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It was The Economists’ Hour, as the title of the New York Times editorial writer Binyamin Appelbaum’s debut book has it.

Lemann and Appelbaum contribute to the second wave of post-2008 commentary. The first postmortems focused narrowly on the global financial crisis, dissecting the distorted incentives, regulatory frailty, and groupthink that caused bankers to blow up the world economy

The new round of analysis broadens the lens, searching out larger political and intellectual wrong turns, an expansion that reflects the morphing of the 2008 crash into a general populist surge.

Berle went further. He laid out in detail how shareholders, being so dispersed and numerous, could not hope to restrain bosses—indeed, how nobody could do so. Enormous powers to shape society belonged to company chieftains who answered to no one. Hence Berle’s prescription: The government should regulate them.

“the Treaty of Detroit,” GM’s bosses granted workers regular cost-of-living pay increases, a measure of job security, health insurance, and a pension—benefits that were almost unheard-of. General Motors had “set itself up as a comprehensive welfare state for its workers,” in Lemann’s succinct formulation.

Berle celebrated the Treaty of Detroit by propounding a pro-corporate liberalism. The corporation had become the “conscience-carrier of twentieth-century American society,” he marveled

Anticipating the “end of history” triumphalism of a later era, the sociologist Daniel Bell feted the corporatist order in a book titled The End of Ideology.

the chief threat to Berle’s vision came not from America’s suspicion of concentrated power. It came from economics

Starting in the 1970s, however, economists began to wield extraordinary influence. They persuaded Richard Nixon to abolish the military draft. They brought economics into the courtroom. They took over many of the top posts at regulatory agencies

The rise of economics, Appelbaum writes, “transformed the business of government, the conduct of business, and, as a result, the patterns of everyday life.

In sum, Jensen’s prescriptions inverted Berle’s. The market could be made to solve the problem of the firm. Government could pull back from regulation

Jensen agreed with Berle’s starting point: Corporate managers were unaccountable because shareholders could not restrain them. But rather than seeing a remedy in checks exerted by regulators and organized labor, Jensen proposed to overhaul the firm so that ownership and control were reunited

After decades in which economists’ influence expanded rapidly, the striking thing about the Trump administration and its foreign analogues is that they have largely dispensed with economic advisers

Shortly after the publication of his research, the invention of junk bonds made hostile takeovers the rage. During the ’80s, more than a quarter of the companies on the Fortune 500 list were targeted. Jensen became the scholar who explained why this unprecedented boardroom bloodbath was good news for America.

to a considerable extent, the news was good. Shielded from market discipline, the old corporate heads had deployed capital carelessly

From 1977 to 1988, Jensen calculated, American corporations had increased in value by $500 billion as a result of the new market for corporate control. Reengineered and reinvigorated, American business staved off what might have been an existential threat from Japanese competition.

Michael C. Jensen, an entertainingly impassioned financial economist who reframed attitudes toward the corporation in the mid-’70s.

Even before the 2008 crash, Jensen disavowed the transactional culture he had helped to legitimize. Holy shit, Jensen remembers saying to himself. Anything can be corrupted.

Contrary to common presumption, the economics establishment in the 1990s and 2000s did not believe that markets were perfectly efficient. Rather, influential economists took the pragmatic view that markets would discipline financiers more effectively than regulators could

He is happy to state at the outset that market-oriented reforms have lifted billions out of poverty, and to recognize that the deregulation that helped undo Berle-ism was not some kind of right-wing plot. In the late ’70s, it was initiated by Democrats such as President Jimmy Carter and Senator Ted Kennedy.

Inequality has grown to unacceptable extremes in highly developed economies. From 1980 to 2010, life expectancy for poor Americans scandalously declined, even as the rich lived longer.

Meanwhile, the primacy of economics has not generated faster economic growth. From 1990 until the eve of the financial crisis, U.S. real GDP per person grew by a little under 2 percent a year, less than the 2.5 percent a year in the oil-shocked 1970s.

economists have repeatedly made excessive claims for their discipline

In the ’60s, Kennedy’s and Johnson’s advisers thought they had the business cycle tamed. They believed they could prevent recessions by “fine-tuning” tax and spending policies

When this expectation was exposed as hubris, Milton Friedman urged central banks to focus exclusively on the supply of money circulating in the economy. This too was soon discredited. From the ’90s onward, economists oversold the benefits of targeting inflation, forgetting that other perils—the human cost of unemployment, the destabilization wrought by financial bubbles—might well be worse than rising prices

Greenspan and Summers ducked the political challenge of buffering new kinds of financial trading with regulatory safeguards

Yet a large cost eluded Jensen’s calculations. The social contract of the Berle era was gone: the unstated assumption of lifetime employment, the promise of retirement benefits, the sense of community and stability and shared purpose that gave millions of lives their meaning. Berle had viewed the corporation as a social and political institution as much as an economic one, and the dismembering of corporations on purely economic grounds was bound to generate fallout that had not been accounted for

today’s fierce international competition and disruptive innovation oblige businesses to cut costs or go under. The dilemma is that, even as they compel efficiency, globalization and technological change exacerbate inequality and uncertainty and therefore the need for a compassionate social contract

LinkedIn is not a solution to worker insecurity writ large, still less to inequality. On the contrary, a world in which people compete to gather connections may be even less equal than our current one. A few high-octane networkers will attract large followings, while a long tail of pedestrians will have only a handful of buddies

Rather than buy in to a single grand vision, societies should prefer a robust contest among interest groups—what Lemann calls pluralism. Borrowing from the forgotten early-20th-century political scientist Arthur Bentley, Lemann defines groups broadly. States and cities are “locality groups,” income categories are “wealth groups,” supporters of a particular politician constitute “personality groups.” People inevitably affiliate themselves with such groups; groups naturally compete to influence the government; and the resulting push and pull, not squabbles among intellectuals about organizing concepts, constitutes the proper stuff of politics

Lemann is aware of the risks in this conclusion. He cites the obvious objection: “The flaw in the pluralist heaven is that the heavenly chorus sings with a strong upper-class accent.” In a contest of competing interest groups, the ones with the most money are likely to win

For those who regard inequality as a challenge, an interest-group free-for-all is a perilous prescription.

