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Some players in this online echo chamber were knowingly part of the propaganda campaign, the researchers concluded, while others were “useful idiots” — a term born of the Cold War to describe people or institutions that unknowingly assisted Soviet Union propaganda efforts

The Russian campaign during this election season, researchers from both groups say, worked by harnessing the online world’s fascination with “buzzy” content that is surprising and emotionally potent, and tracks with popular conspiracy theories about how secret forces dictate world events

Some of these stories originated with RT and Sputnik, state-funded Russian information services that mimic the style and tone of independent news organizations yet sometimes include false and misleading stories in their report

On other occasions, RT, Sputnik and other Russian sites used social-media accounts to amplify misleading stories already circulating online, causing news algorithms to identify them as “trending” topics that sometimes prompted coverage from mainstream American news organizations.

The speed and coordination of these efforts allowed Russian-backed phony news to outcompete traditional news organizations for audience.

other misleading stories in August about Clinton’s supposedly troubled health. The Daily Beast debunked a particularly widely read piece in an article that reached 1,700 Facebook accounts and was read online more than 30,000 times

But the PropOrNot researchers found that the version supported by Russian propaganda reached 90,000 Facebook accounts and was read more than 8 million times. The researchers said the true Daily Beast story was like “shouting into a hurricane” of false stories supported by the Russians.

The final weeks of the campaign featured a heavy dose of stories about supposed election irregularities, allegations of vote-rigging and the potential for Election Day violence should Clinton win

“The way that this propaganda apparatus supported Trump was equivalent to some massive amount of a media buy,”

“It was like Russia was running a super PAC for Trump’s campaign. . . . It worked.”

A former U.S. ambassador to Russia, Michael A. McFaul, said he was struck by the overt support that RT and Sputnik expressed for Trump during the campaign, even using the #CrookedHillary hashtag pushed by the candidate.

“They don’t try to win the argument,” said McFaul, now director of the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. “It’s to make everything seem relative. It’s kind of an appeal to cynicism.”

“They use our technologies and values against us to sow doubt,” said Robert Orttung, a GWU professor who studies Russia. “It’s starting to undermine our democratic system.

The same tactics, researchers said, helped Russia shape international opinions about its 2014 annexation of Crimea and its military intervention in Syria, which started last year. Russian propaganda operations also worked to promote the “Brexit” departure of Britain from the European Union

“For them, it’s actually a real war, an ideological war, this clash between two systems,” said Sufian Zhemukhov, a former Russian journalist conducting research at GWU. “In their minds, they’re just trying to do what the West does to Russia.”

RT broadcasts news reports worldwide in several languages, but the most effective way it reaches U.S. audiences is online. Its English-language flagship YouTube channel, launched in 2007, has 1.85 million subscribers and has had a total of 1.8 billion views, making it more widely viewed than CNN’s YouTube channel

Though widely seen as a propaganda organ, the Russian site has gained credibility with some American conservatives. Trump sat for an interview with RT in September. His nominee for national security adviser, retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, traveled to Russia last year for a gala sponsored by the network. He later compared it to CNN.

The content from Russian sites has offered ready fodder for U.S.-based websites pushing far-right conservative messages. A former contractor for one, the Next News Network, said he was instructed by the site’s founder, Gary S. Franchi Jr., to weave together reports from traditional sources such as the Associated Press and the Los Angeles Times with ones from RT, Sputnik and others that provided articles that often spread explosively online.

“The readers are more likely to share the fake stories, and they’re more profitable,” said Dyan Bermeo, who said he helped assemble scripts and book guests for Next News Network before leaving because of a pay dispute and concerns that “fake news” was crowding out real news.

In just the past 90 days — a period that has included the closing weeks of the campaign, Election Day and its aftermath — the YouTube audience of Next News Network has jumped from a few hundred thousand views a day to a few million, according to analytics firm Tubular Labs. In October alone, videos from Next News Network were viewed more than 56 million times

Let’s push for home visitation programs that encourage parents to speak to children and read to them; many low-income homes don’t have a single kid’s book. We also need initiatives to reduce exposure to lead and other toxins. Finally, how about screenings for problems like hearing and visual impairment — all followed by a good prekindergarten.

all young children should have a primary care physician who screens them for eight barriers to learning: vision problems, hearing deficits, undertreated asthma, anemia, dental pain, hunger, lead exposure and behavioral problems.

Let’s broaden the conversation about opportunity, to build not just safety nets for those who stumble but also to help all American kids achieve lift-off.

Even the relatively favored areas had rainfall of just 20 to 40 centimeters (8 to 15 inches)—where 20 centimeters (8 inches) is regarded as the absolute minimum to sustain agriculture—and the national average was less than 10 centimeters (4 inches)

Considering only “agricultural Syria,” the population is about five times as dense as Ohio or Belgium, but it does not have Ohio’s or Belgium’s other means of generating income.

Syria is not just a piece of land; it is densely populated. When I first visited Syria in 1946, the total population was less than 3 million. In 2010, it reached nearly 24 million.

The bottom line is that the population/resource ratio is out of balance. While there has been a marginal increase of agricultural land and more efficient cropping with better seed, neither has kept up with population growth.

During Ottoman rule the population was organized in two overlapping ways. First, there was no “Syria” in the sense of a nation-state, but rather provinces (Turkish: pashaliqs) that were centered on the ancient cities. The most important of these were Damascus, which may be the oldest permanently settled city in the world today, and Aleppo.

throughout its centuries of rule, the Ottoman Empire generally was content to have its subjects live by their own codes of behavior. It did not have the means or the incentive to intrude into their daily lives. Muslims, whether Turk or Arab or Kurd, shared with the imperial government Islamic mores and law. Other ethnic/religious “nations” (Turkish: millet) were self-governing except in military and foreign affairs.

the same groups also moved into mainly Muslim cities and towns, where they tended to live in more or less segregated neighborhoods that resembled medieval European urban ghettos or modern American “Little Italys” or “Chinatowns.”

Since this system was spelled out in the Quran and the Traditions (Hadiths) of the Prophet, respecting it was legally obligatory for Muslims. Consequently, when the Syrian state took shape, it inherited a rich, diverse, and tolerant social tradition.

the French created a “Greater” Lebanon from the former autonomous adjunct provinces (Turkish: sanjaqs) of Mount Lebanon and Beirut. To make it their anchor in an otherwise hostile Levant, they aimed both to make it Christian-dominated and big enough to exist as a state. But these aims were incompatible: the populations they added, taken from the pashaliq of Damascus, were mainly Muslim, so the French doomed Lebanon to be a precariously unbalanced society.

the French reversed course. They united the country as defined in the mandate but attempted to change its social and cultural orientation. Their new policy aimed to supplant the common language, Arabic, with French, to make French customs and law the exemplar, to promote Catholicism as a means to undercut Islam, and to favor the minorities as a means to control the Muslim majority. It was inevitable that the native reaction to these intrusions would be first the rise of xenophobia and then the spread of what gradually became a European style of nationalism.

When French policies did not work and nationalism began to offer an alternate vision of political life, the French colonial administration fell back on violence. Indeed throughout the French period—in contrast to the relatively laissez-faire rule of the Ottoman Empire—violence was never far below the outward face of French rule.

the “peace” the French achieved was little more than a sullen and frustrated quiescence; while they did not create dissension among the religious and ethnic communities, the French certainly magnified it and while they did not create hostility to foreigners, they gave the native population a target that fostered the growth of nationalism. These developments have lingered throughout the last 70 years and remain powerful forces today.

in the years after the French were forced out, coup leader after military dictator spoke in nationalist rhetoric but failed to lead his followers toward “the good life.”

for three and a half years, Syria became a part of the United Arab Republic.

Union did not work, so in 1961 Syrians were thrown back on their own resources. A fundamental problem they faced was what it meant to be a Syrian.

The more conservative, affluent, and Westernized nationalists believed that nationhood had to be built not on a religious but on a territorial base. That is, single-state nationalism (Arabic: wataniyah) was the focus of Syria’s statehood.

