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We should accept the truth of history, which is that white men have dominated intellectual life in the west. Let’s not resist this; let’s run with it.

championing a Eurocentric canon can help reinforce the prejudice that white is cerebral and black is physical.

the way the canon has been refracted through racist lenses does need to be incisively and intelligently critiqued.

here’s the rub—and the main reason why I come to praise dead white men, not to bury them: the overwhelming majority of black thought and literature of the last 400 years, by simple dint of the painful exigencies of human history, is devoted to chronicling man’s inhumanity to man. Naturally, if someone has me in shackles, is holding a gun to my head and denying me my basic human rights because of the colour of my skin, I would choose to firstly devote my intellectual energies to addressing that injustice. But it is undeniable that man’s inhumanity to man is only one part of the human condition.

Our perspective is impoverished if we only seek knowledge from the writings of those sharing the same colour skin as ourselves. Black school students today are not shackled in the way their predecessors were, so they should not seek to limit themselves, and can only benefit from access to a wider range of intellectual riches.

When teachers seek eagerly to give black students “relevant” literature, they inadvertently send patronising, and essentially racist, messages about expectations and aspirations—ultimately denying black students their own humanity.

Except that the PA insists on boycotting the settlements — it won’t accept any Israeli presence outside the 1967 borders, no matter that it’s been half a century.

On Sunday, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu took to Facebook to slam the arrests as “further proof of the Palestinian refusal to make peace”

Sadly, it’s all par for the course for the PA — whose textbooks teach hatred of all Jews, whose laws reward Israeli-killing terrorists and whose leaders have spent decades silencing (often fatally) any Palestinian who dares work with Israel’s government.

A recent series of articles on fraternities by Bloomberg News’s David Glovin and John Hechinger notes that since 2005, more than 60 people—the majority of them students—have died in incidents linked to fraternities, a sobering number in itself, but one that is dwarfed by the numbers of serious injuries, assaults, and sexual crimes that regularly take place in these houses.

I have spent most of the past year looking deeply into the questions posed by these lawsuits, and more generally into the particular nature of fraternity life on the modern American campus

to answer the vexing question “why don’t colleges just get rid of their bad fraternities?”—the system, and its individual frats, have only grown in power and influence. Indeed, in many substantive ways, fraternities are now mightier than the colleges and universities that host them.

The entire multibillion-dollar, 2,000-campus American college system

the Kappa Alpha Society. Word of the group spread, and a new kind of college institution was founded, and with it a brand-new notion: that going to college could include some pleasure. It was the American age of societies, and this new type fit right in.

every moment of the experience is sweetened by the general understanding that with each kegger and rager, each lazy afternoon spent snoozing on the quad (a forgotten highlighter slowly drying out on the open pages of Introduction to Economics, a Coke Zero sweating beside it), they are actively engaged in the most significant act of self-improvement available to an American young person: college!

There are many thousands of American undergraduates whose economic futures (and those of their parents) would be far brighter if they knocked off some of their general-education requirements online, or at the local community college—for pennies on the dollar—before entering the Weimar Republic of traditional-college pricing. But college education, like weddings and funerals, tends to prompt irrational financial decision making,

depends overwhelmingly for its very existence on one resource: an ever-renewing supply of fee-paying undergraduates. It could never attract hundreds of thousands of them each year—many of them woefully unprepared for the experience, a staggering number (some 40 percent) destined never to get a degree, more than 60 percent of them saddled with student loans that they very well may carry with them to their deathbeds—if the experience were not accurately marketed as a blast.

When colleges tried to shut them down, fraternities asserted that any threat to men’s membership in the clubs constituted an infringement of their right to freedom of association. It was, at best, a legally delicate argument, but it was a symbolically potent one, and it has withstood through the years. The powerful and well-funded political-action committee that represents fraternities in Washington has fought successfully to ensure that freedom-of-association language is included in all higher-education reauthorization legislation, thus “disallowing public Universities the ability to ban fraternities.”

While the fraternities continued to exert their independence from the colleges with which they were affiliated, these same colleges started to develop an increasingly bedeviling kind of interdependence with the accursed societies

the fraternities involved themselves very deeply in the business of student housing, which provided tremendous financial savings to their host institutions, and allowed them to expand the number of students they could admit. Today, one in eight American students at four-year colleges lives in a Greek house

fraternities tie alumni to their colleges in a powerful and lucrative way. At least one study has affirmed what had long been assumed: that fraternity men tend to be generous to their alma maters. Furthermore, fraternities provide colleges with unlimited social programming of a kind that is highly attractive to legions of potential students

It is true that fraternity lawsuits tend to involve at least one, and often more, of the four horsemen of the student-life apocalypse, a set of factors that exist far beyond frat row

the binge-drinking epidemic, which anyone outside the problem has a hard time grasping as serious (everyone drinks in college!) and which anyone with knowledge of the current situation understands as a lurid and complicated disaster

The second is the issue of sexual assault of female undergraduates by their male peers, a subject of urgent importance but one that remains stubbornly difficult even to quantify

The third is the growing pervasiveness of violent hazing on campus

But it’s impossible to examine particular types of campus calamity and not find that a large number of them cluster at fraternity houses

the fourth is the fact that Boomers, who in their own days destroyed the doctrine of in loco parentis so that they could party in blissful, unsupervised freedom, have grown up into the helicopter parents of today

during the period of time under consideration, serious falls from fraternity houses on the two Palouse campuses far outnumbered those from other types of student residences, including privately owned apartments occupied by students. I began to view Amanda Andaverde’s situation in a new light.

Why are so many colleges allowing students to live and party in such unsafe locations? And why do the lawsuits against fraternities for this kind of serious injury and death—so predictable and so preventable—have such a hard time getting traction? The answers lie in the recent history of fraternities and the colleges and universities that host them.

This question is perhaps most elegantly expressed in the subtitle of Robert D. Bickel and Peter F. Lake’s authoritative 1999 book on the subject, The Rights and Responsibilities of the Modern University: Who Assumes the Risks of College Life?

