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The United States is one of the rich countries that bucks the trend. About two-thirds of Americans — 65 percent — say religion is important in their daily lives. Among high-income countries, only Italians, Greeks, Singaporeans and residents of the oil-rich Persian Gulf states are more likely to say religion is important.

nearly a third of Americans continue to believe that the Bible “is the actual word of God and is to be taken literally, word for word.”

some Americans seem to live in a world where facts can’t exist.Facts such as the idea that the world is ancient, and that all living things evolved and some — like dinosaurs — became extinct. Facts like the proven warming of the world. Facts like the very real possibility that such warming could cause a catastrophic sea-level rise.

The conference, moreover, took place against the background of many new commemorative publications, including the Australian historian Prof. Christopher M. Clark’s account of World War I’s origins, titled “The Sleepwalkers.” An astounding global success, Professor Clark’s book has prompted a substantial revision among historians of the war’s causes. Whereas in the past German nationalism and bellicosity were singled out as disproportionately culpable, Mr. Clark lays equal blame on the other great powers, France, Russia, and Britain.

Furthermore, he argues that Princip was directly or indirectly an arm of Serbia’s intelligence services, not a Bosnian teenager acting on his own. Mr. Clarke also links Serbia’s expansionist campaign at the beginning of the 20th century, and its brutality, to the ethnic cleansing and war crimes of the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia.

The Serbian news media has rallied to the country’s defense with headlines like “Austrians Planned the First World War a Year before the Murder of Ferdinand”; “Vienna had a War Plan in 1913”; and “We are not to Blame for the War.”

“I admit that I wholly underestimated the passionate approaches to the topic and its meaning for today’s politics in the region,”

Mr. Bieber said that Serbs had overreacted to the Clark book and to the intention of the conference. “Clark doesn’t blame Serbia for the war, but rather the Great Powers — all of them,” he said. “Clark is hard on Serbia, more so than most historians, but in Serbia his theses are deliberately misread,” he added, attributing this to domestic politics.

The controversy around the conference, Mr. Bieber wrote in a recent essay in Balkan Insight, suggested that forthcoming commemorations would “not be shaped by reflecting on the past, but by making use of the past for the present.”

Microsoft’s topological approach is generally perceived as the most high-risk by scientists, because the type of exotic anyon particle needed to generate qubits has not been definitively proved to exist.

Microsoft began supporting the effort after Dr. Freedman, who has won both the Fields Medal and a MacArthur Fellowship and is widely known for his work in the mathematical field of topology, approached Craig Mundie, one of Microsoft’s top executives, and convinced him there was a new path to quantum computing based on ideas in topology originally proposed in 1997 by the physicist Alexei Kitaev.

Mr. Mundie said the idea struck him as the kind of gamble the company should be pursuing.“It’s hard to find things that you could say, I know that’s a 20-year problem and would be worth doing,” he said. “But this one struck me as being in that category.”

For some time, many thought quantum computers were useful only for factoring huge numbers — good for N.S.A. code breakers but few others. But new algorithms for quantum machines have begun to emerge in areas as varied as searching large amounts of data or modeling drugs. Now many scientists believe that quantum computers could tackle new kinds of problems that have yet to be defined.

“The problem for the longest time for the comic book industry is that we were off the newsstand. We had no way to expose people to comics,” he said. Interested readers would have to visit a comic book store.

“Our best-case scenario — that digital will act like a newsstand — seems to have come true.”

