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the most beautiful surprise was to see how deeply many of them had absorbed lessons not to be found in any textbook. Picking up a campus newspaper one day, I found an article by the person I’d foolishly taken to be our class clown. He went to Mass every Sunday, he wrote, precisely because he had no religious commitment. He wanted to learn about perspectives other than the ones he knew. He admired the discipline and sense of order encouraged by such a practice, which he felt he might lack otherwise. He’d been startled by the open-mindedness of a devout roommate, with whom he used to argue through the night. If someone of religious faith could be so responsive to other positions, he wrote, should not a secular liberal aspire to the same?

We’re caught up in an addiction to simplifications for which the only medicine lies within. We need to be reminded that not to be right doesn’t always mean you’re wrong. And that to be terribly wronged does not mean you’re innocent. The world deals in black-or-whites no more than a hurricane or a virus does.

Traveling across Japan with the Dalai Lama a year before the pandemic, I heard him say often that after watching the planet up close as a leader of his people for what was then 79 years, he felt the world was suffering through an “emotional crisis.” The cure, he said, was “emotional disarmament.” What he meant by the striking phrase was that we can see beyond panic and rage and confusion only by using our minds, and that part of the mind that doesn’t deal in binaries.

Both the novel and the film, which Greenlee produced with Dixon, concern an apparently docile Black C.I.A. employee with the allegorical name Dan Freeman. Recruited as a public relations gesture, Freeman plays the long game, using what he has learned at the agency to mastermind an guerrilla war in Chicago.

Racial solidarity is the movie’s subject and the project’s DNA. Not only did Greenlee raise money from Black investors and get a fellow Chicagoan, Herbie Hancock, to write the score, he was able to use Gary, Ind., one of the first large American cities to elect a Black mayor, as a stand-in location for Chicago, thus enjoying the cooperation of the municipal authorities for powerful riot scenes.

The white characters (mainly male authority figures) are fools, brutes, knaves and patronizing liars. The Black ones are also stereotyped but given greater depth. The movie suggests a live-action animated cartoon in which the whites have two dimensions and the Blacks have three.

if “Spook” is a cartoon, it’s one animated by the ideas of the radical psychiatrist and champion of decolonization Frantz Fanon.

The movie is an analog to anti-imperialist films like “The Battle of Algiers,” albeit in the guise of a blaxploitation cheapster

after three weeks in release, during which F.B.I. agents hounded exhibitors to pull the film, UA withdrew it from circulation, citing poor box office grosses.

Spook” brought in $270,000 during its abortive run.)

White America was spooked. The movie was blamed for serving as a Black Panthers textbook and for inspiring the Symbionese Liberation Army

Historically, it can be bracketed with two earlier, highly successful independent productions — “Putney Swope,” a 1969 absurdist comedy by the white director Robert Downey in which an African-American takes charges of a Madison Avenue advertising agency, and “Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song,” Melvin Van Peebles’s groundbreaking celebration of a Black outlaw,

unlike “Swope,” “Spook” is something other than hip satire and, as opposed to “Sweetback,” it did not lend itself to recuperative commercialization.

“Spook” may be a eulogy, but the most shocking thing about this unquiet movie is how relevant it remains.

There’s plenty of blame to go around, involving Democrats as well as Republicans, but Trump in particular “recklessly squandered lives,” in the words of an unusual editorial this month in the New England Journal of Medicine. Death certificates may record the coronavirus as the cause of death, but in a larger sense vast numbers of Americans died because their government was incompetent.

As many Americans are dying every 10 days of Covid-19 as U.S. troops died during 19 years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan

The paradox is that a year ago, the United States seemed particularly well positioned to handle this kind of crisis. A 324-page study by Johns Hopkins found last October that the United States was the country best prepared for a pandemic.

Then there’s an immeasurable cost in soft power as the United States is humbled before the world.

“It’s really sad to see the U.S. presidency fall from being the champion of global health to being the laughingstock of the world,”

in terms of destruction of American lives, treasure and well-being, this pandemic may be the greatest failure of governance in the United States since the Vietnam War.

the economists David Cutler and Lawrence Summers estimate that the economic cost of the pandemic in the United States will be $16 trillion, or about $125,000 per American household — far more than the median family’s net worth.

Credit for that goes to President George W. Bush, who in the summer of 2005 read an advance copy of “The Great Influenza,” a history of the 1918 flu pandemic. Shaken, Bush pushed aides to develop a strategy to prepare for another great contagion, and the result was an excellent 396-page playbook for managing such a health crisis.