The answer to this question has been steadily evolving ever since the 1960s, when dramatic changes took place on American campuses, changes that affected both a university’s ability to control student behavior and the status of fraternities in the undergraduate firmament. During this period of student unrest, the fraternities—long the unquestioned leaders in the area of sabotaging or ignoring the patriarchal control of school administrators—became the exact opposite: representatives of the very status quo the new activists sought to overthrow. Suddenly their beer bashes and sorority mixers, their panty raids and obsession with the big game, seemed impossibly reactionary when compared with the mind-altering drugs being sampled in off-campus apartments where sexual liberation was being born and the Little Red Book proved, if nothing else, a fantastic coaster for a leaky bong.

American colleges began to regard their students not as dependents whose private lives they must shape and monitor, but as adult consumers whose contract was solely for an education, not an upbringing. The doctrine of in loco parentis was abolished at school after school.

Through it all, fraternities—for so long the repositories of the most outrageous behavior—moldered, all but forgotten.

Animal House, released in 1978, at once predicted and to no small extent occasioned the roaring return of fraternity life that began in the early ’80s and that gave birth to today’s vital Greek scene

In this newly forming culture, the drugs and personal liberation of the ’60s would be paired with the self-serving materialism of the ’80s, all of which made partying for its own sake—and not as a philosophical adjunct to solving some complicated problem in Southeast Asia—a righteous activity for the pampered young collegian. Fraternity life was reborn with a vengeance.

These new members and their countless guests brought with them hard drugs, new and ever-developing sexual attitudes, and a stunningly high tolerance for squalor

Adult supervision was nowhere to be found. Colleges had little authority to intervene in what took place in the personal lives of its students visiting private property. Fraternities, eager to provide their members with the independence that is at the heart of the system—and responsive to members’ wish for the same level of freedom that non-Greek students enjoyed—had largely gotten rid of the live-in resident advisers who had once provided some sort of check on the brothers

, in 1984 Congress passed the National Minimum Drinking Age Act, with the ultimate result of raising the legal drinking age to 21 in all 50 states. This change moved college partying away from bars and college-sponsored events and toward private houses—an ideal situation for fraternities

lawsuits began to pour in.

Liability insurance became both ruinously expensive and increasingly difficult to obtain. The insurance industry ranked American fraternities as the sixth-worst insurance risk in the country—just ahead of toxic-waste-removal companies.

For fraternities to survive, they needed to do four separate but related things: take the task of acquiring insurance out of the hands of the local chapters and place it in the hands of the vast national organizations; develop procedures and policies that would transfer as much of their liability as possible to outside parties; find new and creative means of protecting their massive assets from juries; and—perhaps most important of all—find a way of indemnifying the national and local organizations from the dangerous and illegal behavior of some of their undergraduate members.

comprising a set of realities you should absolutely understand in detail if your son ever decides to join a fraternity.

you may think you belong to Tau Kappa Epsilon or Sigma Nu or Delta Tau Delta—but if you find yourself a part of life-changing litigation involving one of those outfits, what you really belong to is FIPG, because its risk-management policy (and your adherence to or violation of it) will determine your fate far more than the vows you made during your initiation ritual

the need to manage or transfer risk presented by alcohol is perhaps the most important factor in protecting the system’s longevity. Any plaintiff’s attorney worth his salt knows how to use relevant social-host and dramshop laws against a fraternity; to avoid this kind of liability, the fraternity needs to establish that the young men being charged were not acting within the scope of their status as fraternity members. Once they violated their frat’s alcohol policy, they parted company with the frat.

there are actually only two FIPG-approved means of serving drinks at a frat party. The first is to hire a third-party vendor who will sell drinks and to whom some liability—most significant, that of checking whether drinkers are of legal age—will be transferred. The second and far more common is to have a BYO event, in which the liability for each bottle of alcohol resides solely in the person who brought it.

these policies make it possible for fraternities to be the one industry in the country in which every aspect of serving alcohol can be monitored and managed by people who are legally too young to drink it.

But when the inevitable catastrophes do happen, that policy can come to seem more like a cynical hoax than a real-world solution to a serious problem.

Thanks in part to the guest/witness list, Larry can be cut loose, both from the expensive insurance he was required to help pay for (by dint of his dues) as a precondition of membership, and from any legal defense paid for by the organization. What will happen to Larry now?

“I’ve recovered millions and millions of dollars from homeowners’ policies,” a top fraternal plaintiff’s attorney told me. For that is how many of the claims against boys who violate the strict policies are paid: from their parents’ homeowners’ insurance

, the Fraternal Information and Programming Group’s chillingly comprehensive crisis-management plan was included in its manual for many years

the plan serves a dual purpose, at once benevolent and mercenary. The benevolent part is accomplished by the clear directive that injured parties are to receive immediate medical attention, and that all fraternity brothers who come into contact with the relevant emergency workers are to be completely forthright

“Until proven otherwise,” Fierberg told me in April of fraternities, “they all are very risky organizations for young people to be involved in.” He maintains that fraternities “are part of an industry that has tremendous risk and a tremendous history of rape, serious injury, and death, and the vast majority share common risk-management policies that are fundamentally flawed. Most of them are awash in alcohol. And most if not all of them are bereft of any meaningful adult supervision.”

the interests of the national organization and the individual members cleave sharply as this crisis-management plan is followed. Those questionnaires and honest accounts—submitted gratefully to the grown-ups who have arrived, the brothers believe, to help them—may return to haunt many of the brothers, providing possible cause for separating them from the fraternity, dropping them from the fraternity’s insurance, laying the blame on them as individuals and not on the fraternity as the sponsoring organization.

So here is the essential question: In the matter of these disasters, are fraternities acting in an ethical manner, requiring good behavior from their members and punishing them soundly for bad or even horrific decisions? Or are they keeping a cool distance from the mayhem, knowing full well that misbehavior occurs with regularity (“most events take place at night”) and doing nothing about it until the inevitable tragedy occurs, at which point they cajole members into incriminating themselves via a crisis-management plan presented as being in their favor?