Appelbaum presents a series of persuasive recommendations, confirming that Lemann is wrong to despair of reasoned, technocratic argument. If policy makers want ordinary Americans to appreciate the benefits of open trade, they must ensure that displaced workers have access to training and health care. Because some interest groups are weaker than others, government should correct the double standard by which the power of labor unions is regarded with antipathy but the power of business monopolies is tolerated

Progressives should look for ways to be pro-competition but anti-inequality

—it isn’t so clear that the economists have departed

throughout Appelbaum’s narrative, many of the knights who slay the dragons of bad economic ideology are economists themselves. The story of the past generation is more about debates among economists than about economists pitted against laypeople. Perhaps, with a bit of humility and retooling, the economists will have their day again. If they do not come up with the next set of good ideas, it is not obvious who will

They appeared to miss the so-called global warming hiatus between 1998 and 2013. At the time, scientists posited there wasn’t really a hiatus, but that the heat was simply building up in the oceans, or that there was a data collection issue. They were right, but that didn’t save the models from criticism.

The scientists combined four data sets to paint a picture of what has been happening in the oceans since 1991

Trenberth and his co-authors say ocean heat content, which is a measure of the warmth of the water down to about 2,000 meters, is a “great metric for measuring global warming” because the data isn’t as erratic as the temperature on land, and it captures much more of the planet.

n the process, they discovered something interesting: Their data agrees with what the climate models were predicting

Trenberth and his colleagues say if society continues to emit greenhouse gas at its current rate, oceans will rise one foot by the end of the century on top of the rise expected from melting land ice on Greenland and Antarctica.

This synthesis suggests the models are doing just fine

The IPCC reports have research deadlines at least a year before they are published; science in the most recent report may have been done six to eight years ago and “there’s a whole lot of stuff that has happened since then,”

Looking forward, there are two scenarios scientists are working with. The low-emissions scenario that the Paris climate change agreement was built around is no longer realistic, Trenberth said. The high-emissions, business-as-usual scenario will probably continue until about 2040, in his opinion, but eventually society will figure out how to manage the crisis.

“Yes, we need to try and stop emitting greenhouse gas. But the inertia is large,” Trenberth said. “Therefore the climate is going to continue to change.

Di Liberto agrees that we’re already feeling the effects, but he sees things changing in society, too

“We’ve spent too much time and effort on people who may not be convinced” that climate change is real and important, he said

But now there seems to be this grass-roots movement of young people who care. I don’t remember a time like this.”

there is no sign of flying long-haul on an electric plane any time soon.

The answer to this is to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, using “negative emissions technologies”

How can it be done? The UK is betting on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, BECCS, where carbon is removed from the atmosphere by crops or trees as they grow. This biomass is then burned in a power station to generate electricity, and the waste carbon dioxide is pumped far underground

A second approach is to restore or enhance processes that naturally remove carbon dioxide from the atmospher

orest restoration removes carbon by storing it in trees, and soils can also take up carbon, for example, if crushed silicate rocks are spread on to them, enhancing a natural chemical process

Politicians and their advisers love them, because they can announce a target such as 1.5C while planning to exceed it, with temperatures hopefully clawed back later in the century through negative emissions.

The greater the negative emissions, the less decarbonisation is needed. Negative emissions technologies are deployed as a weapon to avoid taking serious action on climate.

Most scenarios have more than 730bn tonnes of carbon dioxide sequestered as negative emissions this century. That is equivalent to all the carbon dioxide emitted since the industrial revolution by the US, the UK, Germany and China combined. There just isn’t enough land to suck up that much carbon into new forests

using BECCS to remove this much carbon, as most scenarios assume, would require an area of new cropland larger than India, plus building a facility to store 1m tonnes of carbon a year every single day from 2025 until 2050. Negative emissions at this scale are the stuff of fantasy.

She characterized her membership at a survival community called Fortitude Ranch as a reasonable insurance policy.“I don’t like to be dependent on anything, be it big government, big food sources or big pharma,” she said. “My interest isn’t from a place of fear. My interest is from a place of freedom.”

In Las Vegas, an underground bunker built by the Avon Cosmetics executive Girard Henderson, featuring a midcentury chef’s kitchen and a wood-burning fireplace, is on sale for $18 million.

Bunker clients say they are united not by ideology — liberals, conservatives and political agnostics exist side by side in this world — but by a belief that global forces have left societies increasingly vulnerable to large-scale disaster.

Forever 21, like its fast-fashion compatriots Zara and H&M, succeeded because it gave young people the thrill of personal choice, more so than any other business model in the world. It crippled some of those other models in the process.

Generation Z consumers—kids currently in grade school and college—just see a bunch of cheap stuff that everyone already knows about.

“A big difference with Generation Z is that they’re not all trying to look the same,” she says.

Gen Z “likes to do research, they have a limited budget, they spend online because they can get better deals.”

“We have a new generation that is more sophisticated in the sense that they are more interested in what they’re consuming,” she says. “They have strong convictions about what they should be wearing and the ethical and authenticity aspects of it, and transparency in terms of manufacturing—especially the ones that are really concerned about climate change.”

She pointed to Greta Thunberg and the success of her recent student climate protests as an indicator of what Generation Z is willing to do in order to stand up for their beliefs.

For some young consumers, those beliefs mean eschewing fast fashion—a business shot through with ethical, environmental, and human-rights problems—in favor of buying clothes secondhand

Teens have been gifted thrifters for generations, but start-ups like Depop have turned that facility into something that can be done on a far larger scale. These start-ups allow young people to buy used clothing from each other and scour the internet for weird finds from the backs of strangers’ closets

That growth, along with all the other ways that the internet lets teens explore identities and aesthetics for themselves and find things they like, has started to change how fashion trends form in and of themselves. “It’s now much more common to see trends growing from the bottom up, and then the press catches on to them, and then they become mass-marketed,

It might be social media, not online shopping itself, that presents the biggest problem for Forever 21 as it moves forward. Young Americans have the most direct window into the lives of others that they’ve ever had, which means they’re acutely aware of how people shop, and any particular marketer’s ability to influence their decisions is limited by the fragmented, decentralized way that adolescents learn about the world

the Twitter-mob mentality has an effect on the rest of the world. Everyone fears the wrath of the Twitter mob and the social justice warriors and the P.C. police. Religions always talk about the one true religion. Now on the left we have the one true opinion. If you go against that, you do so at your peril. That’s why the air on the left is becoming stale. I railed for years against the Fox News bubble, and that is as strong as ever, but I didn’t think it would get this bad on the left.

You can still make whatever joke you want. The difference is that more people are calling you out if they find it offensive. That’s naïve. You can make the joke if you don’t mind giving up your career or being fired. Come on. The politically correct people are not concerned about social justice. They care about putting scalps on the wall.

Liam Neeson. Remember that?44 While promoting a film early this year, Neeson said he had a racist revenge plan as a younger man after a close friend was raped by a black man. He later apologized. Are we at this place where we can’t admit that we’ve ever had bad thoughts and gotten over them and become a better person? You can’t judge today by yesterday. We evolve.

