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It was a scene I have watched play out umpteen times over the years - senators milling about as they gather to cast a vote on the Senate floor.Being the political ge

But observing that ritual late Wednesday night -- while watching it on C-SPAN, obediently social distancing on my couch -- sent shudders down my spine.

These senators were there to vote on an unprecedented $2 trillion relief package because the coronavirus has crippled the economy by forcing people to stay away from one another.

Picture the following sacred but unhygienic scene: Pilgrims from a dozen countries converge on one small city. They stay in cramped hotels, using communal toilets and eating meals together. For their main ritual, they converge on the tomb of a woman, the sister of a holy man, and as they get closer, they feel with rising intensity grief over her death and the deaths of her kin. The grief is a commandment: Each tear, according to one tradition, will be transformed in the afterlife into a pearl, and an angel will compensate them for their tears with a bucket of pearls that will be signs of their devotion when they arrive at the gate of paradise. But for now the bodily fluids are flowing, wiped away occasionally by bare hands, and the crowd is getting denser. A metal cage surrounds the tomb itself, and when the weeping pilgrims reach it, they interlace their fingers with its bars, and many press their face against it, fogging up the shiny metal with their breath. Some linger for minutes, some for seconds. In a single day, many thousands pass through the same cramped space—breathing the same air, touching the same surfaces, trading new and exotic diseases.

Another official, a member of Iran’s Parliament from Qom, said last weekend that his city had already lost 50 people to COVID-19. That figure, assuming it’s accurate, suggests that if COVID-19 is as deadly in Iran as it is elsewhere and kills 2.3 percent of its victims, another 2,000 people have the disease in Qom alone.

Qom feels like a Shiite Disneyland, filled with religious attractions (with junk food for sale between stations), and that comparison might be the best way for Americans to understand the gravity of this outbreak. What if we found out that thousands of people at Disney World all had a highly contagious, sometimes fatal illness—and that vacationers had been coming and going, returning to their home city, for weeks?

What are Sufis? This was a question many were asking after at least 305 Egyptians were massacred on Friday in the Sinai. They were killed in an assault by Islamist militants (likely from the local Islamic State affiliate, although the group has not yet made a claim of responsibility) on Al Rawdah mosque, which is commonly described as a “Sufi mosque.” The implication is that its congregants observed a more “mystical” version of Islam, one that, for example, venerates saints. While such a description is not necessarily inaccurate—it is common to refer to mosques by their apparent ideological or spiritual orientation—like most things related to Islam, it’s a bit more complicated. Many Sufis do not self-define as Sufis, since for them, this is just how Muslims practice—and have always practiced—Islam.

For most of Islamic history, Sufism wasn’t considered as something apart. That it is today has much to do with the rise of Islamism, which is generally perceived as anti-Sufi.

To describe Sufis as “tolerant” and “pluralistic” may also be true, but doing so presupposes that non-Sufi Muslims aren’t tolerant or pluralistic. On the other hand, describing Sufis as heterodox, permissive, or otherwise less interested in ritual or Islamic law is misleading.

A Martian following election coverage via GoGo in-flight WIFI would never know that Trump’s pledge to revenge-kill family members of terrorists—a war crime—violated more important Earth-taboos than his calling a campaign rival “a pussy.” Watching CBS or NBC or ABC, the Martian would likewise conclude that Trump calling Ted Cruz “a pussy” was worse than calling Mexican migrants rapists. Only the former comment was censored. The broadcast rules that produced those results remain in place.

Trump has been running against “political correctness.” This has sometimes meant attacking taboos that prevent real discussions, foster social exclusion, and signal snobbery. One key to taking Trump down is pointing out that he is also violating norms that are essential to American democracy. And that is a different offense

His supporters are as inclined as the press to treat every utterance as an undifferentiated instance of political correctness—as if the appropriate degree of political correctness is all that’s at stake this election cycle.

Throughout the imperial period and into the beginning of the twentieth century, the relationship among family members was prescribed by Confucian teachings.

Marriages, births, and deaths were all accompanied by rituals designed to reinforce these unequal but mutually supportive roles.

While such severe actions were rare, they did occur and left a lasting legacy of discrimination against females.

Discoveries at Sanxingdui have totally transformed our understanding of how multiple, regionally distinct yet interrelated early cultures intertwined to produce what came to be understood as “Chinese” civilization.

Why is there such a gap in the attention paid in the West to the Egyptian archaeology, as opposed to Chinese archaeology — given that each is important to our understanding of human history?