I have had long and wide-ranging conversations with both men, in which each put forth his perspective on the situation.

the young men who typically rush so gratefully into the open arms of the representatives from their beloved national—an outfit to which they have pledged eternal allegiance—would be far better served by not talking to them at all, by walking away from the chapter house as quickly as possible and calling a lawyer.

The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.

The fraternity system, he argues, is “the largest industry in this country directly involved in the provision of alcohol to underage people.” The crisis-management plans reveal that in “the foreseeable future” there may be “the death or serious injury” of a healthy young person at a fraternity function.

His belief is that what’s tarnishing the reputation of the fraternities is the bad behavior of a very few members, who ignore all the risk-management training that is requisite for membership, who flout policies that could not be any more clear, and who are shocked when the response from the home office is not to help them cover their asses but to ensure that—perhaps for the first time in their lives—they are held 100 percent accountable for their actions.

Unspoken but inherent in this larger philosophy is the idea that it is in a young man’s nature to court danger and to behave in a foolhardy manner; the fraternity experience is intended to help tame the baser passions, to channel protean energies into productive endeavors such as service, sport, and career preparation.

In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.

In a sense, Fierberg, Smithhisler, and the powerful forces they each represent operate as a check and balance on the system. Personal-injury lawsuits bring the hated media attention and potential financial losses that motivate fraternities to improve. It would be a neat, almost a perfect, system, if the people wandering into it were not young, healthy college students with everything to lose.

Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.

Wesleyan is one of those places that has by now become so hard to get into that the mere fact of attendance is testament, in most cases, to a level of high-school preparation—combined with sheer academic ability—that exists among students at only a handful of top colleges in this country and that is almost without historical precedent.

This January, after publishing a withering series of reports on fraternity malfeasance, the editors of Bloomberg.com published an editorial with a surprising headline: “Abolish Fraternities.” It compared colleges and universities to companies, and fraternities to units that “don’t fit into their business model, fail to yield an adequate return or cause reputational harm.”

A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.

A college or university can choose, as Wesleyan did, to end its formal relationship with a troublesome fraternity, but—if that fiasco proves anything—keeping a fraternity at arm’s length can be more devastating to a university and its students than keeping it in the fold.

there is a Grand Canyon–size chasm between the official risk-management policies of the fraternities and the way life is actually lived in countless dangerous chapters.

When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.

When there is a common denominator among hundreds of such injuries and deaths, one that exists across all kinds of campuses, from private to public, prestigious to obscure, then it is more than newsworthy: it begins to approach a national scandal.

it still feels like a very strange sort of feminism that looks at the literature on sexual and romantic preferences and makes what men want the measure of empowerment, happiness and health.

The second possible attitude, which I think is actually more commonplace (though often unstated) than the strict feminist take, doesn’t dismiss these patterns but basically denies that they have any clear relevance to individual lives and relationships — because every sexual situation is so different, every romantic encounter so distinctive, that trying to draw any kind of specific life lessons from what a bunch of men and women tell a sociologist is a fool’s errand.

the “rigid social conventions” of the past were so self-evidently anti-sex and awful that it’s better not to question whatever conventions we’ve replaced them with.

ignore the sociology, to insist that the patterns and preferences have no relevance to people’s happiness, or to try to paper them over out of an implausible fear that merely acknowledging them will send us hurtling back into the world of “Mad Men,” the Victorians, or worse.

Which brings us to the third possible response to the sociological findings and patterns mentioned above. If there’s evidence that 1) women’s stated sexual preferences are somewhat more conservative than what men say they want and what our cultural norms encourage, that 2) women’s happiness increases when their sex lives conform to their own preferences rather than to the culture’s more libertine script, and that (at least anecdotally) 3) men tend toward a kind of indecisive, listless, semi-exploitative relationship style when their preferences are too easily fulfilled, then perhaps — just perhaps — what we have here is a case for a somewhat more conservative sexual culture.

Just a culture where it’s a little easier for women (and men) to act on attitudes and preferences that, in the aggregate (!!!!), seem to correlate more with happiness and flourishing than many social liberals are willing to acknowledge or admit.

My interest in juxtaposing hip-hop and Indo-Persian miniature painting, the primary medium through which I have told stories, is in taking these two disparate narrative forms and letting the dissonance find a detour.

My work over the past 20 years has both borrowed and departed from traditional modes of miniature painting. One of these elements, the hair of Gopis — the female consorts of the Hindu god Krishna — appears in this painting, circling around the central axis. Over the past 15 years, I have been experimenting by divorcing their signature hairstyles from the rest of their bodies as a means of identifying them. The Gopi hair, in its many transformed and recontextualized iterations, takes on the appearance of bats, particles or elements of a moving mass. In this painting, the Gopis swirl around Africa and move outward. In their clusters around the central glowing orb of Africa, the Gopis coalesce and overlap, suggesting a symbol that became ubiquitous in 2014: the biohazard sign.

For years, the form had been ignored by many Pakistani artists. I found it ripe with potential — to change its status and its narrative and to deconstruct its stereotypes. What others saw as enslavement to tradition, I recognized as a path to expanding the medium from within, embracing the complexities of craft and rigor in order to open up possibilities for dialogue.

Much in the way that hip-hop’s place in popular culture was diminishing by the time Nas took it up in the early 1990s, Indo-Persian miniature painting fell from relevance in Pakistani culture. The practice shifted so dramatically after the fall of the Mughal Empire and the rise of colonial rule in South Asia during the 19th century that when I began engaging with the miniature in my work in the late 1980s and early ’90s at the National College of Arts in Lahore, it was regarded as tourist kitsch and derided as a craft technique.

My process is driven by my interest in exploring and rediscovering cultural and political boundaries, and using that space to create new frameworks for dialogue and visual narrative. Contemporaneity is about remaining relevant by challenging the status quo, not by clinging to past successes. This is at odds with the standards set up in the worlds of commercial art and music, which are more interested in branding and often hold an artist hostage to one idea or form.

During the War the Nazis discovered that Greta and her husband, Adam Kuckhoff, were members of a famous Soviet spy ring, known as the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle). Adam was executed. Greta had her sentence commuted to life imprisonment. She survived the war, and in her autobiography she describes her first meeting with James Murphy, who she refers to as Mr M.