The Obama administration updated this playbook and in the presidential transition in 2016, Obama aides cautioned the Trump administration that one of the big risks to national security was a contagion. Private experts repeated similar warnings. “Of all the things that could kill 10 million people or more, by far the most likely is an epidemic,” Bill Gates warned in 2015.

It’s true that the Obama administration did not do enough to refill the national stockpile with N95 masks, but Republicans in Congress wouldn’t provide even the modest sums that Obama requested for replenishment. And the Trump administration itself did nothing in its first three years to rebuild stockpiles.

Trump argues that no one could have anticipated the pandemic, but it’s what Bush warned about, what Obama aides tried to tell their successors about, and what Joe Biden referred to in a blunt tweet in October 2019 lamenting Trump’s cuts to health security programs and adding: “We are not prepared for a pandemic.”

When the health commission of Wuhan, China, announced on Dec. 31 that it had identified 27 cases of a puzzling pneumonia, Taiwan acted with lightning speed. Concerned that this might be an outbreak of SARS, Taiwan dispatched health inspectors to board flights arriving from Wuhan and screen passengers before allowing them to disembark. Anyone showing signs of ill health was quarantined.

If either China or the rest of the world had shown the same urgency, the pandemic might never have happened.

In hindsight, two points seem clear: First, China initially covered up the scale of the outbreak. Second, even so, the United States and other countries had enough information to act as Taiwan did. The first two countries to impose travel restrictions on China were North Korea and the Marshall Islands, neither of which had inside information.

That first half of January represents a huge missed opportunity for the world. If the United States, the World Health Organization and the world media had raised enough questions and pressed China, then perhaps the Chinese central government would have intervened in Wuhan earlier. And if Wuhan had been locked down just two weeks earlier, it’s conceivable that this entire global catastrophe could have been averted.

the C.D.C. devised a faulty test, and turf wars in the federal government prevented the use of other tests. South Korea, Germany and other countries quickly developed tests that did work, and these were distributed around the world. Sierra Leone in West Africa had effective tests before the United States did.

It’s true that local politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, made disastrous decisions, as when Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City urged people in March to “get out on the town despite coronavirus.” But local officials erred in part because of the failure of testing: Without tests, they didn’t know what they faced.

t’s unfair to blame the testing catastrophe entirely on Trump, for the failures unfolded several pay grades below him. Partly that’s because Trump appointees, like Robert Redfield, director of the C.D.C., simply aren’t the A team.

In any case, presidents set priorities for lower officials. If Trump had pushed aides as hard to get accurate tests as he pushed to repel refugees and migrants, then America almost certainly would have had an effective test by the beginning of February and tens of thousands of lives would have been saved.

Still, testing isn’t essential if a country gets backup steps right. Japan is a densely populated country that did not test much and yet has only 2 percent as many deaths per capita as the United States. One reason is that Japanese have long embraced face masks, which Dr. Redfield has noted can be at least as effective as a vaccine in fighting the pandemic. A country doesn’t have to do everything, if it does some things right.

Yet in retrospect, Trump did almost everything wrong. He discouraged mask wearing. The administration never rolled out contact tracing, missed opportunities to isolate the infected and exposed, didn’t adequately protect nursing homes, issued advice that confused the issues more than clarified them, and handed responsibilities to states and localities that were unprepared to act.

Trump’s missteps arose in part because he channeled an anti-intellectual current that runs deep in the United States, as he sidelined scientific experts and responded to the virus with a sunny optimism apparently meant to bolster the financial markets.

The false reassurances and dithering were deadly. One study found that if the United States had simply imposed the same lockdowns just two weeks earlier, 83 percent of the deaths in the early months could have been prevented.

A basic principle of public health is the primacy of accurate communications based on the best science. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who holds a doctorate in physics, is the global champion of that approach

Trump was the opposite, sowing confusion and conspiracy theories; a Cornell study found that “the President of the United States was likely the largest driver of the Covid-19 misinformation.”

A conservative commentariat echoed Trump in downplaying the virus and deriding efforts to stay safe.

A University of Chicago study found that watching the Sean Hannity program correlated to less social distancing, so watching Fox News may well have been lethal to some of its fans.

Americans have often pointed to the Soviet Union as a place where ideology trumped science, with disastrous results. Stalin backed Trofim Lysenko, an agricultural pseudoscientist who was an ardent Communist but scorned genetics — and whose zealous incompetence helped cause famines in the Soviet Union. Later, in the 1980s, Soviet leaders were troubled by data showing falling life expectancy — so they banned the publication of mortality statistics

It was in the same spirit that Trump opposed testing for the coronavirus in the hope of holding down the number of reported cases.

