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In a healthy society, the early-20th-century Dutch prime minister and theologian Abraham Kuyper observed, there are a variety of spheres, each with its own social function. There is the state, the church, the family, the schools, science, business, the trades, etc. Each of these spheres, he continued, has its own rules and possesses its own integrity and correct way of doing things. Each sphere is a responsible zone of flourishing.

ou can clarify what any particular sphere’s responsibility is by asking questions like: What is a school for? What is a science lab for? What is a baseball team for?

In our country, the business sphere has sometimes tried to take over the education sphere — to run schools like a business. But if you run a school or university on the profit-maximization mentality, you will trample over the mission of what a school is for — the cultivation of the student, the mission of pure research.

Sycophancy in politics is often hard to see, something done behind closed doors, away from public scrutiny. But the release of a rough transcript of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's conversation with President Trump offered a window into it. His flattery of Trump began small, as routine ingratiation -- a phone call, a private kowtow, with a limited audience of diplomats and officials inured to this dynamic. But now we have an expanded theater, a media spectacle that plays to an audience whose complicity is eagerly solicited.

Politics and sycophancy have a long association, ranging from the ingratiating punctilio of diplomacy to the pomp and fatuity of state visits. But the Trump brand prefers a different version of this old practice, one that exploits new media to intensify and redirect its force.Flatterers perform through the media for a target who often monitors the tribute at a distance. As toadying becomes spectacle, the observers -- or in the patois of new media, followers -- become more important. Where observers traditionally have been bystanders -- sometimes amused, sometimes appalled -- their participation and approbation are now cultivated.

We can trace a rough history of this rewiring of flattery. Trump himself tried something like this earlier in his career as a developer, when he reportedly called journalists using an assumed name to praise himself.

Black Friday is insulated, in a way many other pseudo-holidays are not, from the Culture Wars, because what could be more implicitly agreeable to an American—or to anyone, for that matter—than the simple promise of a good deal?

"Black Friday highlights the contrast between rich and poor." As a spectacle, it may be celebrated by all, but it is participated in, increasingly, by a few.

But Black Friday is also, as pseudo-holidays go, more class-conscious than most. It is thus more divisive than most. If you can't normally afford a flat-screen/iPad/Vitamix/Elsa doll/telephone, Black Friday discounts could offer you the opportunity to purchase those items. If you can normally afford those things, though, you may well decide that the trip to the mall, with its "throngs" and its "masses" and its sweaty inconvenience, isn't worth the trouble.

PALMAS, Brazil — The first World Indigenous Games closed Saturday night with a pumping ceremony that brought together nearly 2,000 participants from more than two dozen countries for a monumental extravaganza.

Palmas, a sunbaked outpost in the geographical heart of Brazil, and the 5,000-seat arena was packed well beyond capacity for the spectacle.

With delegations from as far afield as Ethiopia and New Zealand and two dozen indigenous peoples from across Brazil, the games produced nine frenetic days of compet

These appearances breached the boundary between the process of government and partisan politics, which past presidents seeking reelection have traditionally observed. They may also have broken the law. But, the White House made clear, that wasn’t a concern. “Nobody outside of the Beltway really cares,” Chief of Staff Mark Meadows told Politico.

The manic egregiousness of the convention was the natural expression of Trump’s attitude toward governance — an attitude that might be best summed up by the question, Who’s going to stop me? But on another level, it also insists, You’d do the same if you were me.

Trump’s political project, and the project of the 2020 Republican convention, lies not only in corroding norms but also in insisting that those norms never existed, that corruption and misbehavior have always been the way of things — and that anyone who says otherwise is, like Trump, a liar.

The strength of the younger generation is the willingness to see more clearly certain truths that have been hidden and concealed. The courage to step forward. The willingness to be critical of charismatic models and be open to a variety of different people.

The weaknesses of the younger generation, of course, is that they grew up in the most commodified culture in the history of the world. So there's something always very superficial about spectacle in a commodified culture. It's all about what's visible. What is projected. What your image is and so forth

you can find a lot of the young brothers and sisters always talking about what they brand is. I say, I ain't got no god-dang brand. I got a cause. You know what I mean? They put a brand on enslaved Africans when they came here and kept that brand on them. But that language, that market language, is built into the culture. That's the mentality of a spectacle. So you've got to shatter the superficial to get at the substantial.