He spoke French, Italian and German fluently. He harboured dreams of a United States of Europe - at peace. Ultimately, though, even if it wasn't his intention, he'll be best known as the man who translated Hitler's Mein Kampf.

If we did, we would know that this speech so deeply connected to the notion of a dream of a different America begins with a history lesson, tying modern America to President Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation.

But there is more in the "I Have a Dream" speech that is often ignored or forgotten. King used the term "police brutality" twice in this historic address, and here we are many seasons later wondering why police-community relations are so tainted.

"'When will you be satisfied?'

Yet they, too, will pause on the King national holiday and say they loved the man and his ideals, when we know that is not the truth.

But they heard about the March on Washington, they heard about these people, mostly black but also white sisters and brothers, too, who were making their way to America's capital to fight for freedom, equality and jobs for all people.

And as he instructed folks to go back to their home states to keep marching and fighting for what was righ

learn that King had been killed because he was fighting for the rights of black people, of all people. Doubly confused me that his words spoke of love and peace, yet he was gunned down in cold blood on the balcony of a motel.

I lost respect for King, when I was in college, because I did not think he was as fearless as other black leaders of his time, like Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party.

For it takes great courage to love any people who do not love you. It takes great courage to push for peace with every fiber of your being when violence is the language of those who believe in hate, division and fear.

And it takes great courage to see an America full of unity and togetherness even when fellow Americans cannot imagine it for themselves.

The killings of the prayer group in Charleston, South Carolina, echoes the four little girls killed in a Birmingham church the same year King delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. That kind of trauma and shock makes you question America, makes you question humanity, and makes you question King's dream itself.

To paraphrase the words Bobby Kennedy said to an Indianapolis crowd on the night King was assassinated, we've got to make an effort to be compassionate and show love, toward ourselves, toward each other, for the sake of ourselves and for the sake of America.

If we did, we would know that King declared, matter-of-factly, that America had not made good on its promise of full citizenship rights to black people. We would acknowledge, 50 years later, how sad and unfortunate it is that we are still having the same conversations about equality for people of color, women, the LGBTQ community

a lesson some of us need to learn or relearn as we engage in civil disobedience in this new millennium. But those who say movements of today are disrupting their lives also fail to connect that the civil rights movement was completely about making the comfortable uncomfortable until real justice was served.

g's "I Have a Dream" speech. My mother and her family were so poor she interrupted her education for the first of many times when she was only 8 years old, to pick cotton on land owned by local whites that had been forcibly taken from her grandfather upon his death at their hands. The family was so poor there was no telephone, no television, no radio, and no indoor plumbing.

Nor do they love people like my mother, a woman born and bred in the backwoods of South Carolina, whose 20th birthday was the same day as Ki

"I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of 'interposition' and 'nullification' — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers."

I sensed his sorrow when he talked about the need for a relevant ministry among the faith community, and how so many have moved so far away from being relevant in these times. I think of how King asked us to practice a dangerous kind of selflessness, to not put ourselves, our lives, our material things, before people. The dream cannot be only about individual success, individual progress, while ignoring the plight of others. Even if we have some form of privilege, as King himself had, we must never forget that the basics of life must be for all people.

Granted, the 1980 act does not apply to the conduct of Supreme Court justices. But the act fails to say what to do when a judge engages in misconduct before becoming a Supreme Court justice. Here, the Judicial Council argued that Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court was an “intervening event” under the 1980 act and its accompanying rules, and that “a misconduct proceeding can be concluded because of ‘intervening events.’ ”

Unfortunately, the Judicial Council truncated the relevant rule, which allows for a complaint to be dismissed if “intervening events render some or all of the allegations moot or make remedial action impossible.” Kavanaugh’s elevation to the Supreme Court did not render moot the questionable behavior that helped win him that seat. Nor is remedial action impossible now that Judge Kavanaugh is Justice Kavanaugh. Brett Kavanaugh can still issue the kind of full apology he has avoided up until now, and he can recuse himself from highly partisan cases (those with Trump as a party, for example).

In order to let Kavanaugh off the hook, the Judicial Council skipped around relevant commentary stating that “as long as the subject of a complaint performs judicial duties, a complaint alleging judicial conduct must be addressed.” Here, the Judicial Council interpreted “judicial duties” to refer only to duties of judges covered under the 1980 act — leading the council to the strained conclusion that a Supreme Court justice does not perform “judicial duties.” Instead of this tortured reasoning, I’d say we’ve appended yet another exception to the adage that no one is above the law.

One provider boasts about having “precise second-by-second viewing of tens of millions of televisions in all 210 local markets across the country.”

privacy advocates say targeting has gotten out of control. “Do you really need to track people on all the websites they visit, every single app they use, on their entire platform, and keep the data for a shockingly long time?” asked Ms. Kaltheuner, from Privacy International. “Is all of this really necessary to show relevant ads?”

companies today are mining private lives the same way they exploit natural resources, turning them into profitable goods. She said that makes every “smart” device and “personalized” service just another way to collect data for the surveillance economy.

“It’s about ads, but it has all these other implications that have nothing to do with ads,” she said. “And that’s the price we’re paying to see ‘relevant’ ads.”

Huge nuclear arsenals made it necessary to consider both the instantaneous and the endless: the decisive moment when mutually assured destruction is potentially set in motion, the frozen stalemate of the superpower stand-off, and the long catastrophe of a post-nuclear future.

The power of an individual decision was now outrageously amplified – the finger on the nuclear button – yet, at the same time, radically diminished in the face of unfathomable forces,

The world had become too complex and too dangerous

During the second half of the 20th century, many fields of enquiry from anthropology, political theory and analytical philosophy to art, music and literature were influenced by the explosion in interdisciplinary thinking that emerged from developments in cybernetics and its relationship with Cold War military research and development.

The practice of engaging with the connections and interactions between disparate elements of a problem or entity conceived as a system, and between such systems, is now commonplace in areas such as corporate strategy, town planning and environmental policy.