We live in an era where I don’t think people’s main focus is the truth and/or sussing out something valuable or teachable. We live in a time in which people are more concerned with scalps and clicks.

It’s ridiculous to label criticism of a religion as a phobia of a religion. I’m going to criticize any person or group that violates liberal principles, and so should you.

Almost all religions, by their nature, are intolerant and supremacist. At any time in history one religion will be the most fundamentalist. At this moment I think it’s pretty evident that religion is Islam. Of course, intolerance exists everywhere, but the places where, let’s say, human rights workers have their work cut out for them the most are probably traditional Islamic societies. To conflate thinking that with Islamophobia is a facile and unconvincing trick.

You have to find a way to begin with what you share and then explore why you differ so vehemently on other issues, and that’s what we seem to have lost the ability to do. I don’t see a lot of desire for people to talk to each other, to accept that, “O.K., this person doesn’t agree with me on a lot of stuff, but I don’t have to think he’s a monster.” We want to beat our chests and vanquish the other side. Compromise seems like a dead concept.

During the second year of “Politically Incorrect” we had a contest: “Politically incorrect or just stupid?” We were trying to make the point that saying something that’s contrary is not necessarily politically incorrect. It’s sometimes just stupid. I define political correctness as the elevation of sensitivity over truth. That’s my beef with it. We’re

Young people should be the free ones pushing the boundaries and not the ones inhibiting us. “Well, I’m not a woman, so I could not possibly know that experience.” “I’m not a person of color, so I can’t speak about that.

Professors are afraid to speak, because what they say, even if it’s science, might go against the politically correct notion. This is pernicious. I’m sorry, but I have to lay that at the doorstep of the far left and the younger generation. It’s not the worst thing in the world to hear something you find somewhat offensive. You can turn the channel. Look at something else. Go to a puppet show; you’ll never be offended.

what’s the most disappointing thing about your own generation? Aside from ruining the world environmentally. We’ve left a dark, stinking husk of a planet, haven’t we? My generation started this mess. The Baby Boomers were the first “Me” generation. They were the first spoiled kids. There definitely was more discipline, but there was also more indulgence, and that seemed to continue on and on. So I think we have to look in the mirror as to when that trend started

“Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity,” might suffice for someone to be elected to the governorship of a state, but not the presidency. Election would “require other talents, and a different kind of merit,” to gain “the esteem and confidence of the whole Union,” or enough of it to win the presidency. As a result, there would be “a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.” This was the Framers’ goal in designing the system that would make “the choice of the person to whom so important a trust was to be confided.”

In a nutshell, while carrying out his official duties, a president has to put the country, not himself, first; he must faithfully follow and enforce the law; and he must act with the utmost care in doing all that.

can Trump do all that? Does his personality allow him to? Answering those questions doesn’t require mental-health expertise, nor does it really require a diagnosis. You can make the argument for Trump’s unfitness without assessing his mental health: Like James Fallows, for example, you could just ask whether Trump would have been allowed to retain any other job in light of his bizarre conduct

More than a diagnosis, what truly matters, as Lincoln’s case shows, is the president’s behavioral characteristics and personality traits. And understanding how people behave and think is not the sole province of professionals; we all do it every day, with family members, co-workers, and others.

its criteria for personality disorders—they don’t require a person to lie on a couch and confess his or her innermost thoughts. They turn on how a person behaves in the wild, so to speak.

Donald Trump, as president of the United States, is probably the most observable and observed person in the world. I’ve personally met and spoken with him only a few times, but anyone who knows him will tell you that Trump, in a way, has no facade: What you see of him publicly is what you get all the time, although you may get more of it in private

accounts of a person’s behavior from laypeople who observe him might be more accurate than information from a clinical interview, and that this is especially true when considering two personality disorders in particular—what the DSM calls narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorde

These two disorders just happen to be the ones that have most commonly been ascribed to Trump by mental-health professionals over the past four years. Of these two disorders, the more commonly discussed when it comes to Trump is narcissistic personality disorder, or NPD—pathological narcissism

it touches directly upon whether Trump has the capacity to put anyone’s interests—including the country’s and the Constitution’s—above his own.

A certain amount of narcissism is healthy, and helpful—it brings with it confidence, optimism, and boldness. Someone with more than an average amount of narcissism may be called a narcissist. Many politicians, and many celebrities, could be considered narcissists

“Pathological narcissism begins when people become so addicted to feeling special that, just like with any drug, they’ll do anything to get their ‘high,’ including lie, steal, cheat, betray, and even hurt those closest to them,”

The “fundamental life goal” of an extreme narcissist “is to promote the greatness of the self, for all to see,

To many mental-health professionals, Donald Trump provides a perfect example of such extreme, pathological narcissism: One clinical psychologist told Vanity Fair that he considers Trump such a “classic” pathological narcissist that he is actually “archiving video clips of him to use in workshops because there’s no better example”

The goal of a diagnosis is to help a clinician guide treatment. The question facing the public is very different: Does the president of the United States exhibit a consistent pattern of behavior that suggests he is incapable of properly discharging the duties of his office?

Even Trump’s own allies recognize the degree of his narcissism. When he launched racist attacks on four congresswomen of color, Senator Lindsey Graham explained, “That’s just the way he is. It’s more narcissism than anything else.” So, too, do skeptics of assigning a clinical diagnosis. “No one is denying,” Frances told Rolling Stone, “that he is as narcissistic an individual as one is ever likely to encounter.” The president’s exceptional narcissism is his defining characteristic—and understanding that is crucial to evaluating his fitness for office

The DSM-5 describes its conception of pathological narcissism this way: “The essential feature of narcissistic personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy that begins by early adulthood and is present in a variety of contexts.”

The diagnostic criteria offer a useful framework for understanding the most remarkable features of Donald Trump’s personality, and of his presidency. (1) Exaggerates achievements and talents, expects to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements?

(2) Preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance

(3) Believes that he or she is “special” and unique and should only associate with other special or high-status people?

Trump claims to be an expert—the world’s greatest—in anything and everything. As one video mash-up shows, Trump has at various times claimed—in all seriousness—that no one knows more than he does about: taxes, income, construction, campaign finance, drones, technology, infrastructure, work visas, the Islamic State, “things” generally, environmental-impact statements, Facebook, renewable energy, polls, courts, steelworkers, golf, banks, trade, nuclear weapons, tax law, lawsuits, currency devaluation, money, “the system,” debt, and politicians.