A hasty effort to make peace between Donald J. Trump and Republican Party leaders veered toward the point of collapse on Friday as Jeb Bush announced he would not back Mr. Trump in the general election

Mr. Trump has struggled to make peace with senior lawmakers and political donors whom he denounced during the Republican primaries, and upon whose largess he must now rely.

Republican control of the Senate said in a briefing for lobbyists and donors on Thursday that the party’s

As I explained in an earlier Salon piece, Donald Trump, with his background in reality TV and professional wrestling, created a spectacle that rewarded him with at least $3 billion in free media coverage. Trump’s sophisticated meta game also allowed him to exploit a risk-averse news-media establishment that operates according to a clear and predictable set of rules and conventions governing “the boundaries of the approved public discourse.”

These rules and conventions consist of maintaining the appearance of “objectivity” and “fairness,” perpetuating a “both sides do it” framework when discussing Republicans and Democrats, and an obsessive need to present “all sides of an issue.” Clear statements of fact and truth are treated as mere opinions though as Paul Krugman once said, “if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read ‘Views Differ on Shape of Planet.’”

The American corporate news media also prefers to feature generalists who understand these rules as opposed to real experts who will not obey said script. Ultimately, in covering political campaigns and elections, the American corporate news media is more interested in covering the “horse race” — because it is an easy story to communicate — than in critically evaluating the specific policy proposals and qualifications of a given candidate.

Donald Trump Is a 1960s Technology Critic’s Worst Nightmare

“American Presidential campaigning will never be the same again.” This was the Milwaukee Journal’s response, in 1960, to an event that has since become the stuff of political legend.

Rarely are worst-case-scenario fears about emerging technologies realized. The written word certainly diminished the oral tradition, for example, but it didn’t dull human intellect as Socrates feared.

Snap’s business model, which depends on TV-style advertising that (so far) offers marketers fewer of the data-targeted options pioneered by web giants like Google, feels refreshingly novel. And perhaps most important, its model for entertainment and journalism values human editing and curation over stories selected by personalization algorithms — and thus represents a departure from the filtered, viral feeds that dominate much of the rest of the online news environment.

Before Snapchat, the industry took for granted that everything users posted to the internet should remain there by default. Saving people’s data — and then constantly re-examining it to create new products and advertising — is the engine that supports behemoths like Google and Facebook.

Snapchat’s “ephemeral” internet — which has since been imitated by lots of other companies, including, most recently, Instagram — did not just usher in a new idea for online privacy. It also altered what had once been considered a sacred law of online interaction: virality.

According to Boorstin, more than five decades ago the American people were already living in a “thicket of unreality.” By relentlessly indulging in ever more “extravagant expectations,” they were forfeiting their capacity to distinguish between what was real and what was illusory. Indeed, Boorstin wrote, “We have become so accustomed to our illusions that we mistake them for reality.”

“The American citizen lives in a world where fantasy is more real than reality, where the image has more dignity than its original. We hardly dare to face our bewilderment, because our ambiguous experience is so pleasantly iridescent, and the solace of belief in contrived reality is so thoroughly real. We have become eager accessories to the great hoaxes of the age. These are the hoaxes we play on ourselves.”

“The making of the illusions which flood our experience has become the business of America,” wrote Boorstin. It’s also become the essence of American politics, long since transformed into theater, or rather into some sort of (un)reality show.

The line between showbiz and politics has been blurring for decades now. In the ’60s, it was still a bit of a shock to learn that Richard Nixon had hired TV producers — including a young Roger Ailes, later the pioneer of Fox News — to run his campaign. Decades later, Reagan was criticized for having Deaver stage his appearances.

the Trump Show takes us a step beyond. When he and Netanyahu spoke at their news conference, they had not even held a meeting yet. Such appearances are normally meant to communicate what the leaders have already talked about. This show was only about the show.

