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I don’t fault Silver for his caution. It’s honest. What it really says is he doesn’t know with much confidence what’s going to happen

That’s because there’s a lot of human caprice and whim in electoral behavior that can’t always be explained or predicted with scientific precision. Politics ain’t moneyball. Good-quality polls give an accurate sense of where a political race is at a point in time, but they don’t predict the future.

Predictive models, generally based on historical patterns, work until they don’t.

Eduardo Porter: I read your very interesting column about the universal basic income, the quasi-magical tool to ensure some basic standard of living for everybody when there are no more jobs for people to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a certainty, at least among the technorati on the West Coast

the economic numbers that we see today don’t support this view. If robots were eating our lunch, it would show up as fast productivity growth. But as Robert Gordon points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” productivity has slowed sharply. He argues pretty convincingly that future productivity growth will remain fairly modest, much slower than during the burst of American prosperity in mid-20th century.

it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all.

Long ago and far away, in the days when white men in power ties and women in funny hats gathered in air-conditioned caverns to hammer out the Republican Party platform, it was a predictable affair. The G.O.P. was for less taxes and less government, free trade and free people, a scolding of victims and grievance-mongers, and a vision of social norms circa 1952.

As time went on, they let the cranks and the racists in, the fact-deniers and the extreme gun nuts, the xenophobes and the nature-haters, because the big tent could take in all that extra gas without overheating. They would tolerate those people, who you picture looking like that dude who sucker-punched a protester at a Trump rally, because they needed them.

imagine the Republican Party gathering for its convention in Cleveland and hammering out a vanity platform in Donald Trump’s image. It’s all walls and no bridges. Free trade is gone. Taxes? Who knows. There will be a call for more government, through a bloated military, and untouched benefits for seniors who must be pandered to. Most significantly, it’s a party of grudges and grievances, of anger and fear by that formerly detested class — victims.

How do people reconcile a belief in individual autonomy with nationwide wage stagnation?

“Many middle-class wage earners are victims of the economy, and, perhaps, of that great, glowing, irresistible American promise that has been drummed into our heads since birth: Just work hard and you can have it all.”

This sentiment taunts at two sacred and quintessentially American convictions—that success is self-determined and that advancement is inevitable for anyone with a serious work ethic. According to a 2014 Pew Global Attitudes Study, people in the United States are much more likely to hold these two beliefs than many of their European counterparts.

“That’s not who we are.” So said President Obama, again and again throughout his administration, in speeches urging Americans to side with him against the various outrages perpetrated by Republicans.

If close to half of America voted for Republicans in the Obama years and support Trump today, then clearly something besides the pieties of cosmopolitan liberalism is very much a part of who we are.

This self-undermining flaw makes the trope a useful way to grasp the dilemmas facing Trump’s opponents. In seeking to reject Trump’s chauvinist vision, they end up excluding too much of what a unifying counternarrative would require.

while the Chief Justice is taking a lot of heat from the right, the way he handled the case might actually turn out to be a brilliant strategic move -- one that could very well define his judicial career, and could actually be the optimal outcome for Republicans.

the president was ready for the Court to break right or break left. But instead, Chief Justice Roberts juked. He agreed with the challengers that the mandate couldn't be justified under the Commerce Clause or even the Necessary and Proper Clause -- thereby reinforcing the narrative that the Democratic Congress overreached in passing the bill. His opinion -- though not the result -- may provide much help in the future to judicial conservatives, as it suggests that, with the dissent, five justices are in favor of a more aggressive role for the Court in policing the bounds of the Commerce Clause (and the Spending Clause, which was at issue in the Medicaid legislation). And while Roberts ultimately voted to uphold the Act, he did so on a ground that, for Obama, plays terribly: that it's a tax.

“Bourgeois Dignity” is both the title of a recent book by the economic historian Deirdre N. McCloskey and, she argues, the attitude that accounts for the biggest story in economic history: the explosion of growth that took northern Europeans and eventually the world from living on about $3 a day, give or take a dollar or two (in today’s bu

ing power), to the current global average of $30 -- and much higher in developed nations

That change, she argues, is way too big to be explained by normal economic behavior, however rational, disciplined or efficient

Norman Davies, Britain's pre-eminent historian of Europe. From where he sits, Europe's problem is one of failed governance. "It all started, I guess, in the 1990s, with the Yugoslav wars and the inability of the Europeans to do anything basic about a war in their backyard."

"I now feel that the thing that is being proved wrong is what some people call the 'gradualist fallacy'—that . . . you drive European integration forward by economic means," he says. "And it's just wrong."

After World War II, Europeans set about forming a union along three axes: politics, defense and economics. Britain quickly rejected political union, however, and soon enough NATO came along to become the only defense union Western Europe needed. An economic union—the European Economic Community, established in 1957—was the only remaining pillar of integration left to pursue.

Niebuhr noticed a secular religion that was especially strong in the years after World War II. It was the faith that historical forces were gradually bringing about “the unification of mankind.”

Old nationalisms would fade away, many people believed. Transportation and communications technologies would unite people. Values would converge.

As communications technology has become more global, people’s tastes have become more parochial, not less.

Vimeo continues to be the destination for content creators and viewers looking for cutting-edge videos, beautiful playback, and a remarkably positive community. A world away from cat virals, Vimeo is winning by nurturing the next generation of filmmakers (well, videomakers) and promoting their most innovative work.

now videomakers can get started, at least, by making good work and letting the Internet run with it.

. Vimeo Staff Picks, curated by Sam Morrill and Jason Sondhi, surfaces new videos of all kinds on a daily basis, and from there, many go viral. Within 24 hours of appearing on the channel, a video can receive tens of thousands views.