(4) Requires excessive admiration? Last Thanksgiving, Trump was asked what he was most thankful for. His answer: himself, of course. A number of years ago, he made a video for Forbes in which he interviewed two of his children. The interview topic: how great they thought Donald Trump wa

(5) A sense of entitlement? (9) Arrogant, haughty behaviors? Trump is the man who, on the infamous Access Hollywood tape, said, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything you want”—including grabbing women by their genitals. He’s the man who also once said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.”

(8) Envious of others? Here’s a man so unable to stand the praise received by a respected war hero and statesman, Senator John McCain, that he has continued to attack McCain months after McCain’s death;

(6) Interpersonally exploitative? Just watch the Access Hollywood tape, or ask any of the hundreds of contractors and employees Trump the businessman allegedly stiffed, or speak with any of the two dozen women who have accused Trump of sexual misconduct, sexual assault, or rape.

Finally, (7) Lacks empathy: is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings or needs of others? One of the most striking aspects of Trump’s personality is his utter and complete lack of empathy

The notorious lawyer and fixer Roy Cohn, who once counseled Trump, said that “Donald pisses ice water,” and indeed, examples of Trump’s utter lack of normal human empathy abound.

“It made no sense, Priebus realized, unless you understood … ‘The president has zero psychological ability to recognize empathy or pity in any way.’

What kind of human being, let alone politician, would engage in such unempathetic, self-centered behavior while memorializing such horrible tragedies? Only the most narcissistic person imaginable—or a person whose narcissism would be difficult to imagine if we hadn’t seen it ourselves. The evidence of Trump’s narcissism is overwhelming—indeed, it would be a gargantuan task to try to marshal all of it, especially as it mounts each and every day.

A second disorder also frequently ascribed to Trump by professionals is sociopathy—what the DSM-5 calls antisocial personality disorder

Central to sociopathy is a complete lack of empathy—along with “an absence of guilt.” Sociopaths engage in “intentional manipulation, and controlling or even sadistically harming others for personal power or gratification. People with sociopathic traits have a flaw in the basic nature of human beings … They are lacking an essential part of being human.” For its part, the DSM-5 states that the “essential feature of antisocial personality disorder is a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.”

Trump’s sociopathic characteristics sufficiently intertwine with his narcissistic ones that they deserve mention here. These include, to quote the DSM-5, “deceitfulness, as indicated by repeated lying, use of aliases, or conning others.” Trump’s deceitfulness—his lying—has become the stuff of legend; journalists track his “false and misleading claims” as president by the thousands upon thousands.

Other criteria for antisocial personality disorder include “failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, as indicated by repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arrest”; “impulsivity or failure to plan ahead”; and “lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent to or rationalizing having hurt, mistreated, or stolen from another.

As for impulsivity, that essentially describes what gets him into trouble most: It was his “impulsiveness—actually, total recklessness”—that came close to destroying him in the 1980s

And lack of remorse? That’s a hallmark of sociopathy, and goes hand in hand with a lack of human conscience. In a narcissistic sociopath, it’s intertwined with a lack of empathy. Trump hardly ever shows remorse, or apologizes, for anything. The one exception: With his presidential candidacy on the line in early October

In a way, Trump’s sociopathic tendencies are simply an extension of his extreme narcissism

articular, “They change reality to suit themselves in their own mind.” Although Trump “lies because of his sociopathic tendencies,” telling falsehoods to fool others, Dodes argues, he also lies to himself, to protect himself from narcissistic injury. And so Donald Trump has lied about his net worth, the size of the crowd at his inauguration, and supposed voter fraud in the 2016 election.

The latter kind of lying, Dodes says, “is in a way more serious,” because it can indicate “a loose grip on reality”—and it may well tell us where Trump is headed in the face of impeachment hearings. Lying to prevent narcissistic injury can metastasize to a more significant loss of touch with reality

Experts haven’t suggested that Trump is psychotic, but many have contended that his narcissism and sociopathy are so inordinate that he fits the bill for “malignant narcissism.” Malignant narcissism isn’t recognized as an official diagnosis; it’s a descriptive term coined by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm, and expanded upon by another psychoanalyst, Otto Kernberg, to refer to an extreme mix of narcissism and sociopathy, with a degree of paranoia and sadism mixed in

In the view of some in the mental-health community, such as John Gartner, Trump “exhibits all four” components of malignant narcissism: “narcissism, paranoia, antisocial personality and sadism.”

Mental-health professionals have raised a variety of other concerns about Trump’s mental state; the last worth specifically mentioning here is the possibility that, apart from any personality disorder, he may be suffering cognitive decline.

His “mental state,” according to Justin A. Frank, a former clinical professor of psychiatry and physician who wrote a book about Trump’s psychology, “include[s] so many psychic afflictions” that a “working knowledge of psychiatric disorders is essential to understanding Trump.” Indeed, as Gartner puts it: “There are a lot of things wrong with him—and, together, they are a scary witch’s brew.”

when you line up what the Framers expected of a president with all that we know about Donald Trump, his unfitness becomes obvious. The question is whether he can possibly act as a public fiduciary for the nation’s highest public trust. To borrow from the Harvard Law Review article, can he follow the “proscriptions against profit, bad faith, and self-dealing,” manifest “a strong concern about avoiding ultra vires action” (that is, action exceeding the president’s legal authority), and maintain “a duty of diligence and carefulness”? Given that Trump displays the extreme behavioral characteristics of a pathological narcissist, a sociopath, or a malignant narcissist—take your pick—it’s clear that he can’t.

To act as a fiduciary requires you to put someone else’s interests above your own, and Trump’s personality makes it impossible for him to do that. No president before him, at least in recent memory, has ever displayed such obsessive self-regard

Indeed, Trump’s view of his presidential powers can only be described as profoundly narcissistic, and his narcissism has compelled him to disregard the Framers’ vision of his constitutional duties in every respect

Trump’s incapacity affects all manner of subjects addressed by the presidency, but can be seen most acutely in foreign affairs and national security.

All in all, Trump sought to impede and end a significant counterintelligence and criminal investigation—one of crucial importance to the nation—and did so for his own personal reasons. He did precisely the opposite of what his duties require. Indeed, he has shown utter contempt for his duties to the nation

hat constitutional mechanisms exist for dealing with a president who cannot or does not comply with his duties, and how should they take the president’s mental and behavioral characteristics into account?

it turns out that impeachment is a more practical mechanism

In short, now that the House of Representatives has embarked on an impeachment inquiry, one of the most important judgments it must make is whether any identified breaches of duty are likely to be repeated. And if a Senate trial comes to pass, that issue would become central as well to the decision to remove the president from office. That’s when Trump’s behavioral and psychological characteristics should—must—come into pla

One of the most compelling arguments about the meaning of those words is that the Framers, in Article II’s command that a president faithfully execute his office, imposed upon him fiduciary obligations. As the constitutional historian Robert Natelson explained in the Federalist Society Review, the “founding generation [understood] ‘high … Misdemeanors’ to mean ‘breach of fiduciary duty.’