The pervasiveness of a systems approach also influenced the arts.

attempts to grasp the complex interconnectedness of society, and often the effects of technology and progress upon it.

Systems thinking offered a means of conceptualising and understanding a world that had grown hugely more complex and dangerous.

Nuclear weapons demanded radical new ways of thinking about time, scale, power, death, responsibility and, most of all, control – control of technology, people, information and ideas.

We are now accustomed to thinking about the current moment in global terms – globalisation, global warming, global communications, global security.

Everyday life is firewalled and password-protected. We move under a canopy of invisible cameras and sensors, where our personal details and likenesses, our associations, preferences and transactions lie waiting to be called upon – by friends, strangers, employers or snoops. And so what? We all do it – we are already conscripted

This is a world produced by the Cold War, by the anxieties and energies that found expression in the laboratories, boardrooms, government offices, think-tanks and universities tasked with managing a permanent state of emergency. The geopolitics may be different, but the technology, infrastructure, and worldview that built up and hardened during the Cold War era are still with us, embodied in the everyday devices we take for granted, and the precarious identities they suggest.

Normalised surveillance, generalised anxiety, an obsession with security, nationalised identities, pervasive suspicion and secrecy, spectacular military technology and proxy wars, spies, whistleblowers, and the enemy within.

Cold War marked the “end of history” – the great ideological struggles were over and Western liberal democracy had won, according to his thesis.

The world we are in is, in many ways, the world the Cold War made for us.

New technologies of war, such as heavy bombers and long-range missiles like the V-2 rocket, reduced distances of time and space. In recognition of this new state of affairs, in 1942 the

“Trump has always been successful when he’s had a bogeyman and China is the perfect bogeyman,” said Chris LaCivita, a longtime Republican strategist.

Eager to continue trade talks, uneasy about further rattling the markets and hungry to protect his relationship with President Xi Jinping at a moment when the United States is relying on China’s manufacturers for lifesaving medical supplies, Mr. Trump has repeatedly muddied Republican efforts to fault China.

Pressed on how he could criticize the World Health Organization for what he called pushing “China’s misinformation,” after he had also lavished praise on Beijing’s purported transparency, he responded, “Well, I did a trade deal with China, where China is supposed to be spending $250 billion in our country.”

“I’d love to have a good relationship with China,” he added.

On a conference call with reporters, Antony J. Blinken, a senior Biden adviser, noted that in January and February “the president praised China and President Xi more than 15 times.” He attributed the flattery to the administration’s not wanting to “risk that China pull back on implementing” the initial trade agreement the two countries signed in January.

the rhetoric this time is far more pointed — with concern growing that it will fan xenophobia and discrimination against Asian-Americans.

Mr. Trump’s clashing comments on China illustrate not only his unreliability as a political messenger but also his longstanding ambivalence over how to approach the world’s second-largest economy. He ran for president four years ago vowing to get tough with China, but his ambition was not to isolate the Chinese but to work with them — and especially for the United States to make more money from the relationship.

polls show that Americans have never viewed China more negatively.

In a recent 17-state survey conducted by Mr. Trump’s campaign, 77 percent of voters agreed that China covered up the extent of the coronavirus outbreak, and 79 percent of voters indicated they did not think China had been truthful about the extent of infections and deaths,

those polling numbers also come as 65 percent of Americans say they believe that Mr. Trump was too late responding to the outbreak

More ominous for the president are some private Republican surveys that show him losing ground in key states like Michigan, where one recent poll has him losing by double digits, according to a Republican strategist who has seen it.

“This is the 9/11 of this generation,” said Mr. Hawley, adding that he hopes Mr. Trump “keeps the pressure high.”

Few Republicans have been more outspoken than Mr. Cotton, an Arkansan who was warning about the virus at the start of the year when few lawmakers were paying attention, and has been urging Senate candidates to make China a centerpiece of their campaigns.

Fortified by private polling his campaign conducted last year for his own re-election showing bipartisan disdain for China, Mr. Cotton’s top aides approached aides to Mr. Trump’s campaign last month and told them they planned to air an ad in Ohio, a few days before its scheduled primary, attacking Mr. Biden over China.

the president’s eldest son, Donald Jr., posted the spot on Twitter and sought to stamp a new nickname on the former vice president: “BeijingBiden.”

Brian O. Walsh, the president of America First Action, said the strategy builds on years of voter concerns about China.“The China piece of this was part of the overall thinking far before coronavirus, because we knew its potency and its relevance,” Mr. Walsh said. “This just made it more potent and more relevant.”

There might be other explanations. With any infection, there are four basic questions to ask when looking at broad differences in death rates. Is the virus different here versus there? NO. Right now, there is no evidence that the virus is mutating toward a more potent strain in the US.Is one country diagnosing the virus sooner than another? YES. As above, this may be skewing German and South Korean results by identifying asymptomatic and mildly symptomatic persons unlikely to require medical care. Hospitalization rates by country, currently not tracked, would help sort out the contribution of aggressive testing to survival rates. Is the infected patient different here versus there? YES. South Korea (young patients) and Italy (old patients) are unique in the outbreak, and the characteristics in Iran are not well known. All other countries with specific information, from China to even the US epicenter of New York City, have shown the same basic distribution with respect to age, sex (more men than women) and smoking. Is the health care system different here versus there? OH YES. Health care system differences at the country level are hard to examine: information is sparse and, given the 50,000-foot view, possibly misleading. However, health care experts typically can rely on "structural measures" to determine the quality of a hospital or a state or a country.

The World Bank tracks health care information by country on three relevant structural measures (though recentness of information varies country to country), each measured per 1,000 general population: doctors, nurses and hospital beds. They and other sources also track two other relevant variables: lifespan per country and health care spending per individual. Neither of these demonstrate differences in affected Western European countries that might explain a difference in Covid-19 survival.

Among the nine countries with the highest number of Covid-19 cases, the country that has the highest nurse rate also has the lowest death rate from the disease. Germany has 13.2 nurses per 1,000 (echoing a trend for high nurse numbers throughout Northern Europe) far above the other heavily Covid-19 affected countries. This may be just another armchair epidemiologist observation of course. But higher numbers of nurses may reflect one of two beneficial factors (or both): first, that nurses, the backbone of hospital (and especially ICU) care, are essential to patient management and, ultimately, survival.