Their program, however, did not lead to success; its failure opened the way for a redefinition of nationalism as pan-Arab or folk nationalism (Arabic: qawmiyah). As it was codified by the Baath Party, it required that Syria be considered not a separate nation-state but a part of the whole Arab world and be domestically organized as a unified, secular, and at least partly Westernized state. This was a particularly difficult task because the dominant Muslim community, initially as a result of French rule and later as a result of domestic turbulence and foreign interference, regarded the members of the minority communities, particularly the Jewish community, as actual or potential turncoats.

as Syrians struggled for a sense of identity and came to suspect social difference and to fear the cooperation of minorities with foreigners, being an Alawi or a Christian or a Jew put people under a cloud. So, for Hafez al-Assad, the secular, nationalist Baath Party was a natural choice

Their answer was to try to bridge the gaps between rich and poor through a modified version of socialism, and between Muslims and minorities through a modified concept of Islam. Islam, in their view, needed to be considered politically not as a religion but as a manifestation of the Arab nation. Thus, the society they wished to create, they proclaimed, should be modern (with, among other things, equality for women), secular (with faith relegated to personal affairs), and defined by a culture of “Arabism” overriding the traditional concepts of ethnicity.

The “Resurrection” (Arabic: Baath) Party had its origins, like the nationalist-communist Vietnamese movement, in France. Two young Syrians, one a Christian and the other a Sunni Muslim, who were then studying in Paris were both attracted to the grandeur of France and appalled by the weakness of Syria. Like Ho Chi Minh, they wanted to both become like France and get the French out of their nation. Both believed that the future lay in unity and socialism. For Michel Aflaq and Salah Bitar, the forces to be defeated were “French oppression, Syrian backwardness, a political class unable to measure up to the challenge of the times,”

After Assad’s assault in 1982, the Syrian city of Hama looked like the Iraqi city of Fallujah after the American assault in 2004. Acres of the city were submerged under piles of rubble. But then, like Stalingrad after the German attack or Berlin after the Russian siege, reconstruction began. In a remarkable series of moves, Hafez al-Assad ordered the rubble cleared away, built new highways, constructed new schools and hospitals, opened new parks, and even, in a wholly unexpected conciliatory gesture, erected two huge new mosques. He thus made evident what had been his philosophy of government since he first took power: help the Syrian people to live better provided only that they not challenge his rule. In his thought and actions, his stern and often-brutal monopoly of power, he may be compared to the ruling men, families, parties, and establishments of Chinese, Iranian, Russian, Saudi Arabian, Vietnamese, and numerous other regimes.

Hafez al-Assad did not need to wait for leaks of documents: his intelligence services and international journalists turned up dozens of attempts by conservative, oil-rich Arab countries, the United States, and Israel to subvert his government. Most engaged in “dirty tricks,” propaganda, or infusions of money, but it was noteworthy that in the 1982 Hama uprising, more than 15,000 foreign-supplied machine guns were captured, along with prisoners including Jordanian- and CIA-trained paramilitary forces (much like the jihadists who appear so much in media accounts of 2013 Syria). And what he saw in Syria was confirmed by what he learned about Western regime-changing elsewhere.

As Iraq “imploded” in coups beginning in 1958 and morphed into Saddam Husain’s regime, the Syrians came to regard it as an enemy second only to Israel.

During the rule of the two Assads, Syria made considerable progress. By the eve of the civil war, Syrians enjoyed an income (GDP) of about $5,000 per capita. That was nearly the same as Jordan’s, roughly double the income per capita of Pakistan and Yemen, and five times the income of Afghanistan, but it is only a third that of Lebanon, Turkey, or Iran

In 2010, savaged by the great drought, GDP per capita had fallen to about $2,900, according to UN data. Before the civil war—and except in 2008 at the bottom of the drought, when it was zero—Syria’s growth rate hovered around 2 percent,

In social affairs, nearly 90 percent of Syrian children attended primary or secondary schools and between eight and nine in 10 Syrians had achieved literacy. On these measures, Syria was comparable to Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Libya despite having far fewer resources to employ.

Like his father, Bashar sought to legitimize his regime through elections, but apparently he never intended, and certainly did not find, a way satisfactory (to the public) and acceptable (to his regime) of enlarged political participation.

The lack of political participation, fear of public demands, and severe police measures made the regime appear to be a tyranny

This and its hostility to Israel led to large-scale, if covert, attempts at regime change by outside powers including the United States. These acts of subversion became particularly pronounced during the second Bush administration.

between 2 and 3 million of Syria’s 10 million rural inhabitants were reduced to “extreme poverty.”  

Four years of devastating drought beginning in 2006 caused at least 800,000 farmers to lose their entire livelihood and about 200,000 simply abandoned their lands, according to the Center for Climate & Security. In some areas, all agriculture ceased. In others, crop failures reached 75 percent. And generally as much as 85 percent of livestock died of thirst or hunger. Hundreds of thousands of Syria’s farmers gave up, abandoned their farms, and fled to the cities and towns

Syria was already a refuge for a quarter of a million Palestinians and about 100,000 Iraqis who had fled the war and occupation. Formerly prosperous farmers were lucky to get jobs as hawkers or street sweepers. And in the desperation of the times, hostilities erupted among groups that were competing just to survive.

And so tens of thousands of frightened, angry, hungry, and impoverished former farmers were jammed into Syria’s towns and cities, where they constituted tinder ready to catch fire.

Instead of meeting with the protesters and at least hearing their complaints, the government saw them as subversives. The lesson of Hama must have been at the front of the mind of every member of the Assad regime. Failure to act decisively, Hama had shown, inevitably led to insurrection. Compromise could come only after order was assured. So Bashar followed the lead of his father. He ordered a crackdown. And the army, long frustrated by inaction and humiliated by its successive defeats in confrontation with Israel, responded violently. Its action backfired. Riots broke out all over the country. As they did, the government attempted to quell them with military force. It failed. So, during the next two years, what had begun as a food and water issue gradually turned into a political and religious cause.

we don’t know much about the rebels. Hundreds of groups and factions—called “brigades” even when they are just a dozen or so people—have been identified. Some observes believe that there are actually over 1,000 brigades. A reasonable guess is that, including both part-time and full-time insurgents, they number about 100,000 fighters.

In Syria, quite different causes of splits among the brigades are evident. To understand the insurgency there, we must look carefully at the causes. The basis is religion

During the course of the Assad regime, the interpretation of Islam was undergoing a profound change. This was true not only of Syria but also of understanding, practice, and action in many other areas of the world.

tens of thousands of young foreigners flocked to Syria to fight for what they see as a religious obligation (Arabic: fi sabili’llah).

in Syria, while many Muslims found the Assad regime acceptable and many even joined its senior ranks, others saw its Alawi and Christian affiliations, and even its secularism and openness to Muslim participation, insupportable.

The foreign jihadists, like the more recent nationalists, put their emphasis on a larger-than-Syria range. For them, it is a folk nationalism not only to the Arab world but also to the wider world of Islam, affecting a billion people across the globe. What they seek is a restored Islamic world, a Dar ul-Islam, or a new caliphate.

the aims of the two broad groups—the Syrians and the foreigners—have grown apart in a way similar to the split that occurred in Arab nationalism. The Syrians focus on Syria and seek the overthrow of the Assad regime much as their fathers and grandfathers focused on the task of getting the French out of their country—their watan. Their nationalism is single-country oriented

all the rebels regard the conflict in Syria as fundamentally a religious issue. Particularly for the native rebels, as I have pointed out, the religious issue is overlaid by ethnic complexities.

It would be a mistake to regard the Syrian war, as some outside observers have done, as a fight between the forces of freedom and tyranny. If the opponents of the regime are fighting for some form of democracy, they have yet to make their voices heard.

as in Afghanistan, they have fought one another over territory, access to arms, leadership, and division of spoils as bitterly as they have fought their proclaimed enemy. This fracturing has made them impossible to defeat—as the Russians experienced in Afghanistan—but also, so far at least, incapable of governing on a national scale. But they are moving in that direction.

All observers agree that the foreign-controlled and foreign-constituted insurgent groups are the most coherent, organized, and effective. This is little short of astonishing as they share no common language and come from a wide variety of cultures.

Paradoxically, governments that would have imprisoned the same activists in their own countries have poured money, arms, and other forms of aid into their coffers. The list is long and surprising in its makeup: it includes Turkey; the conservative Arab states, particularly Qatar and Saudi Arabia; the EU member states; and the U.S.