Eighteenth-century lawyers instead used terms such as breach of trust—which describes the same thing. “Parliamentary articles of impeachment explicitly and repetitively described the accused conduct as a breach of trust,” Natelson argues, and 18th-century British legal commentators explained how impeachment for “high Crimes and Misdemeanors” was warranted for all sorts of noncriminal violations that were, in essence, fiduciary breaches.

why the discussion of Morris’s suggestion was so brief—the drafters knew what the words historically meant, because, as a House Judiciary Committee report noted in 1974, “at the time of the Constitutional Convention the phrase ‘high Crimes and Misdemeanors’ had been in use for over 400 years in impeachment proceedings in Parliament

Certainly Alexander Hamilton knew by the time he penned “Federalist No. 65,” in which he explained that impeachment was for “those offenses which proceed from the misconduct of public men, or, in other words, from the abuse or violation of some public trust.

What constitutes such an abuse or violation of trust is up to Congress to decide: First the House decides to bring impeachment charges, and then the Senate decides whether to convict on those charges. The process of impeachment by the House and removal by trial in the Senate is thus, in some ways, akin to indictment by a grand jury and trial by a petit jury

As Laurence Tribe and Joshua Matz explain in their recent book on impeachment, “the Constitution explicitly states that Congress may not end a presidency unless the president has committed an impeachable offense. But nowhere does the Constitution state or otherwise imply that Congress must remove a president whenever that standard is met … In other words, it allows Congress to exercise judgment.”

As Tribe and Matz argue, that judgment presents a “heavy burden,” and demands that Congress be “context-sensitive,” and achieve “an understanding of all relevant facts.” A president might breach his trust to the nation once in some small, inconsequential way and never repeat the misbehavior, and Congress could reasonably decide that the game is not worth the candle.

It’s also an appropriate mechanism, because the constitutional magic words (other than Treason and Bribery) that form the basis of an impeachment charge—high Crimes and Misdemeanors, found in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution—mean something other than, and more than, offenses in the criminal-statute books. High Crimes and Misdemeanors is a legal term of art, one that historically referred to breaches of duties—fiduciary duties—by public officeholders. In other words, the question of what constitutes an impeachable offense for a president coincides precisely with whether the president can execute his office in the faithful manner that the Constitution requires.

there’s another reason as well. The people have a right to know, and a need to see. Many people have watched all of Trump’s behavior, and they’ve drawn the obvious conclusion. They know something’s wrong, just as football fans knew that the downed quarterback had shattered his leg. Others have changed the channel, or looked away, or chosen to deny what they’ve seen. But if Congress does its job and presents the evidence, those who are in denial won’t be able to ignore the problem any longer.

Mike Barry, director of sustainable business at Marks & Spencer, said: “The signals are [fashion is] on the same trajectory as plastics and forests and alternatives to meat. These were all underlying concerns that got through to the mainstream consumer.

The government-backed sustainable clothing action plan, whose signatories include Next, M&S, Ted Baker, Primark and Asos, has committed nine major retailers to reducing waste being sent to landfill, water use and carbon footprint by 15% by 2020.

“We have only got 12 years to tackle damaging climate change,” she says. “We as consumers have to ask questions of brands. Brands have to make it part of what they do. These are massive companies run by some of the world’s richest men. Someone is doing OK out of it.”

Creagh adds that cheap fashion comes with a social as well as an environmental cost – with low-paid workers overseas unable to provide for their families. “We are not saying to people on a low income you can’t buy cheap clothes. We are saying it is time that the cost should reflect the true cost of the minimum wage and decent working conditions and growing stuff without pesticides. It needs to be sustainable from top to bottom and we don’t think the true cost is a £5 dress. That price is not being paid by us, it is being paid by someone else and the environment.”

Environmental campaigners say people who want to be more sustainable should choose quality clothes and make them last as long as possible by learning to repair or rework them. Buying secondhand or vintage clothing, considering renting outfits rather than buying, and washing garments less often at lower temperatures in a full machine can all help.

Sumner says: “The more you process and play with them the worse they are and the quality reduces. “Recycled fibres through traditional routes are poor quality.”

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Forgoing any concerns about the deficit, McConnell and administration officials were encouraged by a president who urged negotiators behind the scenes to “be bold, be brave and go big.”

“It was hot on the floor and cool in the room,” said one senior administration official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to talk freely.

All throughout, the fear among senators, particularly those from hard-hit states, was palpable.

“What happened was that we kept our eye on what needed to be done, which really fit the national need — much more money for hospitals than they proposed, far more accountability on corporate bailouts than they proposed,” Schumer said in The Post interview. “Money for state and localities, which they had none of. And more stuff for working and unemployed people, and they really, our Republican friends, didn't have much to say.”

Ambikapur is one of the cities at the front of the charge. It boasts 100% door-to-door waste collection and segregation, and was the second-cleanest in government rankings this year. It also generates about 1.2 million rupees (13,000 pounds sterling) a month selling plastic and recycled paper to private companies. The collected plastic from the Garbage Cafe will be used to construct roads – in 2015, the Ambikapur authorities built an entire road out of plastic. “It has lasted really well, even during the monsoon rains,” said Tirkey.

It has now reached the capital, New Delhi, where municipal authorities plan to open several Garbage Cafes along the lines of the one in Ambikapur. About 70% of the city’s plastic waste is single use, and most of it ends up in landfills or clogging drains. It is a particular menace for hungry cows who end up rummaging through garbage bins and eating plastic. Last year, a vet in Delhi removed 70kg of plastic from a cow’s stomach.

Tirkey stresses the importance of that loop. “What’s important is that our meals are nutritious and tasty. We didn’t want to give rubbish.”

what happens when an extraordinarily rich society can’t find enough new ideas that justify investing all its stockpiled wealth. We inflate bubbles and then pop them, invest in Theranos and then repent, and the supposed cutting edge of capitalism is increasingly defined by technologies that have almost arrived, business models that are on their way to profitability, by runways that go on and on without the plane achieving takeoff.

what this tells us, unfortunately, is that 21st-century growth and innovation are not at all that we were promised they would be.

slowly compounding growth is not the same as dynamism. American entrepreneurship has been declining since the 1970s: Early in the Jimmy Carter presidency, 17 percent of all United States businesses had been founded in the previous year; by the start of Barack Obama’s second term, that rate was about 10 percent. In the late 1980s, almost half of United States companies were “young,” meaning less than five years old; by the Great Recession, that share was down to only 39 percent, and the share of “old” firms (founded more than 15 years ago) rose from 22 percent to 34 percent over a similar period

From World War II through the 1980s, according to a recent report from Senator Marco Rubio’s office, private domestic investment often approached 10 percent of G.D.P.; in 2019, despite a corporate tax cut intended to get money off the sidelines, the investment-to-G.D.P. ratio was less than half of that.