Stories of Western archaeologists competing to find tombs in the 19th century riveted Western Europeans, and today’s news coverage is a product of that imperialist tradition

Beginning in 1973, when he was a United States Senator from Delaware, Joe Biden had a ritual: nearly every evening he would hop a train back to Wilmington after his work day on Capitol Hill, spending most nights and weekends at the place he considered home, 100 miles from Washington. Doing so earned him the nickname "Amtrak Joe," and in 2011, the Wilmington depot was renamed the Joseph R. Biden Jr. Railroad Station.

And as all Americans can agree, it's important for leaders to avoid becoming ensconced in Washington, DC."

"He thinks of (the White House) more like a Monday-through-Friday kind of place," said one of several people familiar with Biden's thinking who spoke to CNN for this story and were granted anonymity in order to preserve relationships.

When Donald Trump became the first president to make a formal proposal to eliminate the National Endowment for the Arts, the future looked grim to the many artists and cultural organizations that have long worried about conservative efforts to close the federal arts-funding agency.

because Congress, whose role as the president’s nemesis has only grown in recent days, voted to keep it alive.

Part of the argument against shuttering the arts endowment has always rested on the fact that culture is an economic engine and that, as federal agencies go, the N.E.A. is hardly an expensive one. Its $167.5 million budget for 2021 is still no more than what one city, New York, spends on its cultural affairs. The number has grown by about $17 million since 2017, but it’s still absolutely dwarfed by the cultural budgets in European countries where financial support for the arts is viewed as a government function. For example, Britain’s culture ministry has annually spent more than $1 billion on the arts for years.

Before self-proclaimed members of the far-right group the Proud Boys marched toward the U.S. Capitol on Wednesday, they stopped to kneel in the street and prayed in the name of Jesus.

The presence of Christian rituals, symbols and language was unmistakable on Wednesday in Washington. There was a mock campaign banner, “Jesus 2020,” in blue and red; an “Armor of God” patch on a man’s fatigues; a white cross declaring “Trump won” in all capitals. All of this was interspersed with allusions to QAnon conspiracy theories, Confederate flags and anti-Semitic T-shirts.

that the most extreme corners of support for Mr. Trump have become inextricable from some parts of white evangelical power in America. Rather than completely separate strands of support, these groups have become increasingly blended together.

Still waters and mythology aside, the mirror as object is called “one of mankind’s most consistent civilizers,” bringing a sense of personal reflection and comparative identity. (Passing In Review, 1925, Hart Mirror Plate Company). Mirror is central to every aspect of human history—art, archaeology, medicine, psychology, philosophy, technology­, optics—and of course, style.

The word mirror derives from the French “mirour,” from the Latin “mirari”—to admire. (The Romans themselves, however, used the word “speculum,” from “specere”—to look, or behold.)

Around 500 AD, man began to create somewhat clearer and more reflective glass mirrors using silver-mercury amalgams. Examples of such have been found in China dated as early as c.500AD. But another thousand years would pass before silvery-mercury amalgam processes became more efficient—and less deadly, mercury being one of the most toxic elements on planet Earth.

"Just as we have our own networks of 'friends' and 'followers' on platforms like Facebook and Twitter, societies that existed in North America between 1,200 and 350 years ago had their own information sharing networks,"

"Our analysis shows how these networks laid the groundwork for Native American political systems that began developing as far back as 600 A.D."

The ceramics database includes 276,626 sherds from 43 sites across eastern Tennessee, and 88,705 sherds from 41 sites across northern Georgia.

You could call it west Africa’s Brexit. In what amounts to be the biggest shift in the region’s relations with France since independence, eight west African countries will in 2020 ditch the CFA franc in favour of a new currency to be called the eco. It cannot be long before the six central African states, members of a separate CFA franc union, follow suit.

The symbolism is important, though the changes go beyond that. It is no small matter for eight nations, seven of them former French colonies, to rid themselves of a currency whose acronym originally stood for Colonies françaises d’Afrique, or “French colonies in Africa”. 

s if to underline the message, Emmanuel Macron, president of France, chose the day he announced the end of the currency to declare French colonialism in Africa a “profound mistake”. The first French leader born after African independence, Mr Macron had already, during the 2017 election campaign, deemed France’s activities in Algeria a “crime against humanity”.

I want to say a word in favor of the idea of legitimacy.

Except that I think this is true. Legitimacy is magic.

I think we undervalue the idea of legitimacy at our peril.

On March 30, the COVID death toll in America eclipsed the toll of 9/11. Here is what I wrote:   When all is said and done, the novel coronavirus will be the equivalent of multiple 9/11’s. Maybe two of them. Maybe five. Maybe thirty. We’ll see. God help us, we’re going to see.

