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In places such as Silicon Valley, the slopes of Davos, Switzerland, and the halls of Harvard Business School, there is a sense that the kind of capitalism that once made America an economic envy is responsible for the growing inequality and anger that is tearing the country apart.

Americans still loved technology, Khanna said, but too many of them felt locked out of the country’s economic future and were looking for someone to blame.

Without an intervention, he worried that wealth would continue to pile up in Silicon Valley and anger in the country would continue to grow. “It seems like every company in the world has to be here,” Larsen said. “It’s just painfully obvious that the blob is getting bigger.

On Thursday, Chung Eui Yong, South Korea’s national security advisor, told a stunned group of journalists at the White House that President Donald Trump had accepted an invitation to meet with Kim Jong Un, the leader of North Korea. Like so many other decisions in this White House, this one felt chaotic. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, for example, seemed to learn of the decision to hold the meeting, which is planned to occur by May, only after it was made. (He and other administration officials have since downplayed its significance, though Trump on Friday night tweeted: “The deal with North Korea is very much in the making.”) And yet: While one may wish that Trump acted less impulsively, a Trump-Kim summit is a good idea, one that may solve the problem of a truculent North Korea.

It’s also worth remembering that when it comes to North Korea, nukes are hardly the only danger. Even if Pyongyang relinquished its entire nuclear arsenal, it would still possess a large stockpile of chemical and biological weapons, and could decimate Seoul, South Korea’s capital, with its conventional weaponry. The real problem is not North Korea’s nuclear arms, but its potential willingness to use them, along with the rest of its weapons, in a way that harms U.S. interests.

The reasonable best-case scenario for North Korea is that the Kim regime focuses almost exclusively on staying in power and delivering economic growth to its citizens rather than threatening the United States or its neighbors. (Think something like Vietnam after its 1980s economic liberalization—but with nuclear weapons.) Actually pushing for regime change is risky. A coup could replace Kim with a benevolent dictator who prepares the country for elections and reunification with the South under Seoul—or with a general who decides that launching nuclear weapons at the United States, or selling them to a group like the Islamic State, serves Pyongyang’s interests.

The good news is that much of the world is fed up with corruption. The bad news is that the way many are fighting corruption is ineffective. Too often, the remedy centers on finding and empowering an honest leader who promises to stamp out the problem. Worldwide, candidates for elected offices are running on highly personalized anti-corruption platforms, offering themselves as the solution. What countries really need, though, are smart laws that reduce the incentives and opportunities for corruption. They also need strong institutions that enforce those laws and deprive corrupt officials, and their private-sector accomplices, of impunity in their efforts to get rich at the public’s expense.

Societies that bet on an honest leader to solve their problems almost always lose out. Such leaders may turn out to have integrity, or they may not. Silvio Berlusconi, Vladimir Putin, and Hugo Chávez all came to power promising to stamp out corruption. And we know how that turned out.

The fight against corruption does not have to be corrupt, however. In Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay, for example, the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) is supporting “public innovation laboratories” that experiment with new methods of monitoring and controlling government conduct.

Zuckerberg wrote Facebook is not “comfortable” deciding which news sources are the most trustworthy in a “world with so much division."

"We decided that having the community determine which sources are broadly trusted would be most objective," he wrote.

The new trust rankings will emerge from surveys the company is conducting. "Broadly trusted" outlets that are affirmed by a significant cross-section of users may see a boost in readership, while less known organizations or start-ups receiving poor ratings could see their web traffic decline

History guided them as they crafted the American system of governance. This included the European traditions they were partially rejecting, but also elements from an older generation of republics that they wished to copy, especially the Roman Republic.

Not surprisingly, then, Rome inspired many features of our own Constitution, including its checks and balances, bicameral legislature, term limits and age requirements. In some cases, the Founders copied terms straight out of the Roman constitution: words like senate, capitol and committee.

A tour through the artwork of the U.S. Capitol today reveals early Americans saw the Roman ideals of farming, working hard, raising strong families and participating in local government as the building blocks for a strong national republic.

No myth is stronger in progressive circles than the magical, wonderworking powers of voter turnout. It’s become a sort of pixie dust that you sprinkle over your strenuously progressive positions to ward off any suggestion that they might turn off voters.