This suggests that the people with the most experience starting businesses look around at their investment opportunities and see many more start-ups that resemble Theranos than resemble Amazon, let alone the behemoths of the old economy.

the dearth of corporate investment also means that the steady climb of the stock market has boosted the wealth of a rentier class — basically, already-rich investors getting richer off dividends — rather than reflecting surging prosperity in general.

In 2017 a group of economists published a paper asking, “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” The answer was a clear yes: “We present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply.”

In his 2011 book “The Great Stagnation,” Tyler Cowen cited an analysis from the Pentagon physicist Jonathan Huebner, who modeled an innovations-to-population ratio for the last 600 years: It shows a slowly ascending arc through the late 19th century, when major inventions were rather easy to conceive and adopt, and a steepening decline ever since, as rich countries spend more and more on research to diminishing returns.

the trends reveal a slowdown, a mounting difficulty in achieving breakthroughs — a bottleneck if you’re optimistic, a ceiling if you aren’t

the relative exception, the internet and all its wonders, highlights the general pattern.

The Northwestern University economist Robert Gordon, one of the most persuasive theorists of stagnation, points out that the period from 1840 to 1970 featured dramatic growth and innovation across multiple arenas — energy and transportation and medicine and agriculture and communication and the built environment.

in the last two generations, progress has become increasingly monodimensional — all tech and nothing else.

Take a single one of the great breakthroughs of the industrial age — planes and trains and automobiles, antibiotics and indoor plumbing — and it still looms larger in our everyday existence than all of the contributions of the tech revolution combined.

We used to travel faster, build bigger, live longer; now we communicate faster, chatter more, snap more selfies.

With this stagnation comes social torpor. America is a more peaceable country than it was in 1970 or 1990, with lower crime rates and safer streets and better-behaved kids

it’s also a country where that supposedly most American of qualities, wanderlust, has markedly declined: Americans no longer “go west” (or east or north or south) in search of opportunity the way they did 50 years ago; the rate at which people move between states has fallen from 3.5 percent in the early 1970s to 1.4 percent in 2010. Nor do Americans change jobs as often as they once did.

Meanwhile, those well-behaved young people are more depressed than prior cohorts, less likely to drive drunk or get pregnant but more tempted toward self-harm

For adults, the increasingly legal drug of choice is marijuana, whose prototypical user is a relaxed and harmless figure — comfortably numb, experiencing stagnation as a chill good time.

then there is the opioid epidemic, whose spread across the unhappiest parts of white America passed almost unnoticed in elite circles for a while because the drug itself quiets rather than inflames, supplying a gentle euphoria that lets its users simply slip away, day by day and bit by bit, without causing anyone any trouble

In the land of the lotus eaters, people are also less likely to invest in the future in the most literal of ways. The United States birthrate was once an outlier among developed countries, but since the Great Recession, it has descended rapidly, converging with the wealthy world’s general below-replacement norm.

This demographic decline worsens economic stagnation; economists reckoning with its impact keep finding stark effects. A 2016 analysis found that a 10 percent increase in the fraction of the population over 60 decreased the growth rate of states’ per capita G.D.P. by 5.5 percent.

This doesn’t excuse the grifting or the rage stoking, especially presidential grifting and rage stoking, and it doesn’t make the mass shootings, when they come, any less horrific. But it’s important context for thinking about whether online politics is really carrying our society downward into civil strife

This feedback loop — in which sterility feeds stagnation, which further discourages childbearing, which sinks society ever-deeper into old age — makes demographic decline a clear example of how decadence overtakes a civilization

Both populism and socialism, Trump and Bernie Sanders, represent expressions of discontent with decadence, rebellions against the technocratic management of stagnation that defined the Obama era.

in practical terms the populist era has mostly delivered a new and deeper stalemate. From Trump’s Washington to the capitals of Europe, Western politics is now polarized between anti-establishment forces that are unprepared to competently govern and an establishment that’s too disliked to effectively rule.

The hysteria with which we’re experiencing them may represent nothing more than the way that a decadent society manages its political passions, by encouraging people to playact extremism, to re-enact the 1930s or 1968 on social media, to approach radical politics as a sport, a hobby, a kick to the body chemistry, that doesn’t put anything in their relatively comfortable late-modern lives at risk.

The terrorist in 21st-century America isn’t the guy who sees more deeply than the rest; he’s the guy who doesn’t get it, who takes the stuff he reads on the internet literally in a way that most of the people posting don’t

once we crossed over into permanent below-replacement territory, the birth dearth began undercutting the very forces (youth, risk -taking, dynamism) necessary for continued growth, meaning that any further gains to individual welfare are coming at the future’s expense.

It suggests that the virtual realm might make our battles more ferocious but also more performative and empty; and that online rage is a steam-venting technology for a society that is misgoverned, stagnant and yet, ultimately, far more stable than it looks on Twitter

in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth.

Human beings can still live vigorously amid a general stagnation, be fruitful amid sterility, be creative amid repetition. And the decadent society, unlike the full dystopia, allows those signs of contradictions to exist

The last hundred-odd years of Western history offer plenty of examples of how the attempt to throw off decadence can bring in far worse evils, from the craving for Meaning and Action that piled corpses at Verdun and Passchendaele, to the nostalgic yearning for the Cold War that inspired post-9/11 crusading and led to a military quagmire in the Middle East.

So you can even build a case for decadence, not as a falling-off or disappointing end, but as a healthy balance between the misery of poverty and the dangers of growth for growth’s sake

A sustainable decadence, if you will, in which the crucial task for 21st-century humanity would be making the most of a prosperous stagnation: learning to temper our expectations and live within limits; making sure existing resources are distributed more justly; using education to lift people into the sunlit uplands of the creative class; and doing everything we can to help poorer countries transition successfully into our current position

this argument carries you only so far. Even if the dystopia never quite arrives, the longer a period of stagnation continues, the narrower the space for fecundity and piety, memory and invention, creativity and daring.