If confirmed, Mr. Mubarak’s release would be the latest erosion of the charges, convictions and sentences that the authorities had hurled against him after the 2011 uprising.

as has happened before with other forms of property, the most politically influential owners of the new property are doing their utmost to increase their profits by creating monopolies

The most valuable intellectual properties are platforms so widely used that everyone else has to use them, too. Think of standard operating systems like Microsoft’s Windows or Google’s Android; Google’s search engine; Amazon’s shopping system; and Facebook’s communication network

Despite an explosion in the number of websites over the last decade, page views are becoming more concentrated. While in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all page views in America, by 2010 the top 10 accounted for 75 percent

Amazon is now the first stop for almost a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything

Google and Facebook are now the first stops for many Americans seeking news — while Internet traffic to much of the nation’s newspapers, network television and other news gathering agencies has fallen well below 50 percent of all traffic.

almost all of the profits go to the platforms’ owners, who have all of the bargaining power

The rate at which new businesses have formed in the United States has slowed markedly since the late 1970s. Big Tech’s sweeping patents, standard platforms, fleets of lawyers to litigate against potential rivals and armies of lobbyists have created formidable barriers to new entrants

The law gives 20 years of patent protection to inventions that are “new and useful,” as decided by the Patent and Trademark Office. But the winners are big enough to game the system. They make small improvements warranting new patents, effectively making their intellectual property semipermanent.

They also lay claim to whole terrains of potential innovation including ideas barely on drawing boards and flood the system with so many applications that lone inventors have to wait years.

Big Tech has been almost immune to serious antitrust scrutiny, even though the largest tech companies have more market power than ever. Maybe that’s because they’ve accumulated so much political power.

Economic and political power can’t be separated because dominant corporations gain political influence over how markets are maintained and enforced, which enlarges their economic power further. One of the original goals of antitrust law was to prevent this.

We are now in a new gilded age similar to the first Gilded Age, when the nation’s antitrust laws were enacted. As then, those with great power and resources are making the “free market” function on their behalf. Big Tech — along with the drug, insurance, agriculture and financial giants — dominates both our economy and our politics.

The real question is how government organizes the market, and who has the most influence over its decisions

Yet as long as we remain obsessed by the debate over the relative merits of the “free market” and “government,” we have little hope of seeing what’s occurring and taking the action that’s needed to make our economy work for the many, not the few.

American conservatism has always been different than the conservatism found on continental Europe and elsewhere. There it was based on blood and soil, here on promise.

American free market and religious conservatives have traditionally embraced a style of nationalism that is hopeful and future minded. From Lincoln to Reagan to Bush, the market has been embraced for being dynamic and progressive. The major faiths uplift in part because they are eschatological — they look forward to a glorious future.

This pessimism isn’t justified by the facts. As a definitive report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine recently found, today’s immigrants are assimilating as fast as previous ones. They are learning English. They are healthier than native-born Americans. Immigrant men age 18 to 39 are incarcerated at roughly one-fourth the rate of American men.

The researchers found several genetic variants at different locations in the genome that were unusually common in the Inuit, compared with people in Europe or China. Several of these variations occurred within a cluster of genes that direct construction of enzymes called fatty acid desaturases. (The genes are called FADS, for short.)

This discovery was particularly tantalizing, because the scientists knew that these enzymes helped regulate the different fats in our bodies, including omega-3 fatty acids.

Natural selection is the only known way this gene variant could have become so common in the Inuit. Dr. Nielsen said this adaptation might have arisen as long ago as 20,000 years, when the ancestors of the Inuit were living in the Beringia region, which straddles Alaska and Siberia

one of these gene variants was present in almost every Inuit in the study. It is much less common in other populations: About a quarter of Chinese people have it, compared with just 2 percent of Europeans.

To uncover the effect of this variant gene, the scientists compared the Inuit in their study with others with more European ancestry. Some had inherited a European version of the variant. People with two copies of the Inuit gene had different blood levels of fatty acids than people without them, the researchers found.

The adaptation did more than just change blood levels of fatty acids, the scientists found. Inuit who carried two copies of the variant gene were on average an inch shorter and 10 pounds lighter than those without a copy.“That’s quite extreme,” said Dr. Nielsen.

Indeed, it’s rare to find a single gene that can influence height and weight so drastically. In recent years, scientists have run a number of large studies pinpointing hundreds of genes that affect height and weight, but each one played a minuscule role in the variation from person to person.