The United States has a long history of covertly aiding insurgents in Syria, and has engaged in propaganda, espionage, and various sorts of dirty tricks. The rebels, naturally, have regarded the aid they’ve received as insufficient, while the government has regarded it as a virtual act of war. Both are right: it has not been on a scale that has enabled the rebels to win, but it is a form of action that, had another country engaged in it, seeking to overthrow the government, any American or European administration would have regarded as an act of war under international law.

Such covert intervention, and indeed overt intervention, is being justified on two grounds, the first being that the Syrian government is a tyranny. By Western standards, it is undoubtedly an authoritarian regime

However, the standards Western nations proclaim have been applied in a highly selective way. The EU and the U.S. enjoy cordial and mutually beneficial relations with dozens of tyrannical governments including most of the countries now attempting to regime-change Syria.              

Senior rebels have publicly threatened to carry out a genocide of the country’s main ethnic/religious minority, the Alawis. Scenes being enacted in Syria today recall the massacres and tortures of the wars of religion in 16th- and 17th-century Europe.

Most urgent in the minds of the EU and the U.S. is the second justification for intervention: the Syrian government is charged with using illegal chemical weapons. This is a very serious charge. However, doubts remain about who actually used the weapons. And, more importantly, even though the weapons are indeed horrible and are now generally considered illegal, several other states (the U.S., Israel, Egypt, and Iraq) have used them. Terrible as they are, they are only a small part of the Syrian problem—more than 99 percent of the casualties and all of the property damage in the war have been the result of conventional weapons. Getting rid of chemical weapons will neither in and of itself stop the war nor create conditions favorable to a settlement.

the cost of the war has been immense. And, of course, it is not over. We have only guesses on the total so far. One estimate is that the war has cost Syria upwards of $150 billion. Whole cities now resemble Stalingrad or Berlin in World War II. More than 2 million people have fled abroad while more than 4 million are internal refugees, remaining in Syria.

Lebanon. Even though there is little fighting there, the conflict in Syria is estimated to have cost that little country about $7.5 billion and doubled unemployment to 20 percent. About 1 million Lebanese were already judged by the World Bank as “poor,” and an additional 170,000 are now thought to have been pushed into poverty. The Syrian refugee population in the country has reached at least 1 million, making Syrians now almost a third of the total Lebanese population.

In Jordan, the story is similar. Half a million refugees are camped out there. One refugee encampment in the country houses over 100,000 people and has become Jordan’s fifth-largest city

However reprehensible the Syrian government may be in terms of democracy, it has not only given refugees and minorities protection but also maintained the part of Syria that it controls as a secular and religiously ecumenical state.

Tragic as these numbers are—the worst for nearly a century—factored into them is that Syria has lost the most precious assets of poor countries: most of the doctors and other professionals who had been painstakingly and expensively educated during the last century

Even more “costly” are the psychological traumas: a whole generation of Syrians have been subjected to either or both the loss of their homes and their trust in fellow human beings. Others will eventually suffer from the memory of what they, themselves, have done during the fighting. Comparisons are trivial and probably meaningless, but what has been enacted—is being enacted—in Syria resembles the horror of the Japanese butchery of Nanjing in World War II and the massacres in the 1994 Hutu-Tutsi conflict in Rwanda.

How the victims and the perpetrators can be returned to a “normal life” will be the lingering but urgent question of coming generations in Syria and elsewhere.

one in four or five people in the world today are Muslim: roughly 1.4 billion men, women, and children. That whole portion of the world’s population has its eyes on Syria. What happens there is likely to have a ripple effect across Asia and Africa. Thus, even though it is a small and poor country, Syria is in a sense a focal point of world affairs.

Unlike the Iraq and Afghan wars, the Syrian conflict will also have a “blowback” effect on the countries from which the Muslim fundamentalist insurgents come. It is in recognition of this fact that Russian President Vladimir Putin decided to intervene in the Syrian war.

Even if fighting dies down, “lasting and bitter war,” like the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—regardless of what American and European politicians say or even hope—will necessarily involve “boots on the ground.” That is, it will be fought with guerrilla and terrorist tactics on the rebel side against the now-typical counterinsurgency methods on the other side.

The share of podcasts in Americans’ diet of audio programming grew by 18 percent from 2014 to 2015, according to Edison. People who listen to podcasts daily spend about two hours a day, on average, with podcasts, a larger share than for any other form of audio, Edison reported

For Gimlet, listeners’ willingness to try new podcasts has translated into instant audiences for its newest shows. “Startup,” the company’s first show, took 30 days to reach 100,000 listeners a week. Its weekly audience is now more than 500,000. “Mystery Show” took four days to reach 100,000 listeners, mainly because it was being promoted by Gimlet’s two other shows. By its fourth episode, its audience was about 250,000 weekly listens.

Several advertisers told me that podcast ads had proved to be tremendously effective. They can’t be easily skipped, and because they are often read by hosts, audiences are often convinced of their authenticity. “We feel it creates a deep personal connection to our brand,”

Podcasting is destined to be huge, both as a medium and a business. “It’s the future of radio,” Mr. Turck of Panoply said. Just don’t expect that future to come tomorrow.

. That January, after a pair of terrorist attacks in Paris, pundits and conservative officials propagated a discredited myth about Shariah-run zones in European cities off limits to non-Muslims.

Hashtags like #KillAllMuslims trended on Twitter. A month later, three Muslim youths were shot dead in their North Carolina apartment in what many people said was a hate crime.

An examination of anti-Muslim hatred in the last few years can easily devolve into a laundry list: armed demonstrators picketing at a mosque in Phoenix

Ben Carson compared Syrian refugees to “rabid” dogs. Ted Cruz called for allowing only Christian refugees to enter the United States. And Donald J. Trump, whose statements on Islam seem to be read directly off paranoid chain emails, first stated that American Muslims celebrated the horror of the Sept. 11 attacks (a discredited falsehood), then, after the San Bernardino, Calif., shootin

all Muslims should be barred from entering the United States

At a news conference, Hazem Bata, the Islamic Society’s secretary general, said: “I’m not here to focus on the negative, because once you start focusing on the negative, you start to take on a victim’s mentality. And as Muslims in America, we refuse to be victims in our own country.

e is a fine line between stoic resilience and irresponsible passivity. Muslims in America face a growing threat

And you have UNHCR [the UN refugee agency] telling people how to apply for asylum.”

Many migrants instead tried their luck on the triple razor-wire fence that lines the borders of the Spanish enclave of Melilla, which more than 2,000 migrants and refugees managed to scale in 2014

t was the third boat attempting the crossing in as many days. On Sunday, the Spanish coastguard rescued 51 people making the journey, and on Monday another 47 people.

The numbers arriving on the islands nevertheless remain a far cry far from those in 2006, when more than 31,000 migrants arrived in the Canary Islands. Hundreds of others drowned or died of thirst and exposure while attempting the journey, which can take up to two weeks.

Meanwhile, the bodies of 11 migrants attempting to reach Spain’s Canary Islands by boat were recovered on Tuesday, the latest victims of a perilous migration route that appears to be regaining popularity with sub-Saharan migrants desperate to make it to Europe.

Greece has dispersed more than 2,000 refugees

Greece has dispersed more than 2,000 refugees

EU announced that over 1 million people had now claimed asylum within its borders since the start of the year.

Syrians, Afghans and Iraqis continue to be allowed into Macedonia and the Balkans

on Wednesday 11 people were confirmed to have drowned in the Atlantic Ocean during an attempt to reach Spain’s Canary Islands by boat from west Africa.

which includes asylum seekers from warring countries such as Somalia, as well as peaceful ones like Morocco.

he morning to disperse the camp,

Other observers speculate that those who have been returned to Athens will not remain for long, with many expected to try to reach northern Europe via Bulgaria or Albania instead.

On Sunday, the Spanish coastguard rescued 51 people making the journey, and on Monday another 47 people.

Rough estimates suggest that more than 400 people have arrived in the Spanish archipelago since the start of the year,

Just like the videos of children choking on chlorine gas, or of desperate relatives trying to dig their families from the rubble of homes demolished by Assad's barrel bombs, the images of starvation in Madaya are making their way across Syria and the Middle East. Those images are likely radicalizing the population, firing up emotions and creating pressure on other regimes to take action. They also add to the enmity between (pro-Assad, Shiite) Iran and (anti-Assad, Sunni) Saudi Arabia, fueling the fury that makes young men want to join violent sectarian groups, which in turn helps expand the ranks of extremist groups like ISIS.

is fueling the rage that keeps this conflict burning and growing. It is extreme human suffering that is helping to solidify a most extreme ideology, one filled with hatred and mistrust, one that is spilling out of Syria -- across the Middle East and into the streets of Paris and San Bernardino, California.