Most striking, Trump still has never developed a comprehensive plan to fight Covid-19. His “strategy” was to downplay the virus and resist business closures, in an effort to keep the economy roaring — his best argument for re-election.

This failed. The best way to protect the economy was to control the virus, not to ignore it, and the spread of Covid-19 caused economic dislocations that devastated even homes where no one was infected.

Eight million Americans have slipped into poverty since May, a Columbia University study found, and about one in seven households with children have reported to the census that they didn’t have enough food to eat in the last seven days.

Yet today we can’t even churn out enough face masks; a poll of nurses in late July and early August found that one-third lacked enough N95 masks

More than one-quarter of young adults said they have seriously contemplated suicide

So in what is arguably the richest country in the history of the world, political malpractice has resulted in a pandemic of infectious disease followed by pandemics of poverty, mental illness, addiction and hunger.

The rejection of science has also exacerbated polarization and tribalism

An old school friend shared this conspiracy theory on Facebook:Create a VIRUS to scare people. Place them in quarantine. Count the number of dead every second of every day in every news headline. Close all businesses …. Mask people. Dehumanize them. Close temples and churches …. Empty the prisons because of the virus and fill the streets with criminals. Send in Antifa to vandalize property as if they are freedom fighters. Undermine the law. Loot …. And, in an election year, have Democrats blame all of it on the President. If you love America, our Constitution, and the Rule of Law, get ready to fight for them.

During World War II, American soldiers died at a rate of 9,200 a month, less than one-third the pace of deaths from this pandemic, but the United States responded with a massive mobilization

More than 40 percent of adults reported in June that they were struggling with mental health, and 13 percent have begun or increased substance abuse, a C.D.C. study found

Trump and his allies have even argued against mobilization. “Don’t be afraid of Covid,” Trump tweeted this month. “Don’t let it dominate your life.”

It didn’t have to be this way. If the U.S. had worked harder and held the per capita mortality rate down to the level of, say, Germany, we could have saved more than 170,000 lives

And if the U.S. had responded urgently and deftly enough to achieve Taiwan’s death rate, fewer than 100 Americans would have died from the virus.

“It is a slaughter,” Dr. William Foege, a legendary epidemiologist who once ran the C.D.C., wrote to Dr. Redfield. Dr. Foege predicted that public health textbooks would study America’s response to Covid-19 not as a model of A-plus work but as an example of what not to do.

During this time, eight American presidents assumed, or hoped, that China would eventually bend to what were considered the established rules of modernization: Prosperity would fuel popular demands for political freedom and bring China into the fold of democratic nations. Or the Chinese economy would falter under the weight of authoritarian rule and bureaucratic rot.

China’s Communist leaders have defied expectations again and again. They embraced capitalism even as they continued to call themselves Marxists. They used repression to maintain power but without stifling entrepreneurship or innovation. Surrounded by foes and rivals, they avoided war, with one brief exception, even as they fanned nationalist sentiment at home. And they presided over 40 years of uninterrupted growth, often with unorthodox policies the textbooks said would fail.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

China’s Communists studied and obsessed over the fate of their old ideological allies in Moscow, determined to learn from their mistakes. They drew two lessons: The party needed to embrace “reform” to survive — but “reform” must never include democratization.

China has veered between these competing impulses ever since, between opening up and clamping down, between experimenting with change and resisting it, always pulling back before going too far in either direction for fear of running aground.

The careers of these men from Moganshan highlight an important aspect of China’s success: It turned its apparatchiks into capitalists.

Party leaders called this go-slow, experimental approach “crossing the river by feeling the stones” — allowing farmers to grow and sell their own crops, for example, while retaining state ownership of the land; lifting investment restrictions in “special economic zones,” while leaving them in place in the rest of the country; or introducing privatization by selling only minority stakes in state firms at first.

Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, tried to break the hold of these bureaucrats on the economy by opening up the political system. Decades later, Chinese officials still take classes on why that was a mistake. The party even produced a documentary series on the subject in 2006, distributing it on classified DVDs for officials at all levels to watch.

Afraid to open up politically but unwilling to stand still, the party found another way. It moved gradually and followed the pattern of the compromise at Moganshan, which left the planned economy intact while allowing a market economy to flourish and outgrow it.

American economists were skeptical. Market forces needed to be introduced quickly, they argued; otherwise, the bureaucracy would mobilize to block necessary changes. After a visit to China in 1988, the Nobel laureate Milton Friedman called the party’s strategy “an open invitation to corruption and inefficiency.”

