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Mr. Lignier built his own version of a Skinner box — a tall, transparent tower with an attached camera — and released two pet-store rats inside. Whenever the rats pressed the button inside the box, they got a small dose of sugar and the camera snapped their photo. The resulting images were immediately displayed on a screen, where the rats could see them. (“But honestly I don’t think they understood it,” Mr. Lignier said.)

The rodents quickly became enthusiastic button pushers. “They are very clever,”

after this training phase, the rewards became more unpredictable. Although the rats were still photographed every time they hit the button, the sweet treats came only once in a while, by design. These kinds of intermittent rewards can be especially powerful, scientists have found, keeping animals glued to their experimental slot machines as they await their next jackpot.

Sullivan first had to dismantle establishment orthodoxies within himself — the same orthodoxies he now sought to undo at Brookings: That globalization and free trade were an unalloyed good, growing economies and improving people’s lives in the process. What was good for the stock market, in effect, was great for everybody. Given enough time, swelling wallets would produce a steady middle class, one that demands its political and human rights from its government. Even the most repressive regimes, the thinking went, would eventually crumble under the weight of inflowing capital. Consistent pressure via greenbacks did the most good for the most people.

“Those were the heady days when the mainstream foreign policy consensus was that globalization was a force for good,” Sullivan recalled in a 2017 interview. There was, of course, reason to think this. Capitalism helped keep the Soviet Union at bay, China still wasn’t a major power and building the economies of enemies turned them into friends. Globalization, per its champions, had the benefit of making many people rich while making the world safer in general and U.S. foreign policy less costly.

“After the Second World War, the United States led a fragmented world to build a new international economic order. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It sustained thrilling technological revolutions. And it helped the United States and many other nations around the world achieve new levels of prosperity. But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations,”

Blame spread, accountability avoided.And the net result was year after year of stasis, the initial injustice made all the worse by a collective unwillingness to acknowledge it, let alone address it.

Mr, now Lord, Cameron said the government was “deeply sorry” after a public inquiry unequivocally blamed the British Army for one of the most controversial days in Northern Ireland's history, when 13 civil rights marchers were shot dead and 15 others were wounded.For 38 years, so many had waited for those words.Obfuscation, delay and denials until finally the truth emerged.

So you can be secretary of state, of all things, and still be misled?“It’s incredible. Most serious questions should be asked of Whitehall departments

Pollsters suggest that about two-thirds of Haley voters preferred Joe Biden to Trump. Do the math, and that’s two-thirds of one-fifth of all Republicans. That’s not a lot of people in total. But it may be more than the margin of national victory in 2024

Polls in swing states that find that young voters and voters of color are drifting away from Biden also find that older and more conservative white voters are sticking with him. Older, more conservative, and white are not exactly synonymous with “anti-Trump Republican”—but the categories do considerably overlap.

Donald Trump campaigns as if he can return to the presidency with the votes of only his most zealous supporters, those who believe his lies about the election of 2020. Joe Biden understands that elections are decided not by the most zealous voters, but by the most conflicted: those who dislike the other fellow just that crucially decisive increment more than they dislike you

simply tossing your résumé and cover letter into a company’s job portal has a low probability of success, especially now. It’s so easy to submit applications that companies are being bombarded with thousands of them. Human beings can’t possibly review all of them, so they’re reviewed by computers, which simply search for keywords. They don’t understand in any deep way either the applicant’s qualities or the employer’s needs.

“The better writer you are, the greater your chance of getting rejected, because you won’t use keywords” the way the evaluation algorithm wants,

Personal contact is crucial, he said. Rather than spraying applications far and wide, he recommends focusing on a handful of companies, researching them in depth and contacting a wide range of people connected with them, even their suppliers and customers.

Reeve chronicles the alt-right’s rise in “Black Pill,” a chilling and insightful account of the throughline from dopey internet memes to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, the seductions of QAnon and the storming of the Capitol. In Reeve’s telling, Charlottesville was the fulcrum between a before, when hateful ideologies were coalescing, largely out of view, and the after — which we now inhabit

the internet culture she depicts starts at least a decade earlier, when a teenager modified the source code of a Japanese website to launch an English-language version, 4chan. The site let users post images anonymously, and it did not take long for pornography and vile memes to find a home there.