“Nothing in the West can compare with the role which aesthetics has played in Japanese life and history since the Heian period”; and “the miyabi spirit of refined sensibility is still very much in evidence” in modern aesthetic criticism.9

there has run through history the idea that the Japanese are, in terms of their original nature (that is, their nature before the introduction from the outside of such systems of thought and religion as Confucianism and Buddhism), essentially an emotional people. And in stressing the emotional side of human nature, the Japanese have always assigned high value to sincerity (makoto) as the ethic of the emotions.

If the life of the emotions thus had an ethic in makoto, the evolution of mono no aware in the Heian period provided it also with an aesthetic.

Tsurayuki said, in effect, that people are emotional entities and will intuitively and spontaneously respond in song and verse when they perceive things and are moved. The most basic sense of mono no aware is the capacity to be moved by things, whether they are the beauties of nature or the feelings of people,

One of the finest artistic achievements of the middle and late Heian period was the evolution of a native style of essentially secular painting that reached its apex in the narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth century. The products of this style of painting are called “Yamato [that is, Japanese] pictures” to distinguish them from works categorized as “Chinese pictures.”

The Fujiwara epoch, in literature as well as the visual arts, was soft, approachable, and “feminine.” By contrast, the earlier Jōgan epoch had been forbidding, secretive (esoteric), and “masculine.”

Despite the apparent lust of the samurai for armed combat and martial renown, much romanticized in later centuries, the underlying tone of the medieval age in Japan was from the beginning somber, pessimistic, and despairing. In The Tale of Genji the mood shifted from satisfaction with the perfections of Heian courtier society to uncertainty about this life and a craving for salvation in the next.

Despite political woes and territorial losses, the Sung was a time of great advancement in Chinese civilization. Some scholars, impressed by the extensive growth in cities, commerce, maritime trade, and governmental bureaucratization in the late T’ang and Sung, have even asserted that this was the age when China entered its “early modern” phase. The Sung was also a brilliant period culturally.

the fortuitous combination of desire on the part of the Sung to increase its foreign trade with Japan and the vigorous initiative taken in maritime activity by the Taira greatly speeded the process of transmission.

The Sung period in China, on the other hand, was an exceptional age for scholarship, most notably perhaps in history and in the compilation of encyclopedias and catalogs of art works. This scholarly activity was greatly facilitated by the development of printing, invented by the Chinese several centuries earlier.

In addition to reviving interest in Japanese poetry, the use of kana also made possible the evolution of a native prose literature.

peasantry, who formed the nucleus of what came to be known as the True Sect of Pure Land Buddhism. Through the centuries, this sect has attracted one of the largest followings among the Japanese, and its founder, Shinran, has been canonized as one of his country’s most original religious thinkers.

True genre art, picturing all classes at work and play, did not appear in Japan until the sixteenth century. The oldest extant genre painting of the sixteenth century is a work, dating from about 1525, called “Views Inside and Outside Kyoto” (rakuchū-rakugai zu).

the aesthetic principles that were largely to dictate the tastes of the medieval era. We have just remarked the use of sabi. Another major term of the new medieval aesthetics was yūgen, which can be translated as “mystery and depth.” Let

One of the basic values in the Japanese aesthetic tradition—along with such things as perishability, naturalness, and simplicity—is suggestion. The Japanese have from earliest times shown a distinct preference for the subtleties of suggestion, intimation, and nuance, and have characteristically sought to achieve artistic effect by means of “resonances” (yojō).

Amidism was not established as a separate sect until the time of the evangelist Hōnen (1133–1212).

But even in Chōmei we can observe a tendency to transform what is supposed to be a mean hovel into something of beauty based on an aesthetic taste for “deprivation” (to be discussed later in this chapter) that evolved during medieval times.

Apart from the proponents of Pure Land Buddhism, the person who most forcefully propagated the idea of universal salvation through faith was Nichiren (1222–82).

Nichiren held that ultimate religious truth lay solely in the Lotus Sutra, the basic text of the Greater Vehicle of Buddhism in which Gautama had revealed that all beings possess the potentiality for buddhahood.

At the time of its founding in Japan by Saichō in the early ninth century, the Tendai sect had been based primarily on the Lotus Sutra; but, in the intervening centuries, Tendai had deviated from the Sutra’s teachings and had even spawned new sects, like those of Pure Land Buddhism, that encouraged practices entirely at variance with these teachings.

Declaring himself “the pillar of Japan, the eye of the nation, and the vessel of the country,”14 Nichiren seems even to have equated himself with Japan and its fate.

The kōan is especially favored by what the Japanese call the Rinzai sect of Zen, which is also known as the school of “sudden enlightenment” because of its belief that satori, if it is attained, will come to the individual in an instantaneous flash of insight or awareness. The other major sect of Zen, Sōtō, rejects this idea of sudden enlightenment and instead holds that satori is a gradual process to be attained primarily through seated meditation.

Fought largely in Kyoto and its environs, the Ōnin War dragged on for more than ten years, and after the last armies withdrew in 1477 the once lovely capital lay in ruins. There was no clear-cut victor in the Ōnin War. The daimyos had simply fought themselves into exhaustion,

Yoshimasa was perhaps even more noteworthy as a patron of the arts than his grandfather, Yoshimitsu. In any case, his name is just as inseparably linked with the flourishing of culture in the Higashiyama epoch (usually taken to mean approximately the last half of the fifteenth century) as Yoshimitsu’s is with that of Kitayama.

The tea room, as a variant of the shoin room, evolved primarily in the sixteenth century.

Shukō’s admonition about taking care to “harmonize Japanese and Chinese tastes” has traditionally been taken to mean that he stood, in the late fifteenth century, at a point of transition from the elegant and “aristocratic” kind of Higashiyama chanoyu just described, which featured imported Chinese articles, to a new, Japanese form of the ceremony that used native ceramics,

the new kind of tea ceremony originated by Shukō is called wabicha, or “tea based on wabi.” Developed primarily by Shukō’s successors during the sixteenth century, wabicha is a subject for the next chapter.

The Japanese, on the other hand, have never dealt with nature in their art in the universalistic sense of trying to discern any grand order or structure; much less have they tried to associate the ideal of order in human society with the harmonies of nature. Rather,

The Chinese Sung-style master may have admired a mountain, for example, for its enduring, fixed quality, but the typical Japanese artist (of the fifteenth century or any other age) has been more interested in a mountain for its changing aspects:

Zen culture of Muromachi Japan was essentially a secular culture. This seems to be strong evidence, in fact, of the degree to which medieval Zen had become secularized: its view of nature was pantheistic and its concern with man was largely psychological.

Nobunaga’s castle at Azuchi and Hideyoshi’s at Momoyama have given their names to the cultural epoch of the age of unification. The designation of this epoch as Azuchi-Momoyama (or, for the sake of convenience, simply Momoyama) is quite appropriate in view of the significance of castles—as represented by these two historically famous structures—in the general progress, cultural and otherwise, of these exciting years.

Along with architecture, painting was the art that most fully captured the vigorous and expansive spirit of the Momoyama epoch of domestic culture during the age of unification. It was a time when many styles of painting and groups of painters flourished. Of the latter, by far the best known and most successful were the Kanō,

Motonobu also made free use of the colorful Yamato style of native art that had evolved during the Heian period and had reached its pinnacle in the great narrative picture scrolls of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

what screen painting really called for was color, and it was this that the Kanō artists, drawing on the native Yamato tradition, added to their work with great gusto during the Momoyama epoch. The color that these artists particularly favored was gold, and compositions done in ink and rich pigments on gold-leaf backgrounds became the most characteristic works of Momoyama art.

there could hardly be a more striking contrast between the spirits of two ages than the one reflected in the transition from the subdued monochromatic art of Japan’s medieval era to the blazing use of color by Momoyama artists, who stood on the threshold of early modern times.

aware, which, as we saw in Chapter 3, connotes the capacity to be moved by things. In the period of the Shinkokinshū, when Saigyō lived, this sentiment was particularly linked with the aesthetic of sabi or “loneliness” (and, by association, sadness). The human condition was essentially one of loneliness;

During the sixteenth century the ceremony was further developed as wabicha, or tea (cha) based on the aesthetic of wabi. Haga Kōshirō defines wabi as comprising three kinds of beauty: a simple, unpretentious beauty; an imperfect, irregular beauty; and an austere, stark beauty.