The United States and Japan, both routinely vilified by party propagandists, became major trading partners and were important sources of aid, investment and expertise

At the same time, the party invested in education, expanding access to schools and universities, and all but eliminating illiteracy

mainland China now produces more graduates in science and engineering every year than the United States, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan combined.

In cities like Shanghai, Chinese schoolchildren outperform peers around the world. For many parents, though, even that is not enough. Because of new wealth, a traditional emphasis on education as a path to social mobility and the state’s hypercompetitive college entrance exam, most students also enroll in after-school tutoring programs — a market worth $125 billion, according to one study, or as much as half the government’s annual military budget.

party made changes after Mao’s death that fell short of free elections or independent courts yet were nevertheless significant

The party introduced term limits and mandatory retirement ages, for example, making it easier to flush out incompetent officials. And it revamped the internal report cards it used to evaluate local leaders for promotions and bonuses, focusing them almost exclusively on concrete economic targets.

These seemingly minor adjustments had an outsize impact, injecting a dose of accountability — and competition — into the political system, said Yuen Yuen Ang, a political scientist at the University of Michigan. “China created a unique hybrid,” she said, “an autocracy with democratic characteristics.”

They were rewarded with soaring tax revenues and opportunities to enrich their friends, their relatives and themselves. A wave of officials abandoned the state and went into business. Over time, the party elite amassed great wealth, which cemented its support for the privatization of much of the economy it once controlled.

The private sector now produces more than 60 percent of the nation’s economic output, employs over 80 percent of workers in cities and towns, and generates 90 percent of new jobs

the bureaucrats stay out of the way. “I basically don’t see them even once a year,” said James Ni, chairman and founder of Mlily, a mattress manufacturer in eastern China. “I’m creating jobs, generating tax revenue. Why should they bother me?”

even as he wraps himself in Deng’s legacy, Mr. Xi has set himself apart in an important way: Deng encouraged the party to seek help and expertise overseas, but Mr. Xi preaches self-reliance and warns of the threats posed by “hostile foreign forces.

China tapped into a wave of globalization sweeping the world and emerged as the world’s factory. China’s embrace of the internet, within limits, helped make it a leader in technology. And foreign advice helped China reshape its banks, build a legal system and create modern corporations.

It was a remarkable act of reinvention, one that eluded the Soviets. In both China and the Soviet Union, vast Stalinist bureaucracies had smothered economic growth, with officials who wielded unchecked power resisting change that threatened their privileges.

Mr. Lin was part of a torrent of investment from ethnic Chinese enclaves in Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and beyond that washed over China — and gave it a leg up on other developing countries

The timing worked out for China, which opened up just as Taiwan was outgrowing its place in the global manufacturing chain. China benefited from Taiwan’s money, but also its managerial experience, technology and relationships with customers around the world. In effect, Taiwan jump-started capitalism in China and plugged it into the global economy.

Before long, the government in Taiwan began to worry about relying so much on its onetime enemy and tried to shift investment elsewhere. But the mainland was too cheap, too close and, with a common language and heritage, too familiar.

Now Taiwan finds itself increasingly dependent on a much more powerful China, which is pushing ever harder for unification, and the island’s future is uncertain

Many in Washington predicted that trade would bring political change. It did, but not in China. “Opening up” ended up strengthening the party’s hold on power rather than weakening it. The shock of China’s rise as an export colossus, however, was felt in factory towns around the world.

In the United States, economists say at least two million jobs disappeared as a result, many in districts that ended up voting for President Trump.

The pro-democracy movement in 1989 was the closest the party ever came to political liberalization after Mao’s death, and the crackdown that followed was the furthest it went in the other direction, toward repression and control. After the massacre, the economy stalled and retrenchment seemed certain. Yet three years later, Deng used a tour of southern China to wrestle the party back to “reform and opening up” once more. Many who had left the government, like Mr. Feng, suddenly found themselves leading the nation’s transformation from the outside, as its first generation of private entrepreneurs.

The fear is that Mr. Xi is attempting to rewrite the recipe behind China’s rise, replacing selective repression with something more severe.

The internet is an example of how it has benefited by striking a balance. The party let the nation go online with barely an inkling of what that might mean, then reaped the economic benefits while controlling the spread of information that could hurt it.

“The basic problem is, who is growth for?” said Mr. Xu, the retired official who wrote the Moganshan report. “We haven’t solved this problem.”

“The cost of censorship is quite limited compared to the great value created by the internet,” said Chen Tong, an industry pioneer. “We still get the information we need for economic progress.”

China is not the only country that has squared the demands of authoritarian rule with the needs of free markets. But it has done so for longer, at greater scale and with more convincing results than any other.

