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I think I'm deeply uncomfortable with any sort of populism. No matter the target--bankers or the poor--it seems to require its leaders to say, "There's nothing wrong with you America." 

In saying that I don't mean to ignore the difference in power, but to contest the notion of powerlessness as some sort of moral cleaning agent, and finally to contest the notion of powerlessness itself. There must be some way to acknowledge, all at once, the outer crookedness of deceptive lending, and then the inner crookedness of trying to get something for nothing.I was trying to get at some of this in the Jon Stewart thread, but the notion that Americans are pure, and what's really wrong with this country, has everything to do with aliens--the media, the Muslim, the poor, the illegal, the rich, the elites--but nothing to do with the natives strikes me as comfort food.

Nicotine, vaping helps you to realise, is a pretty pathetic drug. When you strip away the ritual of lighting up and scorching your lungs, you realise that the ritual and the scorching of the lungs were a large part of the appeal.

Which is not to say that vaping isn’t addictive. In fact, I found it far more addictive than smoking because, for all its many faults, smoking is an analogue technology that involves lighting something on fire. This imposes certain inbuilt consumption limits. Smoking sets off smoke detectors and landlords and makes your soft furnishings smell, so you generally avoid doing it indoors. It leaves a foul taste in your mouth and clogs your lungs, so you try not to do it every minute of the day.

This is not true of vaping

In both the Senate, controlled by Democrats, and the House, under the rule of Republicans, the minority is largely powerless to do anything but protest.

Actually, No. The point of that paragraph is that Congress is suffering from symmetrical paralysis, which is exactly wrong.

In the House, a minority is indeed "largely powerless." Just ask Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer, et al about how life has changed since 2010.In the Senate, it's very different. There a minority is extremely powerful. Just ask Mitch McConnell, who has made 60 votes -- not a simple majority of 51 -- the de-facto minimum for getting either nominees or legislation approved. 

there is much to fear about nationalism. Extreme nationalism has led to fascism, war, the persecution and slaughter of minorities and the undermining of democracy in the name of national unity

In regularly denouncing the give-and-take of party politics as a force dividing and corrupting “the people,” nationalists can open the path to rule by ruthless, cynical autocrats.

But those who would save liberal democracy (along with anyone who would advance a broadly progressive political outlook) need to be honest with themselves and less arrogant toward those who currently find nationalism attractive.

Many of the questions facing writers and artists and comedians are, however, similar. What is taboo? How far can we upset people? Should we transgress consensual boundaries?

there is also, unlike in most of the Muslim world, a general presumption of freedom of expression and laws and institutions that broadly protect free speech. This has made many sanguine about threats to speech.

Arab activists recognise that censorship aids the powerful, while free speech is a vital weapon for those struggling for change. It’s a point often forgotten in the west.

The confusion about these boycotts reveals something much larger than an infirm grasp of how the strategy works, and larger, even, than the pain and fear they produced in transgender people and their allies

The Bud Light and Target boycotts have been the most successful American-consumer boycotts in a quarter century. They made two large companies sustain serious material losses. That isn’t cause for more ennui or alienation. It’s a beacon: It can be done. And it should be done

We haven’t left these young people much. Many of them are so terrified about global warming that they believe that bringing a child into this world would be wrong. The retreat from religion has perhaps unburdened many of them from unfounded claims—but what has replaced it? What provides a community of shared belief, social outreach, the sense of living for some larger purpose? Nothing

Mr. Obama’s and Mr. Fisher’s plan hinged on recruiting blue-collar whites back into a reborn version of the March on Washington coalition. According to Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher, these votes could be won over with a platform that appealed to both the values and the material interests of working people. That meant shifting away from race-based initiatives toward universal economic policies whose benefits would, in practice, tilt toward African Americans — in short, “use class as a proxy for race.”

Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher didn’t pretend that racism had been expunged from American life. “Precisely because America is a racist society,” they wrote, “we cannot realistically expect white America to make special concessions towards blacks over the long haul.”

Demanding that white Americans grapple with four centuries of racial oppression might be a morally respectable position, but it was terrible politics. “Those blacks who most fervently insist on the pervasiveness of white racism have adopted a strategy that depends on white guilt for its effectiveness,” they wrote, ridiculing the idea that whites would “one day wake up, realize the error of their ways, and provide blacks with wholesale reparations in order to expiate white demons.”