The alternate attendance system also had important consequences in the cultural realm, contributing to the development for the first time of a truly national culture. Thus, for example, the daimyos and their followers from throughout the country who regularly visited Edo were the disseminators of what became a national dialect or “lingua franca” and, ultimately, the standard language of modern Japan.

They also fostered the spread of customs, rules of etiquette, standards of taste, fashions, and the like that gave to Japanese everywhere a common lifestyle.

“[Tokugawa-period] statesmen thought highly of agriculture, but not of agriculturalists.”6 The life of the average peasant was one of much toil and little joy. Organized into villages that were largely self-governing, the peasants were obliged to render a substantial portion of their farming yields—on average, perhaps 50 percent or more—to the samurai, who provided few services in return. The resentment of peasants toward samurai grew steadily throughout the Tokugawa period and was manifested in countless peasant rebellions

Although in the long run the seclusion policy undeniably limited the economic growth of Tokugawa Japan by its severe restrictions both on foreign trade and on the inflow of technology from overseas, it also ensured a lasting peace that made possible a great upsurge in the domestic economy, especially during the first century of shogunate rule.

Both samurai and peasants were dependent almost solely on income from agriculture and constantly suffered declines in real income as the result of endemic inflation; only the townsmen, who as commercialists could adjust to price fluctuations, were in a position to profit significantly from the economic growth of the age.

We should not be surprised, therefore, to find this class giving rise to a lively and exuberant culture that reached its finest flowering in the Genroku epoch at the end of the seventeenth and the beginning of the eighteenth centuries. The mainstays of Genroku culture were the theatre, painting (chiefly in the form of the woodblock print), and prose fiction,

The Japanese had, of course, absorbed Confucian thinking from the earliest centuries of contact with China, but for more than a millennium Buddhism had drawn most of their intellectual attention. Not until the Tokugawa period did they come to study Confucianism with any great zeal.

One of the most conspicuous features of the transition from medieval to early modern times in Japan was the precipitous decline in the vigor of Buddhism and the rise of a secular spirit.

The military potential and much of the remaining landed wealth of the medieval Buddhist sects had been destroyed during the advance toward unification in the late sixteenth century. And although Buddhism remained very much part of the daily lives of the people, it not only ceased to hold appeal for many Japanese intellectuals but indeed even drew the outright scorn and enmity of some.

it was the Buddhist church—and especially the Zen sect—that paved the way for the upsurge in Confucian studies during Tokugawa times. Japanese Zen priests had from at least the fourteenth century on assiduously investigated the tenets of Sung Neo-Confucianism, and in ensuing centuries had produced a corpus of research upon which the Neo-Confucian scholarship of the Tokugawa period was ultimately built.

Yamaga Sokō is generally credited as the formulator of the code of bushidō, or the “way of the warrior.”4 Certainly he was a pioneer in analyzing the role of the samurai as a member of a true ruling elite and not simply as a rough, and frequently illiterate, participant in the endless civil struggles of the medieval age.

The fundamental purpose of Neo-Confucian practice is to calm one’s turbid ki to allow one’s nature (ri) to shine forth. The person who achieves this purpose becomes a sage, his ri seen as one with the universal principle, known as the “supreme ultimate” (taikyoku), that governs all things.

Neo-Confucianism proposed two main courses to clarify ri, one objective and the other subjective.7 The objective course was through the acquisition of knowledge by means of the “investigation of things,” a phrase taken by Chu Hsi from the Chinese classic The Great Learning (Ta hsüeh). At the heart of things to investigate was history,

Quite apart from any practical guidance to good rulership it may have provided, this Neo-Confucian stress on historical research proved to be a tremendous spur to scholarship and learning in general during the Tokugawa period;8 and, as we will see in the next chapter, it also facilitated the development of other, heterodox lines of intellectual inquiry.

the subjective course appeared to have been taken almost directly from Buddhism, and in particular Zen. It was the course of “preserving one’s heart by holding fast to seriousness,” which called for the clarification of ri by means remarkably similar to Zen meditation.

The calendrical era of Genro ku lasted from 1688 until 1703, but the Genroku cultural epoch is usually taken to mean the span of approximately a half-century from, say, 1675 until 1725. Setting the stage for this rise of a townsman-oriented culture was nearly a century of peace and steady commercial growth.

places of diversion and assignation, these quarters were the famous “floating worlds” (ukiyo) of Tokugawa fact and legend. Ukiyo, although used specifically from about this time to designate such demimondes, meant in the broadest sense the insubstantial and ever-changing existence in which man is enmeshed.

ukiyo15 always carried the connotation that life is fundamentally sad; but, in Genroku times, the term was more commonly taken to mean a world that was pleasurable precisely because it was constantly changing, exciting, and up-to-date.

the Tokugawa period was not at all like the humanism that emerged in the West from the Renaissance on. Whereas modern Western humanism became absorbed with people as individuals, with all their personal peculiarities, feelings, and ways, Japanese humanism of the Tokugawa period scarcely conceived of the existence of true individuals at all; rather, it focused on “the people” and regarded them as comprising essentially types, such as samurai, farmers, and courtesans.

there is little in the literature as a whole of that quality—character development—that is probably the single most important feature of the modern Western novel.

Although shogunate authorities and Tokugawa-period intellectuals in general had relatively little interest in the purely metaphysical side of Chu Hsi’s teachings, they found his philosophy to be enormously useful in justifying or ideologically legitimizing the feudal structure of state and society that had emerged in Japan by the seventeenth century.

With its radical advocacy of violent irrationality—to the point of psychosis—Hagakure has shocked many people. But during Japan’s militarist years of the 1930s and World War II, soldiers and others hailed it as something of a bible of samurai behavior, and the postwar nationalist writer Mishima Yukio was even inspired to write a book in praise of its values.

It is significant that many of the leading prose writers, poets, and critics of the most prominent journal of Japanese romanticism, Bungakukai (The Literary World, published from 1893 until 1898), were either converts to or strongly influenced by Protestant Christianity, the only creed in late Meiji Japan that gave primacy to the freedom and spiritual independence of the individual. The absolutism embodied in the Meiji Constitution demanded strict subordination of the interests of the individual to those of the state;

The feeling of frustration engendered by a society that placed such preponderant stress upon obedience to the group, especially in the form of filial piety toward one’s parents and loyalty to the state, no doubt accounts for much of the sense of alienation observable in the works of so many modern Japanese writers.

These writers have been absorbed to an unusual degree with the individual, the world of his personal psychology, and his essential loneliness. In line with this preoccupation, novelists have perennially turned to the diary-like, confessional tale—the so-called I-novel—as their preferred medium of expression.

In intellectual and emotional terms, the military came increasingly to be viewed as the highest repository of the traditional Japanese spirit that was the sole hope for unifying the nation to act in a time of dire emergency.

The enemy that had led the people astray was identified as those sociopolitical doctrines and ideologies that had been introduced to Japan from the West during the preceding half-century or so along with the material tools of modernization.

If there is a central theme to this book, it is that the Japanese, within the context of a history of abundant cultural borrowing from China in premodern times and the West in the modern age, have nevertheless retained a hard core of native social, ethical, and cultural values by means of which they have almost invariably molded and adapted foreign borrowing to suit their own tastes and purposes.

The primary goal of the manifesto’s author was to prevent Muslims and non-whites from taking over Western society, calling on white-majority countries to “crush immigration,” deport non-whites and have more children to stop the decline of white populations.

The killer’s ability to livestream the attack via his own social media channels — which led to the dissemination of the video and manifesto across YouTube, Facebook and several mainstream media outlets — also highlights how the far-right has harnessed the reach of major media and technology companies, even as it continues to spread its message through the dark corners of obscure internet sites.