Washington is maneuvering to counter Beijing’s growing influence around the world, warning that a Chinese spending spree on global infrastructure comes with strings attached.

both left and right in America have portrayed China as the champion of an alternative global order, one that embraces autocratic values and undermines fair competition. It is a rare consensus for the United States, which is deeply divided about so much else, including how it has wielded power abroad in recent decades — and how it should do so now.

Mr. Xi, on the other hand, has shown no sign of abandoning what he calls “the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Some in his corner have been itching to take on the United States since the 2008 financial crisis and see the Trump administration’s policies as proof of what they have always suspected — that America is determined to keep China down.

there is also widespread anxiety over the new acrimony, because the United States has long inspired admiration and envy in China, and because of a gnawing sense that the party’s formula for success may be faltering.

Prosperity has brought rising expectations in China; the public wants more than just economic growth. It wants cleaner air, safer food and medicine, better health care and schools, less corruption and greater equality. The party is struggling to deliver, and tweaks to the report cards it uses to measure the performance of officials hardly seem enough.

Now, many companies assign hundreds of employees to censorship duties — and China has become a giant on the global internet landscape.

Mr. Xi himself has acknowledged that the party must adapt, declaring that the nation is entering a “new era” requiring new methods. But his prescription has largely been a throwback to repression, including vast internment camps targeting Muslim ethnic minorities. “Opening up” has been replaced by an outward push, with huge loans that critics describe as predatory and other efforts to gain influence — or interfere — in the politics of other countries. At home, experimentation is out while political orthodoxy and discipline are in.

n effect, Mr. Xi seems to believe that China has been so successful that the party can return to a more conventional authoritarian posture — and that to survive and surpass the United States it must

Certainly, the momentum is still with the party. Over the past four decades, economic growth in China has been 10 times faster than in the United States, and it is still more than twice as fast. The party appears to enjoy broad public support, and many around the world are convinced that Mr. Trump’s America is in retreat while China’s moment is just beginning

The world thought it could change China, and in many ways it has. But China’s success has been so spectacular that it has just as often changed the world — and the American understanding of how the world works.

There is no simple explanation for how China’s leaders pulled this off. There was foresight and luck, skill and violent resolve, but perhaps most important was the fear — a sense of crisis among Mao’s successors that they never shook, and that intensified after the Tiananmen Square massacre and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But China had a strange advantage in battling bureaucratic resistance. The nation’s long economic boom followed one of the darkest chapters of its history, the Cultural Revolution, which decimated the party apparatus and left it in shambles. In effect, autocratic excess set the stage for Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, to lead the party in a radically more open direction.

In other words, he appears to have less use for the “opening up” part of Deng’s slogan.

Now Mr. Xi is steering the party toward repression again, tightening its grip on society, concentrating power in his own hands and setting himself up to rule for life by abolishing the presidential term limit. Will the party loosen up again, as it did a few years after Tiananmen, or is this a more permanent shift? If it is, what will it mean for the Chinese economic miracle?

The question now is whether it can sustain this model with the United States as an adversary rather than a partner.

McConnell rebuked Trump for his actions after the insurrection as well.

But McConnell said that the process of impeachment and conviction is a "limited tool" and that he believes Trump is not "constitutionally eligible for conviction."

"The Constitution gives us a particular role. This body is not invited to act as the nation's overarching moral tribunal," he said.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer acknowledged the group in separate remarks after the vote, saying, "I salute those Republican patriots who did the right thing. It wasn't easy. We know that."

The New York Democrat called Trump's actions on Jan. 6 a "textbook example" of an impeachable offense.

CNN chief medical correspondent Dr. Sanjay Gupta said that the coronavirus could spread at protests depending on factors like mask-wearing, how closely people gathered, and how long people stayed in close contact.

"It is a contagious virus. People being outside, people wearing masks, people moving by each other more quickly may reduce the likelihood of significant exponential growth. But that's still the concern."

The virus has particularly impacted African-Americans, who make up a disproportionate percentage of Covid-19 cases and deaths.

For one, the textbook combination of identification, isolation and quarantine for contacts helped stop the potential spread of coronavirus an Air Force basic training camp. Military doctors said their approach kept the case count to just five among 10,000 recruits at Joint Base San Antonio-Lackland in Texas in March and April.

The base used techniques including quarantine, social distancing, early trainee screening, rapid isolation and monitored re-entry to slow the transmission, the researchers said in a report published by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Tuesday.

"Climate only would become an important seasonal factor in controlling COVID-19 once a large proportion of people within a given community are immune or resistant to infection," Collins wrote, citing experts in infectious disease transmission and climate modeling.