In The Post’s interviews with Trump, he often took on a strange, puzzled look when confronted with some contradiction between what he’d said in the past and what he was saying now. “Only you people care about that,” he’d say, whether the topic was his tax returns, his coarse relationships with women or his longtime liberalism in the years before he decided to paint himself as something of a conservative. The show is always now.

Every year China's port cities erupt in chaos as 130 million migrant factory workers scramble to make their yearly pilgrimage home for the New Year.  This astonishing spectacle, the largest human migration in the history of the world,

Roughly 25 percent of the global workforce is Chinese. Given such enormous firepower, China inevitably sets the norm for wages and working standards in the global supply chain. Multi-national corporate interests have chipped away at those standards and wages in order to maximize profits and serve shareholders.  The chronic disregard for workers' rights in China's foreign-invested sector threatens wages and working conditions around the globe, so it really should be no surprise that ninety percent of Americans have since the 1970s suffered economic slippage--in wages, benefits, job security. 

“How We Got to Now” divides technological history into six thematic areas — glass, cold, sound, cleanliness, time and light.

the ones here function more like departure points for sets of skillfully interwoven narratives. To take the example of glass, we begin with a formation of molten silica, probably by a crashing comet, 26 million years ago in the Libyan desert. In due course we move to the glassmakers of Venice in the 13th century. And then things get more interesting. Monks laboring over religious manuscripts find that curved pieces of glass can aid their vision; a few centuries later, spectacles become popular, because parts of the European population, in response to the invention of the printing press, discover they need corrective lenses to read these new things called books. In time come telescopes and microscopes, which bring forth revolutionary ideas about stars and germs. Fiberglass eventually arrives, and soon we figure out how to make fiber optic glass cables, which carry pulses of laser light and zip petabytes of data around the globe.

I particularly like the cultural observations Johnson draws along the way. The invention and refinement of the glassmaking process, for example, also led to the production of high-quality mirrors. This helped painters like Rembrandt create startling works of self-portraiture; also, it coincided with a new generation of writers, Shakespeare included, willing to examine their characters’ interior lives with unprecedented scrutiny. “The mirror helped invent the modern self,” Johnson asserts. What’s more, “it set in motion a reorientation of society that was more subtle, but no less transformative, than the reorientation of our place in the universe that the telescope engendered.”

David Bowie Dies at 69; He Transcended Music, Art and Fashion

He died after an 18-month battle with cancer, according to a statement on Mr. Bowie’s social-media accounts.

He had also collaborated on an Off Broadway musical, “Lazarus,” that was a surreal sequel to his definitive 1976 film role, “The Man Who Fell to Earth.”

NRA declines to participate in Obama gun town hall

The nation's largest gun rights organization declined Wednesday to send official representatives to a nationally televised town hall with President Barack Obama on gun violence

The National Rifle Association sees no reason to participate in a public relations spectacle orchestrated by the White House,"

now, social media is pushing that spectacle to become continuous, intimate and hyperactive on multiple fronts. Performers gather shards of attention into a multimedia mosaic that’s presented like a soap opera coupled with a surveillance log: evidence of authenticity that can turn forensic.

As the perceived value of recorded music has dropped nearly to zero, people have been willing to pay more and more each year for live concerts — where the music is the main thing in the room, where distractions are minimized

for the top 100 tours of 2018 alone, gross revenues worldwide were $5.6 billion and average ticket prices rose from $84.63 in 2017 to $93.65 this year

Decency and the sense of shame that comes from violating standards of decency depend upon a tacit consensus on what it means to do right by others.

Decency is not justice; since the tacit consensus of the 1950s did not include full civil rights for African Americans, or for that matter virtually anyone who was not a straight white male, very decent folk all over the country lived with perfect complacency in a caste society

Ted Poe, another Texan—another representative, that is, of the law and order capital of America—turned to Strzok and said, “You’re going to act on your bias. You’re going to ‘stop’ President Trump. How do we know that’s not rampant through the FBI?” Strzok rejoined, “A judge asks jurors, ‘Are you able to set aside your personal opinions and render a judgment based on the facts?’ and I and the men and women of the FBI every day take our personal beliefs and set them aside in vigorous pursuit of the truth wherever it lies.