By broadcasting his atrocity himself, the killer was able to both circumvent the traditional gatekeepers of news coverage, while also encouraging those same gatekeepers to subsequently regurgitate some of his footage and even unwittingly amplify his ideas to millions more potential imitators than he might otherwise have reached

“One of the sickest and most upsetting parts of this for me is that the killings, the actual terrorist attacks, are forms of propaganda for the statements,” said Mr. Feldman of the Center for Analysis of the Radical Right. “They draw attentions to their statements through their actions.”

“The coverage will be wall-to-wall today,” he said, “and tomorrow it will set someone else off.”

Individually, these pages have meaningful audiences, but cumulatively, their audience is gigantic: tens of millions of people. On Facebook, they rival the reach of their better-funded counterparts in the political media, whether corporate giants like CNN or The New York Times, or openly ideological web operations like Breitbart or Mic.

these new publishers are happy to live inside the world that Facebook has created. Their pages are accommodated but not actively courted by the company and are not a major part of its public messaging about media. But they are, perhaps, the purest expression of Facebook’s design and of the incentives coded into its algorithm — a system that has already reshaped the web and has now inherited, for better or for worse, a great deal of America’s political discourse.

In 2010, Facebook released widgets that publishers could embed on their sites, reminding readers to share, and these tools were widely deployed. By late 2012, when Facebook passed a billion users, referrals from the social network were sending visitors to publishers’ websites at rates sometimes comparable to Google, the web’s previous de facto distribution hub. Publishers took note of what worked on Facebook and adjusted accordingly.

While web publishers have struggled to figure out how to take advantage of Facebook’s audience, these pages have thrived. Unburdened of any allegiance to old forms of news media and the practice, or performance, of any sort of ideological balance, native Facebook page publishers have a freedom that more traditional publishers don’t: to engage with Facebook purely on its terms.

Rafael Rivero is an acquaintance of Provost’s who, with his twin brother, Omar, runs a page called Occupy Democrats, which passed three million followers in June. This accelerating growth is attributed by Rivero, and by nearly every left-leaning page operator I spoke with, not just to interest in the election but especially to one campaign in particular: “Bernie Sanders is the Facebook candidate,

Now that the nomination contest is over, Rivero has turned to making anti-Trump content. A post from earlier this month got straight to the point: “Donald Trump is unqualified, unstable and unfit to lead. Share if you agree!” More than 40,000 people did.“It’s like a meme war,” Rivero says, “and politics is being won and lost on social media.”

truly Facebook-native political pages have begun to create and refine a new approach to political news: cherry-picking and reconstituting the most effective tactics and tropes from activism, advocacy and journalism into a potent new mixture. This strange new class of media organization slots seamlessly into the news feed and is especially notable in what it asks, or doesn’t ask, of its readers. The point is not to get them to click on more stories or to engage further with a brand. The point is to get them to share the post that’s right in front of them. Everything else is secondary.

All have eventually run up against the same reality: A company that can claim nearly every internet-using adult as a user is less a partner than a context — a self-contained marketplace to which you have been granted access but which functions according to rules and incentives that you cannot control.

For media companies, the ability to reach an audience is fundamentally altered, made greater in some ways and in others more challenging. For a dedicated Facebook user, a vast array of sources, spanning multiple media and industries, is now processed through the same interface and sorting mechanism, alongside updates from friends, family, brands and celebrities.

The flood of visitors aligned with two core goals of most media companies: to reach people and to make money. But as Facebook’s growth continued, its influence was intensified by broader trends in internet use, primarily the use of smartphones, on which Facebook became more deeply enmeshed with users’ daily routines. Soon, it became clear that Facebook wasn’t just a source of readership; it was, increasingly, where readers lived.

It is a framework built around personal connections and sharing, where value is both expressed and conferred through the concept of engagement. Of course, engagement, in one form or another, is what media businesses have always sought, and provocation has always sold news. But now the incentives are literalized in buttons and written into software.

Each day, according to Facebook’s analytics, posts from the Make America Great page are seen by 600,000 to 1.7 million people. In July, articles posted to the page, which has about 450,000 followers, were shared, commented on or liked more than four million times, edging out, for example, the Facebook page of USA Today

Nicoloff’s business model is not dissimilar from the way most publishers use Facebook: build a big following, post links to articles on an outside website covered in ads and then hope the math works out in your favor. For many, it doesn’t: Content is expensive, traffic is unpredictable and website ads are both cheap and alienating to readers.

In July, visitors arriving to Nicoloff’s website produced a little more than $30,000 in revenue. His costs, he said, total around $8,000, partly split between website hosting fees and advertising buys on Facebook itself.

of course, there’s the content, which, at a few dozen posts a day, Nicoloff is far too busy to produce himself. “I have two people in the Philippines who post for me,” Nicoloff said, “a husband-and-wife combo.” From 9 a.m. Eastern time to midnight, the contractors scour the internet for viral political stories, many explicitly pro-Trump. If something seems to be going viral elsewhere, it is copied to their site and promoted with an urgent headline.

In the end, Nicoloff takes home what he jokingly described as a “doctor’s salary” — in a good month, more than $20,000.

In their angry, cascading comment threads, Make America Great’s followers express no such ambivalence. Nearly every page operator I spoke to was astonished by the tone their commenters took, comparing them to things like torch-wielding mobs and sharks in a feeding frenzy

A dozen or so of the sites are published in-house, but posts from the company’s small team of writers are free to be shared among the entire network. The deal for a would-be Liberty Alliance member is this: You bring the name and the audience, and the company will build you a prefab site, furnish it with ads, help you fill it with content and keep a cut of the revenue. Coca told me the company brought in $12 million in revenue last year.

Because the pages are run independently, the editorial product is varied. But it is almost universally tuned to the cadences and styles that seem to work best on partisan Facebook. It also tracks closely to conservative Facebook media’s big narratives, which, in turn, track with the Trump campaign’s messaging: Hillary Clinton is a crook and possibly mentally unfit; ISIS is winning; Black Lives Matter is the real racist movement; Donald Trump alone can save us; the system — all of it — is rigged.

It’s an environment that’s at best indifferent and at worst hostile to traditional media brands; but for this new breed of page operator, it’s mostly upside. In front of largely hidden and utterly sympathetic audiences, incredible narratives can take shape, before emerging, mostly formed, into the national discourse.

How much of what happens on the platform is a reflection of a political mood and widely held beliefs, simply captured in a new medium, and how much of it might be created, or intensified, by the environment it provides? What is Facebook doing to our politics?

for the page operators, the question is irrelevant to the task at hand. Facebook’s primacy is a foregone conclusion, and the question of Facebook’s relationship to political discourse is absurd — they’re one and the same. As Rafael Rivero put it to me, “Facebook is where it’s all happening.”

Because of Putin’s highly conspirological mindset, he apparently blamed Goldman Sachs and Hillary Clinton for the release of the embarrassing information, Soldatov and Borogan reported.

An October report from the Russian business media outlet RBC explained in great detail how the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency, also known as the “troll factory,” operated during the 2016 election. The report, authored by two Russian journalists, detailed the funding, budget, operating methods, and tactics, of the 100 trolls who spent 2016 populating American social media sites with divisive commentary and imitating civil rights groups. The report showed how the Agency was financed through its owner, Putin’s court caterer Yevgeny Prigozhin. It also detailed the reach of various politically inflammatory posts. It showed, for example, how the Agency produced over 20 Facebook posts that gathered over a million unique views each.

That same month, TVRain, Russia’s last independent television network, interviewed “Maxim,” a man who had worked as a troll at this factory. He revealed that the factory was largely staffed by college students from the prestigious St. Petersburg State University, Russia’s #2 university; their majors included international relations, linguistics, and journalism. They were, in other words, young, educated, worldly, and urban—the very cohort Americans imagine would rise up against someone like Putin. Instead, they worked in the factory, making nearly double the average Russian’s salary, sowing discord on Twitter, Facebook, and in the comments sections of various websites. They were instructed not to mention Russia, but instead to focus on issues that divided Americans, like guns and race.

ozlovsky told the journalists how he had been entrapped and blackmailed into working for the FSB, the main Russian security agency, nearly a decade ago. He said that when he hacked into the servers of the DNC, he purposely left behind a calling card: a data file with the number of his visa to the Caribbean Island of St. Martin, as well as his passport number. Kozlovsky also said that he was arrested now because the FSB wanted “to hide the digital traces” of what he did. (It’s worth noting that many of these claims are unverified.)