We are experiencing the same problems and having the same arguments. It’s all leading to a pervasive feeling, especially among younger people, that our systems in the United States (including our system of government) “are no longer able to meet the challenges our country is facing.”

The internet, as a mediator of human interactions, is not a place, it is a time. It is the past. I mean this in a literal sense. The layers of artifice that mediate our online interactions mean that everything that comes to us online comes to us from the past—sometimes the very recent past, but the past nonetheless.

Sacasas asks us to revise the notion of real-time communications online, and to instead view our actions as “inscriptions,” or written and visual records. Like stars in the galaxy, our inscriptions seem to twinkle in the present, but their light is actually many years old.

Given the Jesuits’ watchword to find God “in all things,” some are hoping that the leadership of a Jesuit pope will allow the church to engage more openly and fearlessly with the world, to project the church’s message in new ways and to emphasize service to, and solidarity with, the poor. With an outsider now at the helm, they hope Francis will be able to shake up the culture of the Vatican.

Shaped by their experiences with the poor and powerless, many Jesuits lean liberal, politically and theologically, and are more concerned with social and economic justice than with matters of doctrinal purity. Jesuits were in the forefront of the movement known as liberation theology, which encouraged the oppressed to unite along class lines and seek change.

Francis, when he was head of the Jesuits in Argentina in the 1970s, was opposed to liberation theology, seeing it as too influenced by Marxist politics. The future pope came down hard on Jesuits in his province who were liberation theology proponents and left it badly divided, according to those who study the order and some members who did not want to be identified because he is now pope.

The Only Cure for OCD Is Expensive, Elusive, and Scary

She can’t resist picking up litter whenever she spots it; the other day she cleaned up the entire parking lot of her apartment complex. Each night, she must place her phone in an exact spot on the nightstand in order to fall asleep.

Since then, a succession of therapists have failed to help her. They’ve told her, “I don't really know how to treat this,” she said. Or, they talked to her about the possible source of her troubles.

North Korea conducted its fifth and biggest nuclear test on Friday and said it had mastered the ability to mount a warhead on a ballistic missile, ratcheting up a threat that its rivals and the United Nations have been powerless to contain.

The blast, on the 68th anniversary of North Korea's founding, was more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, according to some estimates. It was condemned by the United States, which said it would work with partners to impose new sanctions on North Korea, and by China, Pyongyang's main ally.

The United Nations Security Council would discuss the test and whether the 15-member body should punish the reclusive state by imposing further sanctions at a closed-door meeting on Friday requested by the United States, Japan and South Korea, diplomats said.

Is Trump himself a racist? Who the bloody hell cares? There is no difference in public influence between a politician who is a racist and one who appeals to racist sentiments with racist arguments. The harm to the country — measured in division and fear — is the same, whatever the inner workings of Trump’s heart.

Trump’s attack on Judge Gonzalo Curiel was not different in kind. But for Republican leaders, this much was new: Since Trump now owns them, they now own his prejudice. Sure, Trump has gone nativist before, but this time it followed their overall stamp of approval, given in the cause of Republican unity.

Republicans have clung to the hope that Trump might find unsuspected resources of leadership; lacking that, to the hope that he might be co-opted; and lacking that, to the hope of laying low and avoiding the Trump taint. All delusions. Having tied themselves to Trump’s anchor, the protests of GOP leaders are merely the last string of bubbles escaping from their lungs.

the challenge for Jared Kushner, and everyone in our extraordinarily privileged generation, is to remember our ancestors’ suffering and honor their memories by defending the weak, vulnerable and oppressed today.

Slavery, in other words, was meant to ensure that Jews would remember powerlessness once they gained power. Jared Kushner is what happens when that memory fails.

How could Kushner — a Modern Orthodox golden boy — fail to internalize that? How could he invite Donald Trump’s Cabinet to his house for Shabbat dinner only hours after his father-in-law’s executive order banning refugees from entering the United States? How could he pose in a tuxedo alongside his wife, Ivanka Trump, on Saturday night as that executive order wreaked havoc on innocent people’s lives simply because they hailed from the wrong countries?