Lead researcher Steven Portugal explains new findings that reveal why birds fly in a V formation.

The mystery of why so many birds fly in a V formation may have been solved.

This revealed that the birds flew in the optimal position - gaining lift from the bird in front by remaining close to its wingtip.

Turchin’s thesis is basically the following: the eternal tension between liberty and equality has a recognizable shape in historical and economic cycles, which are perhaps better understood today. The optimal moment for successful societies is when the middle class dominates, where political institutions reflect a mass interest in governing the society well, because everyone feels they have a stake (so more people than usual want and need collective success), and because they share some basic commonalities in experience, and so can find a way to compromise.

When societies grow more unequal, commonalities fray. Wealth accumulates among the few, who begin to see the polity as something to be used for private interests rather than engaged in for public-spirited reform. But as wealth at the top grows and grows, and as more and more of the middle class attempt to become part of the super-wealthy club, the loss of economic demand among the increasingly struggling majority puts a crimp in the social mobility of the wannabe elites. So we have a wealth glut: hugely wealthy one-percenters and a larger group of under-employed or unemployed professionals. It’s from these disgruntled elites that you will get the tribunes of the new plebeians. And they will be guided by revenge just as destructively as the top one percent is now guided by naked self-interest.

Nearly three months into the latest round of Washington-brokered peace talks in what has been the Middle East’s most intractable conflict, Mr. Kerry met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel in Rome on Wednesday, having said the process had “intensified” over 13 negotiating sessions, i

After years of stalemate, the very fact that the talks are continuing — and, perhaps even more important,

“In a period where the whole Middle East is moving in the direction of chaos, having one area where the parties are trying to further stabilize their relationship is a positive development,”

The American workplace has always prized people who prioritize work over family, and European countries have long had more generous policies for working parents. But in the last two decades, that gap has widened significantly. Other developed countries have expanded benefits like paid parental leave and child care, while the United States has not.

for workers — most of whom have children, aging parents or both, and many of whom are single parents — the downsides can be enormous, whether they work in high finance or hourly labor. Many workers today — blue-collar and white-collar alike — believe they must choose between career and family.

The share of women in their 30s and 40s who work, which was once higher in the United States than in Canada, Australia, Japan and much of Europe, has fallen behind. The widening gap in policies is a major reason for the change,

A catastrophic risk, in the policy-relevant sense, is a very low (or unknown but believed to be low) probability of a very large loss. If the probability of loss is high, strenuous efforts will be made to avert it or mitigate its consequences. But if the probability is believed to be very low, the proper course to take will be difficult, both as a matter of sound policy and as a political matter (to which I return in the last paragraph of this comment), to determine and implement. The relevant cost is the catastrophic loss if it occurs discounted (multiplied) by the probability of its occurring. If that probability is believed to be very low, the expected cost may be reckoned to be low even if, should the loss occur, it would be catastrophic. And if the expected cost is low but the cost of prevention is high, then doing nothing to prevent the risk from materializing may be the optimal course of (in)action.

Politicians have limited time horizons. If the annual probability of some catastrophe is 1 percent, and a politician’s horizon is 5 years, he will be reluctant to support significant expenditures to reduce the likelihood or magnitude of the catastrophe, because to do so would involve supporting either higher taxes or a reallocation of government expenditures from services that provide immediate benefits to constituents.

The article reviews the copious psychological literature behind the value of adversity in building success. It isn't as new as it seems. It's recently been invoked by luminaries from Steve Jobs to J. K. Rowling. Centuries earlier, grit and systematic, conscientious planning was a major theme of the archetypical American self-made genius, Benjamin Franklin, and the other Founders also displayed it, as I suggested here.

suggests that inner-city charter schools may have an advantage over expensive private ones like Riverdale, if only because teachers consider themselves responsible primarily to the community rather than to parents

Mr. Tough also observes that the virtues of self-advancement aren't necessarily those of service to others. In fact, grit may work against compassion

Wilson told me the new proposed evolutionary model pulls the field “out of the fever swamp of kin selection,” and he confidently predicted a coming paradigm shift that would promote genetic research to identify the “trigger” genes that have enabled a tiny number of cases, such as the ant family, to achieve complex forms of cooperation.

In the book, he proposes a theory to answer what he calls “the great unsolved problem of biology,” namely how roughly two dozen known examples in the history of life—humans, wasps, termites, platypodid ambrosia beetles, bathyergid mole rats, gall-making aphids, one type of snapping shrimp, and others—made the breakthrough to life in highly social, complex societies. Eusocial species, Wilson noted, are by far “the most successful species in the history of life.”

Summarizing parts of it for me, Wilson was particularly unsparing of organized religion, likening the Book of Revelation, for example, to the ranting of “a paranoid schizophrenic who was allowed to write down everything that came to him.” Toward philosophy, he was only slightly kinder. Generation after generation of students have suffered trying to “puzzle out” what great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Descartes had to say on the great questions of man’s nature, Wilson said, but this was of little use, because philosophy has been based on “failed models of the brain.”

For the first time perhaps, hope is not as much a characteristic of American feelings.

Andrew Kohut, who has polled for Gallup and the Pew Research Center for over four decades, calls the mood “chronic disillusionment.” He said that in this century we have had only three brief moments when a majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things were going: the month W. took office, right after the 9/11 attacks and the month we invaded Iraq.

Bush and Cheney were black and white, and after them, Americans wanted someone smart enough to get the nuances and deal with complexities. Now I think people are tired of complexity and they’re hungering for clarity, a simpler time. But that’s going to be hard to restore in the world today.”