Eventually, the site’s developer became troubled and began blocking the worst of it, especially during what came to be known as Gamergate, a mass harassment campaign against women in the video game industry.

You’ve probably noticed that policies once dismissed out of hand — from “Medicare for all” to a 70 percent top tax rate; from sweeping action on climate change to abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — are being discussed in mainstream circles now. The Overton window is a useful way to understand what’s happening.

The key is that shifts begin with the public. Mr. Overton argued that the role of organizations like his own was not to lobby politicians to support policies outside the window, but to convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it. If they are successful, an idea derided as unthinkable can become so inevitable that it’s hard to believe it was ever otherwise.

“Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like they’re ordering dessert from a menu,” Mr. Lehman said in an interview. “They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time. And we believe the Overton window defines that range of ideas.”

The Overton window of political possibility is the range of ideas the public is willing to consider and accept.

Public officials cannot enact any policy they please like they’re ordering dessert from a menu. They have to choose from among policies that are politically acceptable at the time. And we believe the Overton window defines that range of ideas.

The most common misconception is that lawmakers themselves are in the business of shifting the Overton window. That is absolutely false. Lawmakers are actually in the business of detecting where the window is, and then moving to be in accordance with it.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2023 American Values Atlas, 55 percent of Trump supporters are Christian nationalists, as measured by their agreement with statements like “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

The Christian right increasingly sees American politics as zero-sum, meaning it is either going to triumph or face subjugation. As Justice Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court was recorded saying, “One side or the other is going to win.”

Payments to thousands of former and current athletes will approach $2.8 billion, minus the trial lawyers’ cut of the class-action suits. This follows the NCAA’s decision to let college athletes benefit financially from their names, images and likenesses

Most legal analysis of the settlement concludes that the days of the “amateur” college athlete are over. In the future, the men and women on Division I teams and others likely will be regarded as professionals who will be paid to play by universities through revenue-sharing agreements up to $20 million a year per school.

In Brussels, the seat of the European Union, rising crime, pollution and decaying infrastructure symbolize a continent in decline. With unusual clarity, Belgium shows what Europe has become in the 21st century: a continent subject to history rather than driving it.

For a long time, Belgian politicians and citizens hoped that European integration would release them from their own tribal squabbles. Who needed intricate federal coalitions if the behemoth in Brussels would soon take over? Except for the army and the national museums, all other levers of policy could comfortably be transferred,

The upward absorption has not come to pass. The European Union remains a halfway house between national government and continental superstate. There is no E.U. army or capacious fiscal apparatus. Consequently, Belgium has been put in an awkward position. Unable to collapse itself into Europe, it is stuck with a ramshackle federal state

where is the line between government persuasion and government coercion?

In Justice Sotomayor’s words, “At the heart of the First Amendment’s Free Speech Clause is the recognition that viewpoint discrimination is uniquely harmful to a free and democratic society.”

When the government can pick sides in an ideological debate and wield its power to suppress opposing views, then you’ve laid the foundation for authoritarianism. If free speech is the “dread of tyrants,” then censorship is one of the tyrant’s greatest weapons.

it seemed pretty clear that what really bothered conservatives was the very suggestion that American consumers should take into account the adverse effects their choices might have on other people. That sort of consideration, after all, is what the right mainly seems to mean when it condemns policies as “woke.”

I think we’re in a really important turning point in American history. What I wrote in “Bowling Alone” is even more relevant now. Because what we’ve seen over the last 25 years is a deepening and intensifying of that trend. We’ve become more socially isolated, and we can see it in every facet in our lives.

Social isolation leads to lots of bad things. It’s bad for your health, but it’s really bad for the country, because people who are isolated, and especially young men who are isolated, are vulnerable to the appeals of some false community. I can cite chapter and verse on this: Eager recruits to the Nazi Party in the 1930s were lonely young German men, and it’s not an accident that the people who are attracted today to white nationalist groups are lonely young white men.

You distinguish between two types of social capital, right? There’s bonding social capital and there’s bridging social capital.