Those studies missed this influential gene variant because they focused mostly on people of European ancestry. So Dr. Nielsen and his colleagues also investigated how it affects Europeans. As it turns out, the gene variant is linked to a drastic drop in height and weight in that population, too.

natural selection might not have favored the FADS variant but a neighboring, as yet unknown piece of DNA that conferred evolutionary advantages.As that gene spread through the Inuit population, the FADS variant might simply have been passed down with it.

Dr. Nielsen and his colleagues are planning to investigate the long-term health effects of the gene variants they’ve found. They may help explain why some of us metabolize fats more effectively than others, and why omega-3s haven’t been the heart panacea once hoped.

89 percent of Democrats described themselves as concerned that intervention in Iraq and Syria “will lead to a long and costly involvement there.”

Mrs. Clinton resisted disavowing her original vote for the war for a long time and as secretary of state pressed for a muscular approach to the world.

At first, the president seemed to lean more toward Mrs. Clinton’s view, if not entirely, as with the 2009 Afghan troop surge. But the war in Libya in 2011 proved a turning point. After his reluctant approval of airstrikes left a fractured country, Mr. Obama soured even more on intervention.

For his part, Mr. Biden could point to Libya as a case study in the perils of Mrs. Clinton’s brand of American meddling in the conflicts of other countries. She might argue that she favored a more expansive involvement than that taken by the administration, which all but washed its hands after Qaddafi’s death, but the terrorist attack on a diplomatic compound in Benghazi has become an enduring political liability for her.

Over the holidays last year, according to the research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple vacuumed up nearly 90 percent of the profits in the smartphone business.

How will the search company — or anyone else, for that matter — ever make much money from Android?

Google is sanguine about Android’s prospects and said the company’s original vision for Android was never solely about huge profits. “The bet that Larry, Sergey and Eric made at the time was that smartphones are going to be a thing, there’s going to be Internet on it, so let’s make sure there’s a great smartphone platform out there that people can use to, among other things, access Google services

The fact that Google does not charge for Android, and that few phone manufacturers are extracting much of a profit from Android devices, means that much of the globe now enjoys decent smartphones and online services for low prices

at the same time, given the increasing threats to Google’s advertising business, we might also wonder how long that largess can continue.

The situation is especially painful for Google in China, the world’s fastest-growing smartphone market, where Google’s apps are blocked. Even in the rest of Asia, where many low-cost phone manufacturers do include Google’s apps on their phones, there’s growing interest in finding some alternative to Google’s version of Android. About 30 percent of Android smartphones shipped in the last quarter of 2014 were actually modified, or forked, versions of the OS that may not be very hospitable to Google’s services, according to the firm ABI Research

even if hot Silicon Valley start-ups still create apps for iOS first, app makers in other parts of the world see Android as a surer path to the masses. “The reality is that folks like you should play a role in educating the Silicon Valley,” she said.

Google’s strategy of giving Android to phone makers free has led to a surge of new entrants in the phone business, several of which sell high-quality phones for cut-rate prices. Among those is Xiaomi, a Chinese start-up making phones that have become some of the most popular devices in China.

Because Xiaomi and others don’t make much of a profit by selling phones, they’re all looking for other ways to make money — and for many, the obvious business is in apps offering mail, messaging and other services that compete with Google’s own moneymaking apps.

A brighter spot for Google is the revenue it collects from sales via Android’s app store, called Google Play. For years, Android apps were a backwater, but sales have picked up lately. In 2014, Google Play sold about $10 billion in apps, of which Google kept about $3 billion (the rest was paid out to developers). Apple makes more from its App Store. Sales there exceeded $14 billion in 2014, and rising iPhone sales in China have led to a growing app haul for Apple. Still, Google’s app revenue is becoming an increasingly meaningful piece of its overall business, and it is also growing rapidly.