Either way, it is a reminder that Covid-19 will continue to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of health care systems across the world. The current observed differences also mandate that, when we finally are out from underneath the weight of the current crisis, we must work to determine how we can deliver better health care to large populations across the world.

This rainbow-flag polity, Plato argues, is, for many people, the fairest of regimes. The freedom in that democracy has to be experienced to be believed — with shame and privilege in particular emerging over time as anathema. But it is inherently unstable. As the authority of elites fades, as Establishment values cede to popular ones, views and identities can become so magnificently diverse as to be mutually uncomprehendin

when all the barriers to equality, formal and informal, have been removed; when everyone is equal; when elites are despised and full license is established to do “whatever one wants,” you arrive at what might be called late-stage democracy

The very rich come under attack, as inequality becomes increasingly intolerable. Patriarchy is also dismantled: “We almost forgot to mention the extent of the law of equality and of freedom in the relations of women with men and men with women.” Family hierarchies are inverted: “A father habituates himself to be like his child and fear his sons, and a son habituates himself to be like his father and to have no shame before or fear of his parents.” In classrooms, “as the teacher ... is frightened of the pupils and fawns on them, so the students make light of their teachers.” Animals are regarded as equal to humans; the rich mingle freely with the poor in the streets and try to blend in. The foreigner is equal to the citizen.

when a democracy has ripened as fully as this, Plato argues, that a would-be tyrant will often seize his moment.

He is usually of the elite but has a nature in tune with the time — given over to random pleasures and whims, feasting on plenty of food and sex, and reveling in the nonjudgment that is democracy’s civil religion. He makes his move by “taking over a particularly obedient mob” and attacking his wealthy peers as corrupt

If not stopped quickly, his appetite for attacking the rich on behalf of the people swells further. He is a traitor to his class — and soon, his elite enemies, shorn of popular legitimacy, find a way to appease him or are forced to flee

Eventually, he stands alone, promising to cut through the paralysis of democratic incoherence. It’s as if he were offering the addled, distracted, and self-indulgent citizens a kind of relief from democracy’s endless choices and insecurities

He rides a backlash to excess—“too much freedom seems to change into nothing but too much slavery” — and offers himself as the personified answer to the internal conflicts of the democratic mess. He pledges, above all, to take on the increasingly despised elites. And as the people thrill to him as a kind of solution, a democracy willingly, even impetuously, repeals itself.

Part of American democracy’s stability is owed to the fact that the Founding Fathers had read their Plato. To guard our democracy from the tyranny of the majority and the passions of the mob, they constructed large, hefty barriers between the popular will and the exercise of power.

Over the centuries, however, many of these undemocratic rules have been weakened or abolished

The franchise has been extended far beyond propertied white men. The presidency is now effectively elected through popular vote, with the Electoral College almost always reflecting the national democratic will. And these formal democratic advances were accompanied by informal ones

Direct democracy didn’t just elect Congress and the president anymore; it expanded the notion of who might be qualified for public office. Once, candidates built a career through experience in elected or Cabinet positions or as military commanders; they were effectively selected by peer review. That elitist sorting mechanism has slowly imploded

further widening of our democracy — our increased openness to being led by anyone; indeed, our accelerating preference for outsiders — is now almost complete.

“It is usually those whose poverty is relatively recent, the ‘new poor,’ who throb with the ferment of frustration,”

Many contend, of course, that American democracy is actually in retreat, close to being destroyed by the vastly more unequal economy of the last quarter-century and the ability of the very rich to purchase political influence. This is Bernie Sanders’s core critique. But the past few presidential elections have demonstrated that, in fact, money from the ultrarich has been mostly a dud.

it is precisely because of the great accomplishments of our democracy that we should be vigilant about its specific, unique vulnerability: its susceptibility, in stressful times, to the appeal of a shameless demagogue.

What the 21st century added to this picture, it’s now blindingly obvious, was media democracy — in a truly revolutionary form. If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse

The rise of the internet — an event so swift and pervasive its political effect is only now beginning to be understood — further democratized every source of information, dramatically expanded each outlet’s readership, and gave everyone a platform. All the old barriers to entry — the cost of print and paper and distribution — crumbled.

Political organizing — calling a meeting, fomenting a rally to advance a cause — used to be extremely laborious. Now you could bring together a virtual mass movement with a single webpage. It would take you a few seconds.

The web was also uniquely capable of absorbing other forms of media, conflating genres and categories in ways never seen before. The distinction between politics and entertainment became fuzzier; election coverage became even more modeled on sportscasting

The web’s algorithms all but removed any editorial judgment, and the effect soon had cable news abandoning even the pretense of asking “Is this relevant?” or “Do we really need to cover this live?” in the rush toward ratings bonanzas. In the end, all these categories were reduced to one thing: traffic, measured far more accurately than any other medium had ever done before

what mainly fuels this is precisely what the Founders feared about democratic culture: feeling, emotion, and narcissism, rather than reason, empiricism, and public-spiritedness

Online debates become personal, emotional, and irresolvable almost as soon as they begin

Godwin’s Law — it’s only a matter of time before a comments section brings up Hitler — is a reflection of the collapse of the reasoned deliberation the Founders saw as indispensable to a functioning republic.

Yes, occasional rational points still fly back and forth, but there are dramatically fewer elite arbiters to establish which of those points is actually true or valid or relevant. We have lost authoritative sources for even a common set of facts. And without such common empirical ground, the emotional component of politics becomes inflamed and reason retreats even further. The more emotive the candidate, the more supporters he or she will get.

The climate Obama thrived in, however, was also ripe for far less restrained opportunists. In 2008, Sarah Palin emerged as proof that an ardent Republican, branded as an outsider, tailor-made for reality TV, proud of her own ignorance about the world, and reaching an audience directly through online media, could also triumph in this new era. She was, it turned out, a John the Baptist for the true messiah of conservative populism, waiting patiently and strategically for his time to come.

