,” the official told the journalists. “On the record: Security and stability are returning to Iraq.”

the Iraq War, conjured in part on the false connections between Iraq and al-Qaeda, ended up helping the terrorist network: It pulled resources from the war in Afghanistan, gave space for bin Laden’s men to regroup and spurred a new generation of terrorists in the Middle East. “A bigger gift to bin Laden was hard to imagine,” Bergen writes.

“U.S. officials had no need to lie or spin to justify the war,” Washington Post reporter Craig Whitlock writes in “The Afghanistan Papers,” a damning contrast of the war’s reality vs. its rhetoric. “Yet leaders at the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department soon began to make false assurances and to paper over setbacks on the battlefield.” As the years passed, the deceit became entrenched, what Whitlock calls “an unspoken conspiracy” to hide the truth.

Afghanistan was where al-Qaeda, supported by the Taliban, had made its base — it was supposed to be the good war, the right war, the war of necessity and not choice, the war endorsed at home and abroad.

If Iraq was the war born of lies, Afghanistan was the one nurtured by them

Whitlock finds commanding generals privately admitting that they long fought the war “without a functional strategy.” That, two years into the conflict, Rumsfeld complained that he had “no visibility into who the bad guys are.”

That Army Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, a former coordinator of Iraq and Afghanistan policy, acknowledged that “we didn’t have the foggiest idea of what we were undertaking.”

That U.S. officials long wanted to withdraw American forces but feared — correctly so, it turns out — that the Afghan government might collapse. “Bin Laden had hoped for this exact scenario,” Whitlock observes. “To lure the U.S. superpower into an unwinnable guerrilla conflict that would deplete its national treasury and diminish its global influence.”

All along, top officials publicly contradicted these internal views, issuing favorable accounts of steady progress

Bad news was twisted into good: Rising suicide attacks in Kabul meant the Taliban was too weak for direct combat, for instance, while increased U.S. casualties meant America was taking the fight to the enemy.

deceptions transpired across U.S. presidents, but the Obama administration, eager to show that its first-term troop surge was working, “took it to a new level, hyping figures that were misleading, spurious or downright false,” Whitlock writes. And then under President Donald Trump, he adds, the generals felt pressure to “speak more forcefully and boast that his war strategy was destined to succeed.”

in public, almost no senior government officials had the courage to admit that the United States was slowly losing,” Whitlock writes. “With their complicit silence, military and political leaders avoided accountability and dodged reappraisals that could have changed the outcome or shortened the conflict.”

Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage traveled to Moscow shortly after 9/11 to give officials a heads up about the coming hostilities in Afghanistan. The Russians, recent visitors to the graveyard of empires, cautioned that Afghanistan was an “ambush heaven” and that, in the words of one of them, “you’re really going to get the hell kicked out of you.”

a war should not be measured only by the timing and the competence of its end. We still face an equally consequential appraisal: How good was this good war if it could be sustained only by lies?

In the two decades since the 9/11 attacks, the United States has often attempted to reconsider its response

They are written as though intending to solve problems. But they can be read as proof that the problems have no realistic solution, or that the only solution is to never have created them.

the report sets the bar for staying so high that an exit strategy appears to be its primary purpose.

he counterinsurgency manual is an extraordinary document. Implicitly repudiating notions such as “shock and awe” and “overwhelming force,” it argues that the key to battling an insurgency in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan is to provide security for the local population and to win its support through effective governance

It also attempts to grasp the nature of America’s foes. “Most enemies either do not try to defeat the United States with conventional operations or do not limit themselves to purely military means,” the manual states. “They know that they cannot compete with U.S. forces on those terms. Instead, they try to exhaust U.S. national will.” Exhausting America’s will is an objective that al-Qaeda understood well.

“Counterinsurgents should prepare for a long-term commitment,” the manual states. Yet, just a few pages later, it admits that “eventually all foreign armies are seen as interlopers or occupiers.” How to accomplish the former without descending into the latter? No wonder so many of the historical examples of counterinsurgency that the manual highlights, including accounts from the Vietnam War, are stories of failure.

“Soldiers and Marines are expected to be nation builders as well as warriors,” the manual proclaims, but the arduous tasks involved — reestablishing government institutions, rebuilding infrastructure, strengthening local security forces, enforcing the rule of law — reveal the tension at the heart of the new doctrine

In his foreword, Army Lt. Col. John Nagl writes that the document’s most lasting impact may be as a catalyst not for remaking Iraq or Afghanistan, but for transforming the Army and Marine Corps into “more effective learning organizations,” better able to adapt to changing warfare. And in her introduction, Sarah Sewall, then director of Harvard’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, concludes that its “ultimate value” may be in warning civilian officials to think hard before engaging in a counterinsurgency campaign.

“The thing that got to everyone,” Finkel explains in the latter book, “was not having a defined front line. It was a war in 360 degrees, no front to advance toward, no enemy in uniform, no predictable patterns, no relief.” It’s a powerful summation of battling an insurgency.

Hitting the wrong house is what counterinsurgency doctrine is supposed to avoid. Even successfully capturing or killing a high-value target can be counterproductive if in the process you terrorize a community and create more enemies. In Iraq, the whole country was the wrong house. America’s leaders knew it was the wrong house. They hit it anyway.

Another returning soldier, Nic DeNinno, struggles to tell his wife about the time he and his fellow soldiers burst into an Iraqi home in search of a high-value target. He threw a man down the stairs and held another by the throat. After they left, the lieutenant told him it was the wrong house. “The wrong f---ing house,” Nic says to his wife. “One of the things I want to remember is how many times we hit the wrong house.”