People on the internet made fun of me for being alarmist, because “only” 2,977 Americans had died from the virus. Turns out I wasn’t being dark enough. We are closing in on the equivalent of 67 September 11’s.

Think about how you felt on that day, which was the greatest intelligence failure in American history. And imagine angry you would have been if 66 more of them had followed. Imagine what sort of accountability you would have demanded for the people in charge.

With no end in sight, many people are flocking to bars, family parties, bowling alleys and sporting events much as they did before the virus hit, and others must return to school or work as communities seek to resuscitate economies. And in sharp contrast to the spring, the rituals of hope and unity that helped people endure the first surge of the virus have given way to exhaustion and frustration.

In parts of the world where the virus is resurging, the outbreaks and a rising sense of apathy are colliding, making for a dangerous combination. Health officials say the growing impatience is a new challenge as they try to slow the latest outbreaks, and it threatens to exacerbate what they fear is turning into a devastating autumn.

The issue is particularly stark in the United States

“We’ve forced every school district to figure out how to respond to a pandemic on its own, and it’s insane,” said Dr. Ashish Jha, dean of the Brown University School of Public Health.“There should be clear guidance — whether it’s Department of Education, or C.D.C., or ideally a combination — so that you don’t have every school district in America with different thresholds, different approaches, different measures.”

Over the summer, Canyons said it would adhere to the state health department’s standard for closing schools. But when Corner Canyon reached 15 cases the school board decided to ignore the guidance, shifting the school to a hybrid schedule instead of going fully remote.The board ultimately adopted its own standard, which stipulated that it would shift high schools to remote learning when positive cases represented 2 percent of the students attending in-person classes — mostly, one board member suggested, because at that point the number of students quarantined from possible exposure would become unmanageable.

In a Canyons board meeting on Sept. 15, when Corner Canyon was at 42 cases, one board member, Steve Wrigley, said he had looked in vain for national standards. “There really is not many guidelines out there right now — everybody is sort of flying by their seat,” Mr. Wrigley said.

This Moment of historic holding to account, of looking inward, deserves a commensurate, totalizing event that explains what is being reckoned with, demanded and hoped for, an experience that rubs between its fingers the earth upon which all those toppled monuments had so brazenly stood. The Moment warrants a depth of conversation the United States has never had. It demands truth and reconciliation.

In 1968, in the wake of the racial conflagrations roiling American cities during the mid- to late 1960s, Gov. Otto Kerner Jr. of Illinois presented the findings of his so-called riot commission, whose politically moderate and racially uniform makeup (two of its members were Black; there was one woman) was strategically cast for ho-hum results. What it delivered to President Lyndon B. Johnson was, instead, shockingly, comprehensively grim. The United States, the commission concluded, is a hopelessly divided nation that has locked its Black citizens in impoverishment and swallowed the key, that good white folks were out-to-lunch and therefore as culpable as the white supremacists were malignant.

When it was published as a book early in ’68, the report became a best seller. But it ought to have been part of a one-two punch. Part two should have been a televised, multipart presentation of the commission’s intensive effort: its conclusions, considerable field work and still-bracing historical contextualizing put before the public, alongside the disgruntled, despondent, enraged, hurt Black Americans whose circumstances swell the report. The country watched the cities burn but never met the human beings who lived in them.

Now, in his view, schools are teaching kids to “hate our country” with a “far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance."

“If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted and punished,” he said.

on.AD“Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but that were villains,”

President Donald Trump's refusal to coordinate with President-elect Joe Biden on the critical Covid-19 vaccine is bringing a staggering possibility into clearer view: that an outgoing US commander in chief is actively working to sabotage his successor.

Trump's denial of his election defeat, his lies about nonexistent mass coordinated voter fraud and his strangling of the rituals of transferring power between administrations are not just democracy-damaging aberrations.

they threaten to cause practical fallout that could damage Biden's incoming White House not just in a political sense.

Joe Biden rarely misses Sunday Mass. So it was notable when the President-elect didn't attend church on November 29, the first Sunday of Advent and the beginning of the season when Roman Catholics like Biden prepare for Christmas.

But the following weekend, Biden was back at his home parish in Wilmington, Delaware -- St. Joseph on the Brandywine -- for Saturday's vigil Mass. He was there again on Tuesday on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation.

That's a level of devotion to regular religious services not seen from recent presidents, who were professed Christians but intermittently attended church or worshipped privately while in office.