The US should have 100 million doses of one candidate Covid-19 vaccine by the end of the year, Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and a member of the White House coronavirus task force, said Tuesday.

Before Tuesday, it would have been hard to imagine how Trump could have offended women more than he already has. The president has, of course, been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women (allegations he denies) and been caught on tape bragging that he can get away with sexual assault. He has regularly disparaged and demeaned women -- including his own daughter -- by talking about their appearances rather than their accomplishments and by calling them offensive names.

misogynist but not necessarily a sexist. On Tuesday evening, Trump made clear that he is both.

A man who is a misogynist, according to Cornell philosopher Kate Manne, punishes women who won't do what he wants. Trump's behavior has long made it evident that he fits this bill. Meanwhile, a sexist, Manne says, believes men are better than women at things like business or sports.

Before Tuesday's comments, it wasn't entirely clear that Trump was a sexist; he did put some women in powerful positions in his administration and in the Trump Organization. But by appealing to suburban women to support him because he's helping their husbands, Trump suggested he believes the workplace is the proper domain of men. This is textbook sexism.

rump's assumption that all women have -- or should have -- husbands is also terribly retrograde and offensive and will almost certainly be off-putting to single women (among others

His sexism isn't even the most jaw-dropping of the implications made by these offensive remarks

Trump says he's looking out for the husbands, but it's women themselves who need help getting back to work: over 800,000 of the 1.1 million people who left the workforce between August and September were women, according to the National Women's Law Center

This is unsurprising, since job losses have been especially concentrated in sectors where there are more women

moms have also been disproportionately taking on the impossible burdens of trying to juggle work, childcare, and home schooling while their kids have been home during the pandemic.

But the exodus of this many women from the workplace will also be terrible for the country overall, because it will deprive many organizations of the well-established benefits of women's leadership and influence.

Companies with more women and cultural diversity have significantly better financial outcomes, according to the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. But it usually isn't enough to have just one or two women. Studies consistently find that women must make up at least 20-30% of an institution before they actually shape outcomes.

They suggest that he thinks that it is men who belong in the workplace and that women all are or should be married. I suspect that women will respond on Tuesday by putting Trump in his own rightful place -- and voting him out of office.

The contract, dated effective May 18, showed that Slaoui had a financial interest in vaccine makers GlaxoSmithKline and Moderna. As a federal employee, he would have had to divest holdings such as those or recuse himself from decisions that pose a conflict. As a consultant, he had the option of keeping them.

Sanofi received a contract worth up to $2.1 billion from Operation Warp Speed for their collaborative effort on a COVID-19 vaccine.

An HHS spokesperson said Slaoui's expertise is "invaluable to the Board of Directors' decisions, but he does not commit the government to any financial obligations. Operation Warp Speed's investment decisions are recommended to, and approved by, the Operation Warp Speed Board of Directors (BoD) on a weekly basis. The BoD is composed of the Secretaries of HHS and DOD, in addition to White House COVID-19 Task Force personnel."

This is a textbook case of a conflict of interest that could affect key decisions and damage OWS's scientific integrity and the race for a vaccine more broadly," the legislators wrote.

By June, she had built her own dashboard to rival the state’s, funded in part by donations from hundreds of thousands of newfound followers on social media.

Ms. Jones has spent months publicly urging health department employees to denounce what she says has been the manipulation and obfuscation of virus data to make Florida look better off than it really is.

The story took a surprising new turn on Monday morning, when agents from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement appeared at the door of Ms. Jones’s townhome.Image

“He just pointed a gun at my children!” Ms. Jones yelled.

She denied having anything to do with the messages. Florida had reported 17,460 coronavirus deaths at the time, and she said she would never have rounded that number down.

“That’s textbook bad security practice, and this is an example of why — it’s cumbersome to revoke access and hard to attribute actions to the responsible people,” said J. Alex Halderman, a computer science and engineering professor at the University of Michigan.

Early on, state agencies refused to release information about the number of coronavirus hospitalizations and cases in long-term care facilities, and only provided it after news organizations threatened litigation.

The fund-raising appeal quickly surpassed her initial $150,000 goal.

In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.

The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,”

The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem.

Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.

Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill.

Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.

“You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country

Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels

Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard.

The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.

Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

“I gave up because I solved the problem.” Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical / Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field

“Does population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different.

All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”

After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said.

The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—­generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.

Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings.

Turchin suggested that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could be applied to ecology.

If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.

“There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.”

he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science

To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data.

The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.)

Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before

One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale

the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones.

Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians.

“There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”

Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle.

In 2010, when Nature surveyed scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop another violent turn.