So decadence must be critiqued and resisted

by the hope that where there’s stability, there also might eventually be renewal,

The next renaissance will be necessarily different, but realism about our own situation should make us more inclined, not less, to look and hope for one — for the day when our culture feels more fruitful, our politics less futile and the frontiers that seem closed today are opened once again.

He recommended misting produce with a very diluted bleach solution (a teaspoon of bleach per gallon of water) and letting it air dry. Or, if you’re nervous about using bleach on something you’ll eat, he said you could use a disinfecting wipe.

Other goods are less risky, but it’s still worth wiping down cardboard boxes of crackers or other packaged items.

the best thing to do is stay away from other people, particularly if you’re part of a vulnerable population.

Hand soap really will protect you.“One thing about this coronavirus,” he said, is that “it’s very susceptible to disinfectants and soap and water.”

if you go to a store, touch a contaminated surface, then touch your hair and then your face, even once between hand-washing, you could become infected.

if you’re really concerned, it might be worth throwing your clothes in the wash and showering after you get back from the store. (Your shoes, he said, are probably fine to bring into the house.)

one thing to watch out for is your reusable grocery bags: “When was the last time you sanitized your favorite bag?

Although state health officials released guidelines for grocery stores saying they should limit how many customers are in a given store and should keep people at least six feet apart even when they’re in line, this is proving to be easier said than done.

he suggested calling the store you’d like to visit before you leave, both to inquire about the wait and what’s in stock.

We came back to our office and started working, fueled by adrenaline. Our first few attempts didn’t succeed, but eventually we made four copies of the prototype on a small 3-D printing machine that we have in our office.

The day after, we returned to the hospital and gave our valves to a doctor who tested them. They worked and he asked for 100 more. So we went back to the office, and returned to the hospital with 100 more. We hoped that this would last them for a few days. Still, the coronavirus rages on. A few hospitals in northern Italy asked us to make copies of the same piece. We are printing them now.

This sparked a second idea: to modify a snorkeling mask already on the market to create a ventilation-assisted mask for hospitals in need of additional equipment, which was successful when the hospital tested it on a patient in need.

We don’t say this to brag, but to show what is possible. In a moment of crisis, and in a moment when commerce globally is shutting down, there are still many do-it-yourself ways of helping the people around you.

His former campaign adviser, Larry Remer, said: “I wouldn’t trust him to go out to get lunch and come back with everybody’s sandwich and drink order correctly. I don’t know how he could be put in charge of logistics.

“There’s something about the process that really brings out your essence,” Remer said. “And in this case it brought out Peter’s essence, which is that he has no people skills at all, and he has no empathy for other people.”

The personality problem got worse with each defeat, according to Navarro’s former spokeswoman, Lisa Ross, who worked with him on four campaigns.

As the years went on and as he kept losing campaign after campaign, he became more and more brittle, more and more confrontational, and ended up … alienating just about everyone,” Ross said. “Peter was not a nice person at the end of the day … He can really get in your face.”

“It occurred to me that really Peter and Trump are the same kind of animal. They’re very media savvy but very brittle,” Ross said. “Peter can be a real bully and maybe that’s why Trump picked him. He wanted a bully to do the job.”

In the book Navarro acknowledged his reputation as “the cruelest and meanest son-of-a-bitch that ever ran for office in San Diego”, adding: “I don’t have any concern at all about making stuff up about my opponent that isn’t exactly true – I know that bastard running against me doesn’t have any scruples either.”

His tirades against China and free trade anticipated the rhetoric that helped Trump win the presidency. In the first two years of the administration, though often marginalised by more powerful, pro-trade officials, he has emerged triumphant long after they have gone.

“He is extraordinarily influential in the White House and whether you like him or not, whether you agree with his politics he caught on early with Donald Trump,” said Walter Lohman, the director of Asian studies at the Heritage Foundation. “He sort of scratches an itch that Donald Trump has.”

In reality, Mr. Rubio added, the heavy hand of the government can be helpful in cases like this, where it is clear that the United States has become too reliant on Chinese manufacturing. “If in our public policy we are going to incentivize certain behavior, certain activities, it should be behavior and activities that are good for the country,” he said.

this moment of national crisis was “almost kind of tailor-made to bring a lot of these issues to the fore.”

Conservatives like Mr. Cass believe that the traditional Republican economic view is not only hamstringing the country’s ability to protect itself, but also hurting the party with the voters whom Mr. Trump brought in — and who are not sharing in the vast wealth gains at the very top of the ladder.

Over the past 30 years, the American right has developed a misguided notion about what prosperity really is by having an “obsession with consumption,” Mr. Cass said, adding: “As long as the pie keeps growing, everyone can have pie. And who doesn’t love pie?”

“It seemed to me what that missed was that the components of prosperity are a whole lot more complex than consumption,” Mr. Cass said.

These kinds of statements are considered an apostasy in certain conservative circles, where the belief that capitalism and the free market will almost always arrive at the best and most efficient outcome is inviolable

For years, Republicans have hewed to the idea that businesses generally know what is best for them and the economy, and that the best public policy leaves decisions largely to business owners and the free market. This has guided a generation of policy that favors deregulation and free trade.

many Republicans have pushed their party to embrace the more nationalist elements of the president’s economic agenda.

American Compass will try to address what some conservatives see as the failure on the part of the right’s biggest think tanks and interest groups to embrace Mr. Trump’s skepticism of unfettered trade, and his willingness to use the power of the government to give American companies a competitive advantage.

“I think that a number of people have been trying to make sense of their own worldviews about politics and how that intersects with economic policy after Trump was elected,” he said. “And that is definitely affecting this debate.”

the work being done at American Compass, where he is a contributing writer, was ultimately part of the larger debate over what happens to the Republican Party once Mr. Trump is no longer leading it.

“Among a type of establishment Republican, there’s definitely been this hope that when Trump goes, all of this stuff will disappear,” Mr. Vance said. “But if the trends in American politics continue, there’s just no way to imagine a Republican Party that doesn’t have a substantially different platform in 20 years.”

His was a revolutionary agenda, designed to turn the world order upside down, rooted deeply in romantic and even avant-garde sensibilities. To see fascism as stemming ultimately from liberalism might sound surprising, but this is true of both socialism as well as fascism, because finally it is liberalism’s principle of human perfectibility from which these impulses derive.

the myth of American exceptionalism is just that, a myth, and that we have traveled so far from our national founding impulses that other tendencies, namely forms of what used to be considered peculiarly European anxieties, have now become the defining features of our polity.

1. Fascism rechannels economic anxiety

. Especially after the Russian Revolution, the urgent question for all of Europe became: Was socialism the right path, or capitalism? And in either case, was a new political order required?