This had previously been the exclusive domain of the FSB—once run by Putin—and the GRU was trying to muscle in on the FSB’s territory and money. A side effect of this internal rivalry, Reiter concluded, was how the Americans discovered the hack.

Why has there been so little reporting on Russian election interference coming out of the place that perpetrated it? For one thing, the Russian security services and the Kremlin do not leak, at least not nearly as much as their American counterparts, and they are suspicious of Western journalists, of whom there are fewer and fewer these days. Russian government officials also “don’t like talking to independent journalists, but they’re still better to talk to than to American journalists,” said Liza Osetinskaya, a legendary Russian editor who now runs The Bell.

The problem is that independent journalism in Russia has been decimated.

Facing this kind of political and economic pressure, many of Russia’s journalists—many of them among the country’s best—either left home or abandoned the profession altogether.* What we are witnessing “is the last phase of the death of independent Russian media,” Galina Timchenko said at last summer’s Aspen Ideas Festival. She is another well-known Russian editor forced out under Kremlin pressure. She now runs the independent Meduza from Latvia. It has a fraction of the reach of the outlet she ran for a decade, Lenta.ru.The squelching of press freedom and the shuttering of independent media abroad is, in other words, not an academic matter. As 2017 has shown, when these voices are silenced, we know far less than we need about vital national security interests. If the violation of an abstract principle doesn’t bother you, its very concrete repercussions should.

“There are, I think, people from both parties of good will who want to have a framework for us to move forward to address all of these issues,” Senator Chris Coons, Democrat of Delaware, said Sunday evening. “But at this point, it is in the hands of leadership

“We have yet to reach an agreement on a path forward that would be acceptable for both sides,” the Democratic leader, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, said after Mr. McConnell’s remarks.

The best hope for a breakthrough appeared to reside with the group of about 20 senators from both parties who met throughout the weekend to try to hammer out a compromise to present to Mr. McConnell and Mr. Schumer.

Any deal would most likely need the support of around a dozen Senate Democrats, since the chamber’s procedural rules require 60 votes.

A major lingering question was how a compromise might pave the way for passage of legislation to protect the young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers. Their status is in jeopardy after President Trump moved last year to end an Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, that shields them from deportation. Mr. Trump gave Congress until early March to find a resolution to the issue.

For as long as the government is closed, the White House has said it will not entertain demands on immigration.

Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, said it was best for Mr. Trump to let the Senate work out its own solution. Advertisement Continue reading the main story

Mr. Trump has vacillated on an immigration deal in recent weeks, leaving both sides confused as to what kind of legislation he might accept.

Leaders from both parties quickly dismissed the idea, but Democrats wasted no time in pointing the finger back at Mr. Trump.

Henri seemed set to win the election when news of the massacre in Paris reached Poland. Overnight the atmosphere changed: lurid depictions of cruelty began to circulate

We want Henri of Valois to be our king!

The former provided for a Diet every two years, forbade the king to name his successor or to marry without its consent, limited his power over legislation and bound him to accept a permanent council of 16 senators. To safeguard religious toleration, the terms of the Confederation of Warsaw of 1573 were included in the Henrician Articles, together with a clause releasing the king’s subjects of their obligation of obedience if he broke the contract

little more than a figurehead

For Poland was far from backward culturally. A strong humanistic tradition had developed there in the 15th century

You will be powerless to do evil’, he said, ‘but all powerful to do good.

Poland as such did not interest him; he was only going there to please his mother.

Two conditions were particularly repugnant to Henri: the obligation to hand over his private fortune to the Polish state and that which released his subjects from their obedience if he should break any condition attached to his election

Henri sat as king of Poland alongside his brother, Charles IX, king of France

This meeting revealed sharp differences among the Poles over religious toleration

German Protestants had been outraged by the massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day. Yet Henri was received courteously

Protestant members of the Diet feared that, once crowned, he would expel all non-Catholics from Poland

He sentenced Zborowski to banishment, thereby unleashing a furious reaction. Considered too harsh by the Zborowskis and too light by the Wapowskis, the sentence ignited bitter criticism of Henri

He was accused of breaking his oath

By now Henri was heartily tired of Poland

On June 14th, 1574, however, news of Charles IX’s death reached Henri. Keeping it to himself, he declined to take part in a tournament that evening and instead consulted four of his French councillors as to what action to take. They were equally divided: some thought a clandestine departure would do lasting damage to Henri’s reputation, while others argued that he needed to return to France urgently

Having decided to go, Henri asked two of his French courtiers to find out how to leave Cracow unnoticed and to prepare horses and guides. For it was essential that the Poles should not suspect that he was about to ditch them. If they tried to retain him he might lose the throne of France, which he valued far more than that of Poland. He was being pressed by his mother to return without delay. His brother Alençon remained a threat. On June 15th Henri deceitfully informed the Senate that he was not planning to leave for the time being and summoned a meeting of the Diet for September

In Cracow Henri’s flight was discovered. Tenczynski and a large troop of horsemen set off in pursuit. On reaching the river the chamberlain spied Henri on the far bank: ‘Your Majesty’, he cried, ‘why are you fleeing?’ He then joined Henri at Ples, a small Austrian town. ‘My friend’, explained the king, ‘while I am taking up the succession given to me by God, I am not renouncing that which He has given me by election, for my shoulders are strong enough to support both crowns

The king gave him a valuable diamond instead. Tenczynski then returned to Cracow, leaving Henri and his company to continue their journey

Discontent and confusion erupted in Poland after Henri’s flight.

the nobles turned instead to Stephen Bathory, Prince of Transylvania. He was acclaimed by a Diet on January 18th, 1576 and, soon afterwards, accepted the conditions laid down by the Polish nobles. He was crowned in Cracow on April 29th and married Princess Anna the next day

Poles felt let down. No king of theirs had ever given up his crown voluntarily. A popular saying expressed their resentment: King Henri has done the Poles a bad turn: elected at night, he came at night, and, like a traitor, he fled at night

The new carrier is based on the former Soviet Union's Kuznetsov class design, with a ski jump-style deck for taking off and a conventional oil-fueled steam turbine power plant.

The country has used its naval fleet to stake claim to virtually the entire South China Sea and to range farther into the Pacific and Indian oceans – a provocative move that has heightened tensions with the U.S. Last Wednesday, the Pentagon said it was disinviting China from the Rim of the Pacific Exercises following reports the country was again secretly beefing up its military operation. 

Wu Qian, spokesperson Ministry of National Defense, said the "provocative action" was a "serious infringement" on China's sovereignty.

They worried that a vaccine would initially elude scientists, that weary citizens would abandon restrictions despite the risks, that the virus would be with us from now on.

Most experts believed that once the crisis was over, the nation and its economy would revive quickly. But there would be no escaping a period of intense pain.

Exactly how the pandemic will end depends in part on medical advances still to come. It will also depend on how individual Americans behave in the interim. If we scrupulously protect ourselves and our loved ones, more of us will live. If we underestimate the virus, it will find us.

More Americans may die than the White House admits.

The epidemiological model often cited by the White House, which was produced by the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation, originally predicted 100,000 to 240,000 deaths by midsummer. Now that figure is 60,000.

The institute’s projection runs through Aug. 4, describing only the first wave of this epidemic. Without a vaccine, the virus is expected to circulate for years, and the death tally will rise over time.

Fatality rates depend heavily on how overwhelmed hospitals get and what percentage of cases are tested. China’s estimated death rate was 17 percent in the first week of January, when Wuhan was in chaos, according to a Center for Evidence-Based Medicine report, but only 0.7 percent by late February.

Various experts consulted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in March predicted that the virus eventually could reach 48 percent to 65 percent of all Americans, with a fatality rate just under 1 percent, and would kill up to 1.7 million of them if nothing were done to stop the spread.

A model by researchers at Imperial College London cited by the president on March 30 predicted 2.2 million deaths in the United States by September under the same circumstances.

China has officially reported about 83,000 cases and 4,632 deaths, which is a fatality rate of over 5 percent. The Trump administration has questioned the figures but has not produced more accurate ones.