Cyanogen, has raised about $100 million from several investors — and has signed a “strategic partnership” with Google’s arch-competitor Microsoft — to sell phone makers an alternative user interface that works on top of Google’s Android.

“We share services revenue with the phone makers — and today they get very little of that from Google,” said Kirt McMaster, Cyanogen’s chief executive. “There are very few companies in the world today that really like Google. Nobody wants Google to run the table with this game. So it’s a good time to be a neutral third party. We’re Switzerland, and we want to share that revenue with our ecosystem partners in a meaningful way.”

in the long run, the rise of Android switching sets up a terrible path for Google — losing the high-end of the smartphone market to the iPhone, while the low end is under greater threat from noncooperative Android players like Xiaomi and Cyanogen.

“Russia has been making aggressive statements, insisting that it lives in a world of mutual military deterrence, while thinking that the West will not pay attention,” Mr. Golts said.But the West paid attention, he said, and Russia is not ready. It is one thing to use a force of up to 100,000 well-trained, well-booted soldiers to seize Crimea or even to destabilize a neighbor, but it is a very different matter to take on NATO, he noted.

Russia, which had long given up on military exercises, then started sending long-range bombers and fighter aircraft on patrol along the edges of European or American airspace. The West, and the United States in particular, felt the aggressive attitude warranted a military response. Hence, a new program of maneuvers and talk of deploying tanks and other heavy equipment.

Russia, lacking both the manpower and the weapons systems, will not be ready to do so any time soon, which is why Mr. Putin resorts to asymmetrical responses like nuclear weapons, analysts said.The war with Ukraine severed cooperation with some critical defense industries there, while Western sanctions cut off some technology used in military applications, like microchips.

The steep drops in the price of oil and the value of the ruble mean Russia is facing a recession this year, although recent figures suggest it will not be as bad as originally anticipated.

Yuriy Borisov, a deputy defense minister, told the Moskovsky Komsomolets newspaper this year that the military had underestimated how much it would need to spend to acquire new Armata tanks. Mr. Putin had pledged the government would buy 2,300 by 2020.“We miscalculated on the Armata,” Mr. Borisov was quoted as saying. “The money allocated for that project turns out to be too little.” Production costs are 250 percent higher than anticipated, he said, without further details

He and other analysts suggested that maintaining the image of a robust military being resupplied on schedule was a political necessity, speaking to the large constituency that supports Mr. Putin because he has promised to restore Russia to its great power status.

Despite the images of walking skeletons that greeted American liberators at Buchenwald, the full enormity of the Holocaust was not fully appreciated, even in the Western world, until relatively recently, for the simple reason that “the Americans and the British liberated no part of Europe that had a very significant Jewish population before the war, and saw none of the German death facilities.” Those facilities, and the fields in which the Germans exterminated the vast majority of their Jewish victims, lay in the bloodlands, which were conquered by the Soviets.

But it was in Belarus where the conflagration between Nazis and Soviets, and between collaborationists and partisans, was greatest. By the end of the war, Snyder writes, a full half of the country’s population had either been killed or deported.

To this day, the populations of the former Soviet Bloc, and some elements of their intelligentsia, have yet to come to terms with their historical complicity in the Holocaust, painting their ancestors as victims, which indeed many of them no doubt were, while ignoring the fact that many were erstwhile collaborators.

The Nazi plan to eliminate the Jewish race — a plan which it executed often with the gleeful participation of local collaborators who needed no prompting in rounding up and murdering their Jewish neighbors — is today being downplayed so that Soviet crimes loom larger.

“the vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.” Their murders were personal affairs in that they involved soldiers firing bullets into their bodies; death did not take place within a closed chamber and the murderers saw the faces of their victims. Most of the killing took place in the fields and forests of Eastern Europe.