It wasn’t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.

This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite over­production as the first horseman of the recurring American apocalypse, inspired Turchin’s 2020 prediction

The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present,

Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them

others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism.

He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.

We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?” He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects

practice “adaptive management,” changing and modulating your approach as you go.

Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically pre­ordained disaster.

He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.

Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones.

The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.

Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity.

One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who is—incredibly—­also a former mathematical ecologist.

in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes.”

Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past.

humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A woodpecker will eat a termite, but it “will not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right.” Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”

Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs.

He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians.

Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-­ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.

Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. “If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,”

The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of the gall­bladder.

Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment

Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.

Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention “disciplinary carpet­baggers” like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods.

“Given the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases, it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,” he says. The only answer is to use large data sets.

“There’s no reason that traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative enterprise,” Pinker wrote. “Knowing stuff is hard; we need to use every available tool.”

Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians

Turchin’s data are also limited to big-­picture characteristics observed over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.

Privately, some historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a little crude. Clio­dynamics is now on a long list of methods that arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads, but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an expanding historiographical tool kit

Turchin’s methods have already shown their power. Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—­revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus.

“Whether the Delta variant is already at that plateau, or whether there’s going to be further increases before it gets to that plateau, I can’t say. But I do think that plateau exists.”

Antibodies, which can prevent the virus from entering our cells, are engineered to latch onto specific molecules on the surface of the virus, snapping into place like puzzle pieces. But genetic mutations in the virus can change the shape of those binding sites.

“If you change that shape, you can make it impossible for an antibody to do its job,”

But as more people acquire antibodies against the virus, mutations that allow the virus to slip past these antibodies will become even more advantageous.

The good news is that there are many different kinds of antibodies, and a variant with a few new mutations is unlikely to escape them all, experts said.

its sleeve to counteract the evolution of the virus,” Dr. Pepper said. “Knowing that there is this complex level of diversity in the immune system allows me to sleep better at night.”

“It’s a lot harder to evade T cell responses than antibody responses,”

And then there are B cells, which generate our army of antibodies. Even after we clear the infection, the body keeps churning out B cells for a while, deliberately introducing small genetic mutations. The result is an enormously diverse collection of B cells producing an array of antibodies, some of which might be a good match for the next variant that comes along.

Whether the virus will become more virulent — that is, whether it will cause more serious disease — is the hardest to predict,

Unlike transmissibility or immune evasion, virulence has no inherent evolutionary advantage.

Some scientists predict that the virus will ultimately be much like the flu, which can still cause serious illness and death, especially during seasonal surges.

“The virus has no interest in killing us,” Dr. Metcalf said. “Virulence only matters for the virus if it works for transmission.”

It is too early to say whether SARS-CoV-2 will change in virulence over the long-term. There could certainly be trade-offs between virulence and transmission; variants that make people too sick too quickly may not spread very far.

Then again, this virus spreads before people become severely ill. As long as that remains true, the virus could become more virulent without sacrificing transmissibility.

Moreover, the same thing that makes the virus more infectious — faster replication or tighter binding to our cells — could also make it more virulent.

Although many possible paths remain open to us, what is certain is that SARS-CoV-2 will not stop evolving — and that the arms race between the virus and us is just beginning.

We lost the first few rounds, by allowing the virus to spread unchecked, but we still have powerful weapons to bring to the fight. The most notable are highly effective vaccines, developed at record speed. “I think there is hope in the fact that the SARS-CoV-2 vaccines at this point are more effective than flu vaccines have probably ever been,”

“I have great faith that we can sort any detrimental evolutionary trajectories out by improving our current or next generation vaccines,”

be you have a re-infection, but it’s relatively mild, which also boosts your immunity,”

rising vaccination rates may already be suppressing new mutations.And the evolution rate could also slow down as the virus becomes better adapted to humans.

“There’s low-hanging fruit,” Dr. Lauring said. “So there are certain ways it can evolve and make big improvements, but after a while there aren’t areas to improve — it’s figured out all the easy ways to improve.”

Eventually, as viral evolution slows down and our immune systems catch up, we will reach an uneasy equilibrium with the virus, scientists predict. We will never extinguish it, but it will smolder rather than rage.