The tighter the restrictions, experts say, the fewer the deaths and the longer the periods between lockdowns. Most models assume states will eventually do widespread temperature checks, rapid testing and contact tracing, as is routine in Asia.

In this country, hospitals in several cities, including New York, came to the brink of chaos.

Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the United States. The C.D.C. has suggested it might be 25 percent of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland said it might be double that.

China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a major study concluded that only 1 percent of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic. New research says perhaps 60 percent were.

The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu.

The lockdowns will end, but haltingly.

it is likely a safe bet that at least 300 million of us are still vulnerable.

Until a vaccine or another protective measure emerges, there is no scenario, epidemiologists agreed, in which it is safe for that many people to suddenly come out of hiding. If Americans pour back out in force, all will appear quiet for perhaps three weeks.

The gains to date were achieved only by shutting down the country, a situation that cannot continue indefinitely. The White House’s “phased” plan for reopening will surely raise the death toll no matter how carefully it is executed.

Every epidemiological model envisions something like the dance

On the models, the curves of rising and falling deaths resemble a row of shark teeth.

Surges are inevitable, the models predict, even when stadiums, churches, theaters, bars and restaurants remain closed, all travelers from abroad are quarantined for 14 days, and domestic travel is tightly restricted to prevent high-intensity areas from reinfecting low-intensity ones.

In his wildly popular March 19 article in Medium, “Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance,” Tomas Pueyo correctly predicted the national lockdown, which he called the hammer, and said it would lead to a new phase, which he called the dance, in which essential parts of the economy could reopen, including some schools and some factories with skeleton crews.

Even the “Opening Up America Again” guidelines Mr. Trump issued on Thursday have three levels of social distancing, and recommend that vulnerable Americans stay hidden. The plan endorses testing, isolation and contact tracing — but does not specify how these measures will be paid for, or how long it will take to put them in place.

On Friday, none of that stopped the president from contradicting his own message by sending out tweets encouraging protesters in Michigan, Minnesota and Virginia to fight their states’ shutdowns.

China did not allow Wuhan, Nanjing or other cities to reopen until intensive surveillance found zero new cases for 14 straight days, the virus’s incubation period.

Compared with China or Italy, the United States is still a playground.Americans can take domestic flights, drive where they want, and roam streets and parks. Despite restrictions, everyone seems to know someone discreetly arranging play dates for children, holding backyard barbecues or meeting people on dating apps.

Even with rigorous measures, Asian countries have had trouble keeping the virus under control

But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative.

Reopening requires declining cases for 14 days, the tracing of 90 percent of contacts, an end to health care worker infections, recuperation places for mild cases and many other hard-to-reach goals.

Immunity will become a societal advantage.

Imagine an America divided into two classes: those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable.

“It will be a frightening schism,” Dr. David Nabarro, a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19, predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.”

Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense

Dr. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner’s personal details so others cannot borrow them.

As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbors resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection

My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have Covid-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going,”

It would be a gamble for American youth, too. The obese and immunocompromised are clearly at risk, but even slim, healthy young Americans have died of Covid-19.

The virus can be kept in check, but only with expanded resources.

Resolve to Save Lives, a public health advocacy group run by Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the former director of the C.D.C., has published detailed and strict criteria for when the economy can reopen and when it must be closed.

once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises.

To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill — including mild cases.

“If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases,”

In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital — often set up in a gymnasium or community center outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners.

There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients’ fears.

Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards

Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the United States is far short of that goal.

In China’s Sichuan Province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts.

The C.D.C. has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases.

China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. Dr. Frieden recently estimated that the United States will need at least 300,000.

There will not be a vaccine soon.

any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months.

the record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.

for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered “antibody-dependent enhancement,” which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less. In the past, vaccines against H.I.V. and dengue have unexpectedly done the same.

A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.

It is possible to speed up that process with “challenge trials.” Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then “challenge” them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.

Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.

“Fewer get harmed if you do a challenge trial in a few people than if you do a Phase 3 trial in thousands,” said Dr. Lipsitch, who recently published a paper advocating challenge trials in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. Almost immediately, he said, he heard from volunteers.

The hidden danger of challenge trials, vaccinologists explained, is that they recruit too few volunteers to show whether a vaccine creates enhancement, since it may be a rare but dangerous problem.

if a vaccine is invented, the United States could need 300 million doses — or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes.

“People have to start thinking big,” Dr. Douglas said. “With that volume, you’ve got to start cranking it out pretty soon.”

Treatments are likely to arrive first.

The modern alternative is monoclonal antibodies. These treatment regimens, which recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, are the most likely short-term game changer, experts said.

as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers.

Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesized in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified.

Goodbye, ‘America First.’

A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet Mr. Trump is moving to defund the W.H.O., the only organization capable of coordinating such a response.

And he spent most of this year antagonizing China, which now has the world’s most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries.

This is not a world in which “America First” is a viable strategy, several experts noted.

“If President Trump cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults,”

If we alienate the Chinese with our rhetoric, I think it will come back to bite us,” he said.“What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?”

Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift. The economy rebounded after both world wars, Dr. Mulder noted.

In one of the most provocative analyses in his follow-up article, “Coronavirus: Out of Many, One,” Mr. Pueyo analyzed Medicare and census data on age and obesity in states that recently resisted shutdowns and counties that voted Republican in 2016.

He calculated that those voters could be 30 percent more likely to die of the virus.

In the periods after both wars, Dr. Mulder noted, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.

If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general — including climate change

Last October, North Korea displayed its biggest missile yet -- an updated version of the Hwasong-15

Japan, America's most important ally in the Pacific and home to numerous US military bases housing tens of thousands of US personnel, was alarmed.

North Korea has previously demonstrated it has missiles that can reach Japan. In 2017, it tested two ballistic missiles that flew over the country before landing in the Pacific Ocean.

Later that year, Pyongyang tested an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), the Hwasong-15, that soared skyward before splashing into waters off the coast of Japan. If it had flown on a standard trajectory, David Wright, an expert with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said it could have traveled 13,000 kilometers (8,100 miles).

"Such a missile would have more than enough range to reach Washington, DC, and in fact any part of the continental United States,"

The atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima, Japan, by the US in 1945 killed 70,000 people with its initial blast, and left tens of thousands of others to die slowly from burns or radiation-related illnesses.

The CFR report notes, however, that as the massive missile displayed at the parade had not yet been tested, its real capabilities remain unknown.

The South Korean Defense Ministry puts Pyongyang's army at 1.28 million people compared to Seoul's 550,000.

North Korea has successfully tested nuclear bombs on six occasions, in 2006, 2009, 2013, twice in 2016 and in 2017, according to the CFR report.

"With each test, North Korea's nuclear explosions have grown in power,"

Ballistic missiles are powered only through the initial stages of their flight, reaching a zenith at some point and then falling from gravity onto their targets.

"We're going to have to learn to live with North Korea's ability to target the United States with nuclear weapons," Jeffrey Lewis, a researcher at the Middlebury Institute of Strategic Studies, said in the CFR report.

A 2020 white paper from South Korea's Defense Ministry said Pyongyang has 13 missile brigades. At October's military parade, nine missiles were unveiled, including the massive ICBM and a submarine-launch ballistic missile, according to the document.

"North Korea is expected to continue to upgrade its nuclear and missile capabilities in the name of strengthening its self-defense capabilities and mobilize all of its manpower and resources with the aim of improving residents' lives by 2022 when it marks the 110th anniversary of Kim Il-sung's birthday,

Pyongyang's army has developed new multiple-rocket launchers that can hit anywhere in South Korea, Seoul's Defense Ministry said, potentially putting the country's entire population of more than 50 million people in danger.

almost 30,000 US troops are based in South Korea on US military installations that dot the country.

The ballistic missiles Pyongyang tested Thursday -- the second weapons test in less than a week -- were likely of a shorter range variety

North Korea's ground forces can also call on 4,300 tanks, 2,600 armored vehicles and 8,800 artillery pieces

The North's navy has 430 combat ships and 70 submarines.

its air force has 810 combat aircraft.

North Korea's firepower could be brought to bear quickly on Seoul because the South Korean capital is only about 50 kilometers (30 miles) from the 38th parallel that divides the Korean Peninsula.

However, regardless of whether Pyongyang ever makes good on its threats, the CFR says the potential for attack can't be ignored. 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