The perverse irony of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s desire to conquer the bloodlands was that by expanding their empires they diversified them. Suddenly, they had a whole lot of foreigners living under their domain, who would need to be pacified. And so the solution to this problem would have to be the liquidation of massive numbers of people.

What has allowed the Soviet Union to escape the same sort of historical reproach as Nazi Germany is that its killing was carried out in the furtherance of various causes — absolute economic equality, the preservation of a dictatorship, the collectivization of agriculture — that are not commonly considered to exist on the same moral plane as a theory of racial superiority. “In Stalinism mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism; it was never the political victory itself,” Snyder explains.

Academics, journalists and political leaders in this region, particularly in the Baltic states, have put forward a “double genocide” approach to understanding this period of European history, which, unlike the more nuanced take of Snyder (who, while placing the Stalinist and Nazi regimes alongside each other as subjects of historical inquiry, does not equate them in terms of moral depravity), is explicitly political.

Snyder reports that the Nazis deliberately killed upwards of eleven million; for the Soviets during the Stalin period the figure was between six and nine million. On the Soviet side, these numbers are far less than what had originally been believed, due to the opening of Eastern European and Soviet archives in the twenty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This historical airbrushing amounts to “Holocaust obfuscation,” in the words of the academic Dovid Katz, which, he writes, “tries to reduce all evil to equal evil, in effect to confuse the issue in order to write the inconvenient genocide that is the Holocaust out of history as a distinct category.” Last year, for instance, the Lithuanian government passed a law making it illegal to deny that the actions of the Soviet Union in Lithuania constitute “genocide,” as it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.

But his acknowledgement that the period of 1933 to 1945 was marked by several genocides, rather than a single one, does not lead him to promote the “double genocide” theory. Snyder has written elsewhere that “The mass murder of the Jews was, indeed, unprecedented in its horror; no other campaign involved such rapid, targeted and deliberate killing, or was so tightly bound to the idea that a whole people ought to be exterminated.” It is morally specious to compare the Jewish Holocaust to the Soviet “genocide” of Balts or Poles or Ukrainians, awful as the experiences of these peoples were, because of the inherently different nature of the methods the Soviet and Nazi regimes used against their subject populations. The Soviet Union had many local collaborators throughout its occupied and satellite territories. And while the Nazis also had collaborators during their occupation of the Baltic States, there was never any room for a Jewish collaborator in the Nazi project.

Though Stalin’s murder campaigns were, in many cases, predicated on ethnic antagonism, the difference is that the Soviets did not exterminate for extermination’s own sake. Once Stalin’s discrete policies had been achieved (the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, for instance), the mass murder stopped, and the Soviet Union eventually wound down its widescale deportations and mass killings in the mid- 1950s. Had Hitler’s  regime, with its animalistic understanding of human nature, lasted beyond 1945, its mass murder and terror would not have decreased. For these tactics were not just means but ends; they were the very lifeblood, the weltanschauung, of nazism itself.

The crucial factor one must consider in evaluating these two strains of totalitarianism is their competing long-term visions, and the policies that were required to execute them. Classifying Stalin’s various murder campaigns (alongside Nazi policies towards Roma, gays, educated Poles and Soviet citizens in Belarus and Ukraine) as “genocides,” which Snyder does, while also singling out the Holocaust as the worst of them all, is not mutually exclusive.

Bloodlands is an incredibly original work. It seeks to redirect our understanding of the Holocaust as primarily an eastern phenomenon, and one which took place among a spate of mass killing policies. When popular interest in the Holocaust and an “international collective memory” of it began to form in the 1970s and 1980s, it focused almost exclusively on the experience of German and West European Jews, the wealthiest and most assimilated on the continent, who died in far smaller numbers than did the Jews of Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic States, who were nearly eradicated. “Deprived of its Jewish distinctiveness in the East, and stripped of its geography in the West, the Holocaust never quite became part of European history,”

If one is to dismiss the role of Chritianity, one should at least take on the extremely rich literature associated with such names as Edward Grant, Toby Huff, James Hannam, and others, of which Morris shows not even a minimal awareness.