Trump assiduously cultivated this image and took to reality television as a natural. Each week, for 14 seasons of The Apprentice, he would look someone in the eye and tell them, “You’re fired!” The conversation most humane bosses fear to have with an employee was something Trump clearly relished, and the cruelty became entertainment. In retrospect, it is clear he was training — both himself and his viewers. If you want to understand why a figure so widely disliked nonetheless powers toward the election as if he were approaching a reality-TV-show finale, look no further. His television tactics, as applied to presidential debates, wiped out rivals used to a different game. And all our reality-TV training has conditioned us to hope he’ll win — or at least stay in the game till the final round. In such a shame-free media environment, the assholes often win. In the end, you support them because they’re assholes.

The deeper, long-term reasons for today’s rage are not hard to find, although many of us elites have shamefully found ourselves able to ignore them. The jobs available to the working class no longer contain the kind of craftsmanship or satisfaction or meaning that can take the sting out of their low and stagnant wages. The once-familiar avenues for socialization — the church, the union hall, the VFW — have become less vibrant and social isolation more common. Global economic forces have pummeled blue-collar workers more relentlessly than almost any other segment of society, forcing them to compete against hundreds of millions of equally skilled workers throughout the planet. No one asked them in the 1990s if this was the future they wanted. And the impact has been more brutal than many economists predicted. No wonder suicide and mortality rates among the white working poor are spiking dramatically.

The barriers to the popular will, especially when it comes to choosing our president, are now almost nonexisten

Fundamentalist religion long provided some emotional support for those left behind (for one thing, it invites practitioners to defy the elites as unholy), but its influence has waned as modernity has penetrated almost everything and the great culture wars of the 1990s and 2000s have ended in a rout. The result has been a more diverse mainstream culture — but also, simultaneously, a subculture that is even more alienated and despised, and ever more infuriated and bloody-minded

It’s a period in which we have become far more aware of the historic injustices that still haunt African-Americans and yet we treat the desperate plight of today’s white working ­class as an afterthought. And so late-stage capitalism is creating a righteous, revolutionary anger that late-stage democracy has precious little ability to moderate or constrain — and has actually helped exacerbate.

For the white working class, having had their morals roundly mocked, their religion deemed primitive, and their economic prospects decimated, now find their very gender and race, indeed the very way they talk about reality, described as a kind of problem for the nation to overcome

Much of the newly energized left has come to see the white working class not as allies but primarily as bigots, misogynists, racists, and homophobes, thereby condemning those often at the near-bottom rung of the economy to the bottom rung of the culture as well.

Mass movements, Hoffer argues, are distinguished by a “facility for make-believe … credulity, a readiness to attempt the impossible.” What, one wonders, could be more impossible than suddenly vetting every single visitor to the U.S. for traces of Islamic belief? What could be more make-believe than a big, beautiful wall stretching across the entire Mexican border, paid for by the Mexican government? What could be more credulous than arguing that we could pay off our national debt through a global trade war?

In a conventional political party, and in a rational political discourse, such ideas would be laughed out of contention, their self-evident impossibility disqualifying them from serious consideration. In the emotional fervor of a democratic mass movement, however, these impossibilities become icons of hope, symbols of a new way of conducting politics. Their very impossibility is their appeal.

But the most powerful engine for such a movement — the thing that gets it off the ground, shapes and solidifies and entrenches it — is always the evocation of hatred. It is, as Hoffer put it, “the most accessible and comprehensive of all unifying elements.”

what makes Trump uniquely dangerous in the history of American politics — with far broader national appeal than, say, Huey Long or George Wallace — is his response to all three enemies. It’s the threat of blunt coercion and dominance.

Fascism had, in some measure, an ideology and occasional coherence that Trump utterly lacks. But his movement is clearly fascistic in its demonization of foreigners, its hyping of a threat by a domestic minority (Muslims and Mexicans are the new Jews), its focus on a single supreme leader of what can only be called a cult, and its deep belief in violence and coercion in a democracy that has heretofore relied on debate and persuasion

what’s notable about Trump’s supporters is precisely what one would expect from members of a mass movement: their intense loyalty. Trump is their man, however inarticulate they are when explaining why. He’s tough, he’s real, and they’ve got his back, especially when he is attacked by all the people they have come to despise: liberal Democrats and traditional Republicans

Trump tells the crowd he’d like to punch a protester in the face or have him carried out on a stretcher. No modern politician who has come this close to the presidency has championed violence in this way. It would be disqualifying if our hyper­democracy hadn’t already abolished disqualifications.

Trump celebrates torture — the one true love of tyrants everywhere — not because it allegedly produces intelligence but because it has a demonstration effect.

Fuck political correctness. As one of his supporters told an obtuse reporter at a rally when asked if he supported Trump: “Hell yeah! He’s no-bullshit. All balls. Fuck you all balls. That’s what I’m about.” And therein lies the appeal of tyrants from the beginning of time. Fuck you all balls. Irrationality with muscle.

The racial aspect of this is also unmissable. When the enemy within is Mexican or Muslim, and your ranks are extremely white, you set up a rubric for a racial conflict. And what’s truly terrifying about Trump is that he does not seem to shrink from such a prospect; he relishes it.

“I’ve got to keep remembering … that Windrip is only the lightest cork on the whirlpool. He didn’t plot all this thing. With all the justified discontent there is against the smart politicians and the Plush Horses of Plutocracy — oh, if it hadn’t been one Windrip, it’d been another … We had it coming, we Respectables.”

Those who believe that Trump’s ugly, thuggish populism has no chance of ever making it to the White House seem to me to be missing this dynamic. Neo-fascist movements do not advance gradually by persuasion; they first transform the terms of the debate, create a new movement based on untrammeled emotion, take over existing institutions, and then ruthlessly exploit events.

I have no doubt, for example, that Trump is sincere in his desire to “cut the head off” ISIS, whatever that can possibly mean. But it remains a fact that the interests of ISIS and the Trump campaign are now perfectly aligned. Fear is always the would-be tyrant’s greatest ally.