Sanders’s explanation of why this is not a problem is simple, and he has repeated it endlessly. When a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board asked him whether “a candidate as far to the left as you” would “alienate swing voters and moderates and independents,” the senator replied: “The only way that you beat Trump is by having an unprecedented campaign, an unprecedentedly large voter turnout.”

Faiz Shakir, Sanders’s campaign manager, adds: “Bernie Sanders has very unique appeal amongst [the younger] generation and can inspire, I think, a bunch of them to vote in percentages that they have never voted before.”

We Americans have always fancied ourselves practical, can-do people who put old feuds aside when faced with a big collective problem.

Instead, Trump championed the extremists who continued their marches on several state capitals over the weekend demanding an abrupt and reckless end to the temporary shutdowns that have slowed the virus’s spread

This tradition acknowledges that we often have multiple goals. In the coronavirus crisis, this means beating the pandemic and getting the economy humming again.

“When a man as uncouth and reckless as Trump becomes president by running against the nation’s elites, it’s a strong signal that the elites are the problem.”

The last four months, on the other hand, have been an education in the shortcomings in populism. It’s not only that Donald Trump is a bad president. It’s that movements fueled by alienation are bound to fail.

a “state of mind that can find a social order remote, incomprehensible or fraudulent; beyond real hope or desire; inviting apathy, boredom, or even hostility.”

McCarthy was dangerous—“no bolder seditionist ever moved among us,” Richard H. Rovere wrote in his classic Senator Joe McCarthy—but much of the country was with him because he embodied, however boorishly, the forces of change.

he was a Republican, and his victory in 1952 was smashing: 55 percent of the popular vote and 442 electoral votes. The trouble was his coattails. They were just wide enough to give the Republicans a one-vote advantage in the Senate

the conservative wing of the party numbered eight to twelve senators.” They were the aboriginal right—Old Guard isolationists and enemies of the New Deal.

Through sheer bulk, the string of revelations about men from Bill Cosby to Roger Ailes to Harvey Weinstein to Louis C.K. to Al Franken and, this week, to Charlie Rose and John Lasseter, have forced men to confront what they hate to think about most: the nature of men in general

Men arrive at this moment of reckoning woefully unprepared. Most are shocked by the reality of women’s lived experience. Almost all are uninterested or unwilling to grapple with the problem at the heart of all this: the often ugly and dangerous nature of the male libido.

For most of history, we’ve taken for granted the implicit brutality of male sexuality.

But the newly fashionable anti-racist thinking contains a mix of good ideas and bad ones — including some that are dangerously counterproductive for the people they are intended to help

By all means, let’s dispense with the frustrating and at times hypocritical meta-debate about “free speech” (in the context of racism) and “cancel culture.”

Bland agreement that “racism is bad” does not suffice when racism is reconceptualized as an abstract attribute of policies and systems, as opposed to bigoted individual behaviors.

New York Democrats have called for the governor to resign over sexual harassment allegations, but no national figures have joined the chorus

But no other national Democrats have joined the chorus. The Axios website branded it the party’s “hypocrisy moment”, arguing: “Governor Andrew Cuomo should be facing explicit calls to resign from President Biden on down, if you apply the standard that Democrats set for similar allegations against Republicans. And it’s not a close call.”

But in 2017, as the #MeToo movement held powerful men accountable, Kirsten Gillibrand, a senator who holds Hillary Clinton’s former seat in New York, argued that the former president should have resigned over the affair.

On Monday, the agency will rule on the drug, aducanumab, which aims to slow progression of memory and thinking problems early in the disease. If approved, it would be the first new Alzheimer’s medication since 2003 and the first treatment on the market that attacks the disease process rather than just easing symptoms.

Beyond the status of this particular drug, some experts worry approval could lower standards for future drugs — an especially important question at a time when public trust in science is teetering.

Debate centers on two never fully completed Phase 3 trials that contradicted each other. One suggested that a high dose could slightly slow cognitive decline; the other showed no benefit. Biogen says that given the need for Alzheimer’s medications, the single positive trial, plus results from a small safety trial and aducanumab’s ability to reduce a key protein, should justify approval.The F.D.A. typically follows advisory committee recommendations and usually requires two convincing studies for approval, but it has made exceptions, especially for severe diseases that lack treatments.