Morris's emphasis on a common cultural humanity is consistent with the officially established academic ideology of "diversity" (see Peter Wood's book, Diversity: The Invention of a Concept), which is intended precisely to do away with the notion that Western nations have a distinctive, particular identity.

The argument that the Scientific Revolution was made possible by the "requirements" for new knowledge occasioned by travel and exploration across the Atlantic is true only in the sense that this was part of a much wider set of institutional and intellectual developments with a long background history. Geography always matters; it is always there, but there is no way one can draw a neat line of causation from geographical mobility and colonization to Newtonian physics. For a far better line of argumentation, see the newly release, and more intelligently argued _Intellectual Curiosity and the Scientific Revolution_ (2010), by Toby Huff.

geography has shaped the development and the distribution of power and wealth in the world over the last 15,000 years, but at the same time the development of societies has changed what the geography means across this period. This is the core thing in the book."

next it is the British who are passively required to become inventive: "As the 18th century goes on, the British, in particular, find that the new wealth coming in from the new market economy is pushing up wages, making it rather difficult for the British to compete with some other European countries in their manufactures. The British, in particular, start facing the need to mechanize production and, ideally, to tap into new energy sources."

My view is the opposite; the Europeans who colonized the Americas and made revolutions in all spheres of life, in ancient, medieval, and modern times, were the most active, restless humans on earth. (And I might add that this disposition was nurtured by the geographical landscape of the European landmass which runs from the Pontic steppes all the way to the Atlantic). Morris's argument on British good luck in the possession of coal and colonies comes from A. G. Frank and Pomeranz; this is how Morris, apparently, integrates the long term and the short term, and, in this respect, goes beyond Diamond.

He finds it a bit alarming that Americans speak of decline as if it were a terrible thing; after all, "if you just substitute America and China, you get really remarkably similar kinds of things." It makes no difference if the US or China is the dominant power in the world.

This way of thinking is conterminous with Morris's geographical determinism and his claim that humans are all the same regardless of cultural background, religious beliefs and intellectual life. Americans and the Chinese are practically (in terms of what matters, economic growth and biological longevity) the same, or at least similarly enough that their difference don't really make much of a difference.

Seeing clearly, of course, isn’t easy in a world of endless night. And Mr. Austin’s lighting summons shadows pregnant with menace — all the characters keep looking over their shoulders to make sure they’re alone — and with dreams that take on flesh. Mr. Ashford uses his experience as a celebrated director of musicals to stunning, time-bending effect here, in sequences that include a funeral that turns into a coronation and a mesmerizing procession of royal apparitions.

the Clovis model was recently bolstered by new DNA analysis ancestrally connecting indigenous peoples in Central and South America to a boy from the Clovis culture whose 12,700-year-old remains were found in 1968 at a site in Montana.

she said she believed that humans had reached these plateaus even earlier, around 100,000 years ago, and might have come not overland from Asia but by boat from Africa.

Professor Boëda, who succeeded Dr. Guidon in leading the excavations, said that such early dates may have been possible but that more research was needed. His team is using thermoluminescence, a technique that measures the exposure of sediments to sunlight, to determine their age.

In what may be another blow to the Clovis model of humans’ coming from northeast Asia, molecular geneticists showed last year that the Botocudo indigenous people living in southeastern Brazil in the late 1800s shared gene sequences commonly found among Pacific Islanders from Polynesia.

How could Polynesians have made it to Brazil? Or aboriginal Australians? Or, if the archaeologists here are correct, how could a population arrive in this hinterland long before Clovis hunters began appearing in the Americas? The array of new discoveries has scholars on a quest for answers.

