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The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.

This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.

On October 1, Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges went live. Most of the exchange websites crashed on the first day, a development that led some of the law’s supporters to conclude that there was overwhelming demand for Obamacare’s insurance products.

. “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one anonymous insurance industry official to the Washington Post. “We are talking single digits.”

Covered California, that state’s subsidized insurance exchange, initially claimed that its website had received 5 million hits on October 1. They later had to revise that number down 87 percent, to 645,000. KUSI-TV in San Diego is reporting that not one policy has yet been sold on the California exchange.

the tiny Gulf state, which won the right to host the event nearly three years ago, is embroiled in controversy over the treatment of the huge migrant labor force within its borders.

Hassan al-Thawadi, secretary general of the Qatar 2022 Supreme Committee, defended his country's efforts in a CNN interview, and said he was outraged by the claim made last week by an international labor organization that it is a "slave state."

The "slave state" claim came as Sharan Burrow, secretary general of the International Trade Union Confederation, warned that if current trends continue an estimated 4,000 migrant workers may die in Qatar as they toil on construction projects in the run-up to the World Cup.

Sixteen rebels have been hanged in Iran in retaliation for the deaths of at least 14 border guards in an ambush, say Iranian news agencies.

A parliamentary committee on national security will look into the attack on Sunday, meeting relevant officials, a committee member was quoted as saying.

At least 14 guards were killed in the ambush, reports now say, though 17 were previously reported to have died. A number were also wounded, reports said.

I wish to return to one of the original features of blogging—the documentation of public thinking. I would suggest that more writers, more academics, and more journalists do this, and do so honestly.

It have come to believe that arguing with the self is as important as arguing with the broader world.

the assumption of that "something new" is happening "racially," that these terms are somehow constant is one of the great, and underestimated, barriers to understanding the case for reparations.

The question is not whether Lincoln truly meant “government of the people” but what our country has, throughout its history, taken the political term “people” to actually mean. In 1863 it did not mean your mother or your grandmother, and it did not mean you and me.

When the journalist asked me about my body, it was like she was asking me to awaken her from the most gorgeous dream. I have seen that dream all my life. It is perfect houses with nice lawns. It is Memorial Day cookouts, block associations, and driveways. The Dream is tree houses and the Cub Scouts. And for so long I have wanted to escape into the Dream, to fold my country over my head like a blanket. But this has never been an option, because the Dream rests on our backs, the bedding made from our bodies.

you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy

There is a movie I’m looking forward to seeing when it comes to Washington. It seems quite relevant to America today

It’s about what can happen in a democratic society when politicians go too far, when they not only stand mute when hateful words that cross civilized redlines suddenly become part of the public discourse, but, worse, start to wink at and dabble in this hate speech for their advantage.

Later, they all say that they never heard the words, never saw the signs, or claim that their own words were misunderstood. But they heard and they saw and they meant.

part of the problem is confusion over what we mean by multiculturalism. It can mean one of two things. First: diversity as lived experience. Second: multiculturalism as a political process.

To talk of diversity as lived experience is to talk of the experience of living in a society that, through mass immigration, has become more open, more vibrant and more cosmopolitan.

But multiculturalism as a political process has come to mean something very different, namely the process of managing that diversity by putting people into ethnic boxes. It's a process through which cultural differences are institutionalized, publicly affirmed, recognized and institutionalized; through which political

with a few brusque strokes, the novice minister solved the riddle that had stymied European diplomacy for two generations: how to unify Germany and reorganize Central Europe. He had to overcome the obstacle that Germany comprised 39 sovereign states grouped in the so-called German Confederation. All the while, Central European trends were warily observed by the two “flanking” powers, France and Russia, ever uneasy about — and tempted to prevent — the emergence of a state capable of altering the existing European balance of power.