His proposition is a simple one. Remember James Carville’s core question in the 1992 election: Change versus more of the same? That sentiment once elected Clinton’s husband; it could also elect her opponent this fall. If you like America as it is, vote Clinton

the more she campaigns, the higher her unfavorables go (including in her own party). She has a Gore problem. The idea of welcoming her into your living room for the next four years can seem, at times, positively masochistic

All Trump needs is a sliver of minority votes inspired by the new energy of his campaign and the alleged dominance of the Obama coalition could crac

like all tyrants, he is utterly lacking in self-control. Sleeping a handful of hours a night, impulsively tweeting in the early hours, improvising madly on subjects he knows nothing about, Trump rants and raves as he surfs an entirely reactive media landscape

And, 81 years later, many of us did. An American elite that has presided over massive and increasing public debt, that failed to prevent 9/11, that chose a disastrous war in the Middle East, that allowed financial markets to nearly destroy the global economy, and that is now so bitterly divided the Congress is effectively moot in a constitutional democracy: “We Respectables” deserve a comeuppance

The vital and valid lesson of the Trump phenomenon is that if the elites cannot govern by compromise, someone outside will eventually try to govern by popular passion and brute force.

But elites still matter in a democracy. They matter not because they are democracy’s enemy but because they provide the critical ingredient to save democracy from itself.

Democrats who are gleefully predicting a Clinton landslide in November need to both check their complacency and understand that the Trump question really isn’t a cause for partisan Schadenfreude anymore. It’s much more dangerous than that.

Those still backing the demagogue of the left, Bernie Sanders, might want to reflect that their critique of Clinton’s experience and expertise — and their facile conflation of that with corruption — is only playing into Trump’s hands

Republicans desperately trying to use the long-standing rules of their own nominating process to thwart this monster deserve our passionate suppor

e. They should resist any temptation to loyally back the nominee or to sit this election out. They must take the fight to Trump at every opportunity, unite with Democrats and Independents against him, and be prepared to sacrifice one election in order to save their party and their country.

Trump is not just a wacky politician of the far right, or a riveting television spectacle, or a Twitter phenom and bizarre working-class hero. He is not just another candidate to be parsed and analyzed by TV pundits in the same breath as all the others. In terms of our liberal democracy and constitutional order, Trump is an extinction-level event. It’s long past time we started treating him as such.

The book traces the way that the upper-middle class has pulled away from the middle class and the poor on five dimensions: income and wealth, educational attainment, family structure, geography, and health and longevity.

their wage and investment increases have proven sizable. They dominate the country’s top colleges, sequester themselves in wealthy neighborhoods with excellent public schools and public services, and enjoy healthy bodies and long lives.

As a result, America is becoming a class-based society, more like fin-de-siècle England than most would care to admit, Reeves argues. Higher income kids stay up at the sticky top of the income distribution. Lower income kids stay down at the bottom

All the while, they support policies and practices that protect their economic position and prevent poorer kids from climbing the income ladder: legacy admissions, the preferential tax treatment of investment income, 529 college savings plans, exclusionary zoning, occupational licensing, and restrictions on the immigration of white-collar professionals.  

They then pass those advantages onto their children, with parents placing a “glass floor” under their kids. They ensure they grow up in nice zip codes, provide social connections that make a difference when entering the labor force, help with internships, aid with tuition and home-buying, and schmooze with college admissions officers.

but the 20 percent have done their part to immiserate the 80 percent, as well—an arguably more relevant but less recognized class distinction.

Why more relevant? In part because the 20 percent are so much bigger than the one percent.

Reeves offers a host of policy changes that might make a considerable difference: better access to contraception, increasing building in cities and suburbs, barring legacy admissions to colleges, curbing tax expenditures that benefit families with big homes and capital gains.

other, bigger solutions might be necessary as well: a universal child allowance to reduce the poverty rate among kids, as the Century Foundation has proposed, say, or baby bonds to help eliminate the black-white wealth gap

Expanding opportunity and improving fairness would require the upper-middle class to vote for higher taxes, to let others move in, and to share in the wealth.

Members of the upper-middle class, as those viral stories show and Reeves writes, love to think of themselves as members of the middle class, not as the rich. They love to think of themselves as hard workers who played fair and won what they deserved, rather than as people who were born on third and think they hit a triple. They hate to hear that the government policies they support as sensible might be torching social mobility and entrenching an elite. That elite is them.

“What we saw was the single largest demand event in history,” said Peter Keavey, managing director for energy products at CME Group, owner of the New York Mercantile Exchange, where U.S. crude futures trade.

Prices have since somewhat recovered. But those jarring moves of the spring added urgency to arguments about whether benchmarks used since the 1980s adequately reflect the modern oil market

The crash rippled through the physical market, where, for example, Saudi Arabia sets prices for exports to the U.S. using an assessment tied to futures prices.

The pricing system based on three benchmark crudes—West Texas Intermediate in the U.S., Brent in Europe and Dubai in the Middle East—has broadly stayed the same.

WTI futures show no sign of being displaced as the primary gauge of U.S. crude prices, said CME’s Mr. Keavey. “Crude-oil infrastructure in the U.S. still revolves around Cushing,” he said. “The Gulf Coast is certainly an emerging price point, but it is still a secondary benchmark.”

That means the price of the contracts typically converges with oil prices at Cushing in the run-up to their last day of trading.

“We need to open up the benchmarks to be more reflective of global oil prices,” said Greg Newman, chief executive of U.K.-based Onyx Capital Group, which specializes in oil swaps. “How can it be accurate if you’re focusing on one tiny localized area?”

Even before coronavirus, there was growing interest in assessing the price of crude at the Gulf Coast, home to other U.S. trading hubs.

there has been a boom in U.S. oil exports since a four-decade embargo on its shipments ended in late 2015.

Crude oil comes in dozens of varieties that differ by density and sulfur content. WTI, Brent and Dubai act as reference points against which other grades are priced. They also are the basis for financial contracts that allow players in the oil market to hedge against and speculate on price swings.

“Benchmarks always reflect flows,”