While the debate continues over how much to give Greece and when to give it, Russell Shorto, a contributing writer for the magazine, takes you on a journey to discover how Greeks live now. In the process, he ends up unveiling much about how Greece is likely to live tomorrow, and the place it — and Europe? — may occupy in an international order that is rapidly shifting:

By many indicators, Greece is devolving into something unprecedented in modern Western experience. A quarter of all Greek companies have gone out of business since 2009, and half of all small businesses in the country say they are unable to meet payroll. The suicide rate increased by 40 percent in the first half of 2011. A barter economy has sprung up, as people try to work around a broken financial system. Nearly half the population under 25 is unemployed.

The situation at the macro level is, if anything, even more transformational. The Chinese have largely taken over Piraeus, Greece’s main port, with an eye to make it a conduit for shipping goods into Europe. Qatar is looking to invest $5 billion in various projects in Greece, including tourism infrastructure. Other, relatively flush Europeans are trying to make “Greece the Florida of Europe,” Theodore Pelagidis, a Greek economist at the University of Piraeus, told me, referring in particular to plans to turn islands into expensive retirement homes for wealthy people from other parts of the continent. Whether or not the country pays its debts, he went on, other nations and foreign companies “now understand the Greek government is powerless, so in the future they will take over viable assets and run parts of the country by themselves.”

Rural Oregon’s LostProsperity Gives Standoffa Distressed Backdrop

a lifelong resident who has lost his job twice and has filed for bankruptcy once, said that was not the case anymore. He now works for the state as a prison guard, a job he said he hated.

“You do what you have to do to stay alive,”

What do I mean by cynical politics? Partly I mean the tacit alliance between businesses and the wealthy, on one side, and racists on the other, that is the essence of the modern conservative movement.

sooner or later something like Trump was going to happen: a candidate who meant the racism seriously, with the enthusiastic support of the Republican base, and couldn’t be controlled.

Recently Tom Donohue, the chamber’s head, published an article decrying Trump’s mistreatment of children at the border, declaring “this is not who we are.” Sorry, Mr. Donohue, it is who you are: You and your allies spent decades empowering racists, and now the bill is coming due.

As someone who spent a whole career in public health working to reduce tobacco use, I’ve long thought part of the answer to the gun problem is to denormalize gun use and gun ownership. This is what happened in many ways with tobacco, probably the biggest instance being restrictions on smoking indoors, which in addition to protecting innocent bystanders from carcinogens, greatly reduced the social utility of cigarettes and changed the smoker’s image, both to himself and others. (Open carry is the gun equivalent of reversing this process).

I’d like to see some deep thinkers researching how to do that with firearms. It will be hard, given the glorification of guns in so much of society, including mass media, but then, cigarettes once were treated the same way (with the help of paid placement from cigarette makers).

we are not collectively powerless in the face of culture. We know this from the evolution of perceptions of drunk driving, smoking, domestic violence and numerous other de-valorized activities. We reify cultural norms in laws and laws, along with the behaviors they shape in turn, changes culture.

“Many young people have absorbed a YouTube-centric worldview, including rejecting mainstream information sources in favor of platform-native creators bearing ‘secret histories’ and faux-authoritative explanations.”

YouTube likes to say that this problematic stuff is “less than one percent of the content on YouTube.” This is, undoubtedly, true, simply because there is so much stuff on YouTube

One exploration from 2015 found that fully half of its videos had fewer than 350 views, and that 90 percent had fewer than roughly 11,000 views. That is to say, YouTube is driven not by the tail of barely viewed videos, but by the head of wildly popular stuff

Good judges know what they must decide and what they need not. The late Judge John Butzner Jr. of the Fourth Circuit, for whom I clerked a quarter century ago, used to tell each new clerk, “Don’t talk to me about the law until you understand the facts.”

Judges must have the self-discipline to respect the limits of their role. Deciding only the case before you—whether that changes the law or simply reaffirms it—is a key judicial virtue. “God has a terrible problem,” runs the old joke. “He thinks he’s a federal judge

Good judges also listen to both parties. Former Justice Anthony Kennedy used to ask advocates, “What’s your strongest case?,

The powerful should never tell relatively powerless people who are protesting for their very lives how they should be behaving.

It was young people protesting about the death of another Florida teenager who died from gun violence six years ago, Trayvon Martin, that led to the Black Lives Matter movement. Their love for that boy killed by George Zimmerman helped spark a movement honoring the value of black life.

To these gay men and their allies, mourning meant being militant about how the dead had been killed by homophobia and inaction – much as the teens staging a die-in outside the White House last week were protesting about the present federal government’s complicity via inaction on gun deaths.