“the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries.”

a highly complex person who incarnated the duality that later tempted Germany into efforts beyond its capacity

A new poll from the Pew Research Center reports that nearly half of Americans identify states’ rights as the primary cause of the Civil War. This is a remarkable finding, because virtually all American textbooks and prominent historians emphasize slavery, as they have for decades. Even more striking, the poll shows young people put more stock in the states’ rights explanation than older people. The 38 percent of Americans who believe slavery was mainly to blame find themselves losing ground.

New computer-assisted tools and techniques can find and evaluate patterns of language and emphasis, otherwise hard to see, among those debates. Researchers at the University of Richmond have developed a computerized text that allows us to explore those hundreds of speeches over time and space, to find connections buried beneath parliamentary procedure and exasperating digressions.

Some of the patterns in the speeches quickly undermine familiar arguments for Virginia’s secession. Tariffs, which generations of would-be realists have seen as the hidden engine of secession, barely register, and a heated debate over taxation proves, on closer examination, to be a debate over whether the distribution of income from taxes on enslaved people should be shared more broadly across the state. Hotheads eager to fight the Yankees did not play a leading role in the months of debates; despite the occasional outburst, when delegates mentioned war they most often expressed dread and foreboding for Virginia. Honor turns out to be a flexible concept, invoked with equal passion by both the Unionist and secessionist sides. Virtually everyone in the convention agreed that states had the right to secede, yet Unionists in Virginia won one crucial vote after another.

these midterms mean nothing? That can’t be right either. They seem to me to be reflecting at the very least a sour and dyspeptic mood in the country at large, a well of deepening discontent and concern, and a national funk that remains very potent as a narrative, even if it has become, in my view, close to circular and more than a little hysterical.

what is the reason for this mood – and why has Obama taken the biggest dive because of it?

Even though the economic signals in the US are stronger than anywhere else in the developed world, even as unemployment has fallen, and as energy independence has come closer than anyone recently expected, the underlying structure of the economy remains punishing for the middle class. This, in some ways, can be just as dispiriting as lower levels of growth – because it appears that even when we have a recovery, it will not make things any better for most people.

What we once instinctively regarded with moral horror has, over the years, become something most Americans are comfortable with. This is what torture does. In the words of Charles Krauthammer, it degrades and morally corrupts those who practice it. And so it has:

Notice that Krauthammer’s maximal position in 2005 is now dead last in public opinion: his view that torture should be used extremely rarely commands less than 20 percent support and is beaten by those Americans who now believe that torture should be employed often. Yes: often

If torture is a monstrous thing, if it corrupts all who do it, as Krauthammer believes, what incalculable damage has been done by the US torturing innocents, in one case to death? Where was there any remorse – yes, remorse – expressed by the CIA yesterday for this compounding of a crime and a mistake?

The BBC has announced it will collaborate with four British universities to offer online courses about World War I, beginning in October.

will focus on trauma and memory, heroism in industrialized warfare, early military aviation and how the war — and the ensuing peace — changed the world.

The BBC, founded just four years after the end of the war, will curate its archives to bring relevant contemporary material to the courses.

The passion and urgency with which these battles are fought reflect the misguided way history is taught in schools. Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same.

Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses.

rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.

The rom-com industrial complex—the cultural institution charged with capturing romance as a kind of ritual—failed to recognize the evolution of romance itself.

the rom-com's normative approach to relationships—the posture that treats romance and romantic partners as puzzles to be solved—is the thing that may be dying. Or, rather, the thing that may be evolving, slowly and steadily, into something else. We have less of a need, now, to look to the movies to give structure to our romantic relationships: The world is doing that for us, already. Under the influence of Match and eHarmony and Tinder and JDate and Our Time and OK Cupid and Farmers Only and all the others—services that promise to mate souls according to algorithms—our sense of romance itself is becoming ever more formulaic. The will-they-or-won't-they—the gooey stuff that forms the rom-com's gooey center—becomes less compelling a tension in a world ever more dominated by signals and swipes. We are ceding some of love's mystery to measurement.