It’s an unfamiliar experience in a country where we’ve treated these kinds of conflicts as private crises to be solved individually. But it has always been true that without an adequate system of child care, elder care and paid leave, personal emergencies and family demands often derail Americans’ ability to get to work

We’re in the middle of a loud debate over what, exactly, counts as “infrastructure.” The word has come to be associated with the country’s physical assets: our national highway system, the pipes that bring us water and the cables that bring us electricity, the tarmac in our airports and the tracks on our train routes.

Republicans are lining up their opposition to the package behind the idea that these things aren’t “real” infrastructure. “There is a core infrastructure bill that we could pass” focused on “roads and bridges and even reaching out to broadband,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, told “Fox News Sunday.” “So let’s do it and leave the rest for another day and another fight.” Business lobbyists are pushing hard to get Mr. Biden to drop the caregiving parts of his package. But it’s not just conservatives; it’s (mostly) men of differing political persuasions. Politico’s Playbook deemed it “silly” to call home care services for the elderly and disabled infrastructure.

But his refusal to accept defeat and the violence that followed appears to have damaged the prospects of similarly minded leaders across the continent.

“What happened in the Capitol following the defeat of Donald Trump is a bad omen for the populists,” said Dominique Moïsi, a senior analyst at the Paris-based Institut Montaigne. “It says two things: If you elect them, they don’t leave power easily, and if you elect them, look at what they can do in calling for popular anger.”

Heather Grabbe, director of the Open Society European Policy Institute in Brussels, said the unrest showed how the populist playbook was founded on “us versus them and leads to violence.”

Lt. Ivan Molchanets peeked over a parapet of sand bags at the front line of the war in Ukraine. Next to him was an empty helmet propped up to trick snipers, already perforated with multiple holes.In other spots, his soldiers stuff straw into empty uniforms to make dummies, and put logs on their shoulders to make it look like they are carrying American antitank missiles — as a scare tactic.“This is just the situation here,” he said, shrugging as he held the government’s position. “The enemy is very close.”

the war in Ukraine has killed 13,000 people, put a large part of the country under Russia’s control and dragged on for five years almost forgotten by the outside world — until it became a backdrop to the impeachment inquiry of President Trump now unfolding in Washington.

Ukraine, politically disorganized and militarily weak, has relied heavily on the United States in its struggle with Russian-backed separatists. But the White House abruptly suspended nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in July and only restored it last month after a bipartisan uproar in Congress.

ebanese protesters demanding the resignation of corrupt officials clashed Friday with security forces across the country, shortly after Lebanon’s prime minister set a 72-hour deadline for the government to settle on measures aimed at addressing a mounting economic crisis.

Several developments over the past week seemed to add fuel to the protests: Wildfires ravaged parts of the country, but two firefighting helicopters were deemed inoperable because of government negligence; the minister of information announced plans to enforce a 20-cents-a-day fee for Internet phone calls, including on WhatsApp and Facebook; and there was a proposal to raise the value-added tax to 15 percent by 2022.

Protesters took to Beirut’s streets early Friday and by late in the day were demonstrating in every major city in Lebanon. They demanded action to address their everyday hardships — including the rising prices of wheat and gas and the lack of clean water and clean air — in addition to condemning widespread corruption within the government, which has been dominated by the same families for decades.

The political and economic power wielded by the approximately 750 wealthiest people in America has become a sudden flash point in the 2020 presidential election

The populist onslaught has ensnared Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, led to billionaire hand-wringing on cable news, and sparked a panicked discussion among wealthy Americans and their financial advisers about how to prepare for a White House controlled by populist Democrats.

With the stock market at an all-time high, the debate about wealth accumulation and inequality has become a top issue in the 2020 campaign

2020 was the year Reaganism died.

What I mean by Reaganism goes beyond voodoo economics, the claim that tax cuts have magical power and can solve all problems. After all, nobody believes in that claim aside from a handful of charlatans and cranks, plus the entire Republican Party.

No, I mean something broader — the belief that aid to those in need always backfires, that the only way to improve ordinary people’s lives is to make the rich richer and wait for the benefits to trickle down.

Everyone was pretty much freaking out.

Do you think the damage Donald Trump has done to the country is irreparable? Or can we find our way back to something approaching normality?

We’re just on the edge of getting rid of this man, after four years of total trauma. I think we deserve at least a couple of nights of cheer before we tackle the irreparable damage issue.