For the elites who propagated the “Washington consensus” in the 1990s, supported by such popularizers as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, there was nothing complicated about globalization: Incomes would rise around the world, inequality would fall and liberal tolerance would flourish. This rosy picture is so far from reality as to be laughable

Thus the question arises again, with as much urgency as in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution: What shall be the world’s economic order? Is it possible to conceive, at this late date, of globalization with a human face? Or is something more revolutionary needed?

2. Liberal institutions have already been fatally weakened

We are currently lamenting Trump’s evisceration of the media and other institutions of democracy, but he would not be having such success, at least with half of the population, if those institutions were not already seriously compromised

They may now be reacting viscerally against Trump, because of the crude way in which he takes on their shallowness, but it doesn’t mean anything to his supporters.

The Italian parliamentary system was marked by a tendency toward transformismo or “transformism,” to which our strongest parallel would be Bill (or Hillary) Clinton’s triangulation.

There were always more assertive fascists around than Mussolini — for example, Roberto Farinacci, the ras (or leader) of Cremona

3. Internal strongmen tussles don’t mean anything

4. Fascism keeps mutating

10. Racism is inherent to fascism

What this shows is that fascism is highly adaptable to different needs and conditions, just as its opposite, democracy, is similarly flexible.

Mussolini, though an inveterate atheist, made peace with the Vatican, in the famous Lateran Accords of 1929, abandoning his most cherished beliefs in order to gain the complicity of the Catholic church. Earlier in the 1920s, he installed corporate-friendly ministers to work with Italy’s industrialists to enact an agenda they could be comfortable with. Such mutations are par for the course for fascists, they’re nothing to get excited about.

6. Of course it’s a minority affair

To note that Trump did not win the popular vote (as was true of George W. Bush in 2000), does not take away from the power of fascism

Mussolini, though he established his regime on the myth of the March on Rome, was actually appointed by King Victor Emmanuel III when Mussolini seemed like the only figure, compared to the discredited liberal politicians, who could bring order to the country

Only a small minority need give overt consent. The rest can be quiet, or complacent, or complicit

7. There is an ideology behind the chaos of ideologies

Italian historians after the fact claimed that fascism was an aberration

8. Its cultural style makes no sense to elites

Trump and his successors will have to work with less potent stuff. So-called conspiratorial thinking is a unifying strand — I already mentioned Alex Jones — which connects many of the strands of ultra-conservative ideology throughout the past century. The Reds become Jews and then Muslims; the substitutions are not that difficult to make.

faux masculinity — is an important part of this cultural style

9. Fascism leads inexorably to suicidal war

Once the façade of virile domesticity starts getting exposed, war becomes the only option to keep the regime going

11. No form of resistance works

its chameleon-like tendency to absorb the ideas of the opposition and to neutralize them and make them invisible leaves a profoundly disillusioning aftertaste. Ideology desperately wants to make a comeback

The thing to notice is that fascism, in all the places it’s been known to arise, converts an admittedly minority point of view into a mass energy that soon overwhelms every civilized instinct. Perhaps Trump doesn’t need to do this footwork; perhaps much of this foundational work was already accomplished in the Bush era. What should really concern us is that fascism now seems to have a certain stability that we have not seen in earlier models that relied on a single charismatic leader. Despite the Obama interlude, Trump has resumed where George W. Bush in his most feverish mood had left off. This suggests that fascism has become permanently stabilized in this country. It is the most worrisome aspect of the present situation.

One remarkable similarity — among many others — between Trump and Mussolini is their total preoccupation with coverage in the media

BURNS: That’s what I meant by cavalier. It’s just so run-of-the-mill, as if the extinguishing — and, look, you’re in the military, that’s your job. But just the cavalierness of a surrendered prisoner or a captured prisoner or whatever it is, it’s a spy and obviously he’s lost comrades in this. But there’s no justification for that moment in any rational scenario — any humane scenario, is probably the better way to describe it. And so what it becomes is an abhorrent mirror to the possibilities in ourselves.

This episode is called “Things Fall Apart” and it has to do with the William Butler Yeats poem that Robert Kennedy cites in an editorial that he writes that year opposing the war in no uncertain terms in the New York Times. But it’s also about what the title of the next episode is about: the veneer of civilization.

This is how close we are. I always feel that all of these images here are mirrors. They ask us — and I think one of the gifts of filmmaking is that it permits us to order and sequence images to remind us of not what happens but also what we are capable of ourselves.

And look, murder and war, they’re synonymous. But there’s something about that moment, that photograph and that footage, that are the — it’s the heart of darkness of the whole story.

When you see someone spooning sugar onto a bowl of cornflakes or Cheerios, you should not see the act as sweetening something that’s good for you, you should see it as someone spooning sugar onto sugar.

the biggest culprits in America’s bad health are sugar and refined grains, in that order. Sugar, a carbohydrate, now seems to be the chief villain. (In his recent book “The Case Against Sugar,” Taubes suggests it should be considered toxic in the same way cigarettes are.) But its nutritional cousin, the refined-grain carbohydrate, may be a close second.

Cereal was not always the morning staple that it is today. It only became so at about the same time that our health problems began to be documented, in the 1960s. A coincidence?

cereal was initially eaten on Sundays, when the women of our churchgoing nation didn’t have time to make the family breakfast. Once women entered the workforce, though, we began pouring our convenient breakfasts out of a box in significant numbers daily, a trend that peaked in 1995,

it may not even just be cereal that’s had such a huge impact on American health. “Maybe the problem,” Sukol said, “is the huge quantity of nutritionally bankrupt foods that are supposed to stand in for breakfast.”

By this she means anything composed primarily of refined wheat, which would be, um, 90 percent of the American breakfast repertoire: pancakes, waffles, bagels, toast, muffins, biscuits, scones, croissants, and so on.

eating this stuff on an empty stomach (i.e. in the morning), may be especially bad for your system, as there is little fiber, fat or protein in your system to slow the sugar absorption. Our breakfast staples might all best be considered as a single category of food: sugar bomb.

she nevertheless recommends that all her patients avoid what she calls “stripped” carbs, carbohydrates stripped of their fiber matrix, before noon.

What does she recommend for breakfast? Steel-cut oats, not cooked but rather soaked overnight with a dash of vinegar. I add whole-fat Greek yogurt and some nuts if I have them

Beans are great too. I had a delicious dish of lentils and a small amount of basmati rice

An egg and some cheese are also a nourishing and satisfying way to begin the day.

it throws a different light on the cereal aisle. That hulking behemoth in the middle of the grocery store, the racks of cereal, is stripped-carb and sugar ground zero, representing a kind of unrecognized terrorism wrought on parents by our own food makers