the axis romance has revolved around—the guiding sense of mystery, of uncertainty, of otherness—is giving way, under the influence of digital capabilities, to more pragmatic orientations. eHarmony promises to connect people across “29 dimensions® of compatibility,” breaking those out into “Core Traits” and “Vital Attributes.” Match.com now lets MENSA members connect through its platform, and is experimenting with facial recognition programs to help users better find “their type.” The promises of big data—insights! wisdom! relevance!—are insinuating themselves onto relationships. Love, actually, is now more

So the number one issue in the midterms was the economy. And a Democratic president has managed to halve the unemployment rate in the wake of a historically grim near-depression, and his own party decided never to mention this – or him – in the campaign. I wish I were surprised. He also managed to slash the deficit at the same time. But shhh … just tell women the GOP is out to get them.

Voters do not always have access to all the relevant data – but they sure can detect political fear. And fear, after all, is what the Democrats have wallowed in for decades since Reagan. Many of them privately believe that their ideas or proposals, however sensible, can never win majority support. So they hide them, or argue for them only before certain constituencies, or play the usual defensive crouch on foreign policy, and bob and weave until the voters are offered a choice between a decisive extremist from the GOP and a quivering pile of jello from the Democrats. The one figure who broke this cycle was Obama in 2008. He managed to do so again in 2012. And yet the default DNA of the Dems is to go back into a defensive crouch, the masters of which are, of course, the Clintons.

You can see it again with the ACA. You couldn’t have a stronger argument: we have given everyone more security in their health, and removed some of the cruelest aspects of the previous system. We have gotten huge numbers of people insured for the first time. And we have managed to halt the rise in healthcare costs in ways that could truly make a dent on future debt. These are huge achievements, but the Democrats couldn’t bring themselves to utter them, let alone craft a narrative of success to contrast with the fear-mongering and nihilism of the Fox News right.

While protests of the so-called rape culture on college campuses have surfaced before — Take Back the Night marches are decades old — the sudden convergence of exposure and outrage over these acts of sexual violence suggests a tolerance tipping point in American culture for a problem that institutions and victims alike have long hidden from view.

“I think we are at a critical moment,” said Eugene R. Fidell, an expert on military justice at Yale Law School. “The military is not on an island all to itself, and the debate in the country is over what is the medicine we need to take. The fact that there is something fundamentally wrong with the way our society treats women is a proposition on which there is now general agreement.”

“As women expect more equality,” said Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, who banned some fraternity functions after two separate assault cases, “the prevalence of this archaic behavior becomes increasingly intolerable. You now find flash points where you can protest against that behavior on college campuses and in the military, and there will be others where women and others can get attention for their claims.”

These two Serbs start with the concepts of the American academic Gene Sharp, the Clausewitz of the nonviolent movement. But they have refined and added to those ideas. In a new book, “Blueprint for Revolution,” Popovic recounts Canvas’s strategies and how people use them.

Otpor’s methods and signature — a stylized graphic clenched fist — have been adopted by democracy movements around the world. The Egyptian opposition used them to topple Hosni Mubarak. In Lebanon, the Serbs helped the Cedar Revolution extricate the country from Syrian control. In Maldives, their methods were the key to overthrowing a dictator who had held power for 30 years. In many other countries, people have used what Canvas teaches to accomplish other political goals, such as fighting corruption or protecting the environment.

“We’re here to plan a war.” Nonviolent struggle, Djinovic explained, is a war — just one fought with means other than weapons. It must be as carefully planned as a military campaign.

Old kingpins like Digital Equipment and Wang didn’t disappear overnight. They sank slowly, burdened by maintenance of the products that made them rich and unable to match the pace of technological change around them. The same is happening now at Hewlett-Packard, which is splitting in two. Even Microsoft — the once unbeatable, declared monopolist of personal computing software — has struggled to stay relevant

“I’m not saying that Google is going to go away, just as Microsoft didn’t go away,” said Ben Thompson, a tech analyst who writes the blog Stratechery. “It’s just that Google will miss out on what’s next.”

The company’s financial results have failed to meet consensus analysts’ expectations for five straight quarters. And its stock price has fallen 8 percent over the last year.