But he added that if the results obtained here in Serra da Capivara are accurate, they will raise even more questions about how the Americas were settled.“If so, then whoever lived there never passed on their genetic material to living populations,” said Dr. Waters, explaining how the genetic history of indigenous peoples links them to the Clovis child found in Montana. “We must think long and hard about these early sites and how they fit into the picture of the peopling of the Americas.”

the total number of undocumented immigrants now in the U.S. is 11.4 million people.

unlike the Senate-passed immigration bill ignored by the House, those protected from deportation will get only a temporary reprieve that could be reversed by Obama's successor, not a clear path to citizenship or permanent legal status.

Obama is also directing the Department of Homeland Security to make significant changes to how it enforces immigration laws. There will be more agents at the border, as well as structural changes to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to make its personnel closer in line with traditional law enforcement officers.

Legal immigrants will also have more flexibility to travel to their countries of origin, and those who are working under H-1B visas will be able to change jobs more easily and get employment visas for their spouses.

The administration plans to move cases involving immigrants and families with no criminal history down the list of deportation priorities so that the government can focus on "national security threats, serious criminals, and recent border crossers."

"We’re going to keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security," Obama said in his speech on Thursday night. "Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids. We’ll prioritize, just like law enforcement does every day."

any governing body, democratic or tyrannical, peace-loving or expansionist, “was obliged to maintain at its heart an institution committed to treachery and violence,” and because “violence and coercion . . . lay at the heart of social existence.” The earliest states required force to maintain systems of agricultural production; mature ones found that the threat of violence — by police within their borders, by armies between them — was, sadly, the best way to keep the peace.

Third, citizens thus face the duty of confronting and trying to control violence carried out in their name by the state, without blaming religion for it or imagining that the solution lies in a cleaner separation of church and state.

This extends to understanding the roots of violence or terrorism directed against them: “As an inspiration for terrorism . . . nationalism has been far more productive than religion.”

In nearly all cases, she argues, violent impulses that originated elsewhere — with nationalism, struggles for territory, resentment at loss of power — may have presented themselves as “religious” disputes but really had little to do with faith.

Armstrong demonstrates again and again that the great spasms of cruelty and killing through history have had little or no religious overlay. In modern times Hitler, Stalin and Mao were all atheists, and the power behind the Holocaust, Armstrong says, was an ethnic rather than a religious hatred. An overemphasis on religion’s damage can blind people to the nonholy terrors that their states inflict.

at the street level in Greece, there is little debate anymore, if there ever was. The images of suffering here have not been that different from the grainy black and white photos of the United States in the 1930s. Suicides have shot up. Cars sit abandoned in the streets. People sift garbage looking for food.

But the failures have been striking, leaving millions of Greeks baffled and angry as their lives disintegrated while the elite often escaped, untaxed and unbothered,

Even if more recent optimistic projections are to be believed, and a steady rate of growth can be expected, it would take Greece perhaps 15 years to regain the jobs it has lost,

Now, Greece is no longer spending far more than it receives, when debt payments are excluded, its officials say. It has remained in the European Union, and can again borrow in the bond markets, t

“The mix was not right,” Mr. Liargovas said of the austerity measures. “It was a cure that has almost killed the patient.”

In a wide-ranging review of the Greece program last year, the I.M.F. found that many of its predictions had failed. There was a sharp fall in imports, but little gain in exports. Public debt overshot original predictions. Predicted revenues from selling public assets were way off. The banking system, perceived as relatively sound at the beginning of the bailout, began having problems as the economy soured.

the I.M.F. concluded that many errors had been made, including too much emphasis on raising taxes instead of cutting expenses. In addition, the monetary fund overestimated the ability of the government to deliver the changes it was demanding — because they were proving politically unpopular and because Greek institutions were far weaker that anyone understood.

Administering these changes would have been difficult in a country with sound institutions, but Greece’s were filled with poorly qualified political appointees and were undergoing hiring freezes and budget cuts even as they were supposed to be managing a huge overhaul: a large assortment of new taxes, the opening of closed professions and the sale of state-owned assets.