So far, studies suggest that our antibody, T cell and B cell responses are all working as expected when it comes to SARS-CoV-2. “This virus is mostly playing by immunological rules we understand,”

Others are more optimistic. “My guess is that one day this is going to be another cause of the common cold,”

There are four other coronaviruses that have become endemic in human populations. We are exposed to them early and often, and all four mostly cause run-of-the-mill colds.

much of the world remains unvaccinated, and this virus has already proved capable of surprising us. “We should be somewhat cautious and humble about trying to predict what it is capable of doing in the future,”

While we can’t guard against every eventuality, we can tip the odds in our favor by expanding viral surveillance, speeding up global vaccine distribution and tamping down transmission until more people can be vaccinated

The future, he said, “depends much, much more on what humans do than on what the virus does.”

Any republic deployed across an extended territory should be relatively free of faction, at least in the aggregate.

Yet Madison's solution depends on certain assumptions. Federalist No. 10 assumes politics will occur at a leisurely pace. The regime Madison foresees is relatively passive, not an active manipulator of economic arrangements. And he is able to take for granted a reasonably broad consensus as to the existence if not the content of the public good.

These assumptions are now collapsing under the weight of positive government and the velocity of our political life.

Given the centrality of Federalist No. 10 to the American constitutional canon, this collapse demands a reckoning. If a pillar of our order is crumbling, something must replace it.

That challenge may call for a greater emphasis on the sources of civic virtue and on the means of sustaining it.

The possibility that virtue might be coded into the essay is evident at its most elemental level: Federalist No. 10's definition of a faction as a group "united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."

this definition hinges on an objective understanding of the public good; one cannot comprehend Madison from the perspective of contemporary relativism.

Its reader must be committed to a normative concept of the good and occupy a polity in which it is possible for such a concept to be broadly shared.

[T]hose who do not believe in an objective moral order cannot 'enter' Madison's system." Thus, belief in such an order, even amid disputes as to its content, constitutes a first unstated assumption of Federalist No. 10.

Madison presents a series of choices, repeatedly eliminating one, then bifurcating the other in turn, and eliminating again until he arrives at his solution. One can remove the causes of factions or control their effects. The causes cannot be removed because the propensity to disagree is "sown in the nature of man," arising particularly from the fact that man is "fallible" and his "opinions and his passions...have a reciprocal influence on each other."

Precisely because this influence arises from the link between "reason" and "self-love," the latter of which distorts the former, property accounts for "the most common and durable source of factions," the key being its durability.

Whereas David Hume's analysis of parties said that those based on self-interest were the most excusable while those based on passions were the most dangerous, Madison warns of the reverse. Those rooted in emotion — including "an attachment to different leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence and power" — are the least worrisome precisely because they are based on passions, which Madison believes to be transient.

A second assumption of Federalist No. 10 is consequently that irrational passions, which Madison understands to be those not based on interest, are inherently unsustainable and thus are naturally fleeting.

Having dismissed minority factions, Madison turns his attention to abusive majorities.

if a group is impelled by ill motives, the intrinsic conditions of an extended republic will make it difficult for it to become a majority.

A third assumption, then, is that both geographic and constitutional distance will permit the passions to dissipate before their translation into policy.

Finally, Madison cautions Jefferson in correspondence about a month before Federalist No. 10's publication that the extended-republic theory "can only hold within a sphere of a mean extent. As in too small a sphere oppressive combinations may be too easily formed agst. the weaker party; so in too extensive a one, a defensive concert may be rendered too difficult against the oppression of those entrusted with the administration."

To recapitulate, the assumptions are as follows: The people will share a belief in the existence of an objective moral order, even if they dispute its content; passions, especially when they pertain to attachments or aversions to political leaders, will be unsustainable; government will not dictate the distribution of small economic advantages; geographic and constitutional distance will operate to dissipate passions; and, finally, the territory will not be so large that public opinion cannot form.

none of them stands in a form that would be recognizable to Madison today.

ASSUMPTIONS UNDONE

It is almost universally acknowledged that moral relativism is ascendant in contemporary American society.

The question, rather, is whether the foundational assumptions of Federalist No. 10 can withstand the pressure of contemporary communications technology. There is reason to believe they cannot.

There is a balance to be struck: Communication is useful insofar as it makes the "mean extent" that was Madison's final assumption larger by enabling the formation of a "defensive concert" through the cultivation of public consensus against an abusive regime. But on Madison's account, the returns on rapid communication should diminish beyond this point because there will be no space in which passions can calm before impulse and decision converge.

what is clear is that there are enough opinions dividing the country that any project attempting to form a coherent public will seems doomed.

The Madisonian impulse is to look first for institutional solutions that can discipline interest groups. Constitutional mechanisms like judicial review, then, might be used to inhibit factions. But judicial review can be done well or poorly.

The empirical conditions not merely of an extensive republic but of 18th-century reality aided in Madison's effort. The deliberate pace of communication did not require an institutional midwife. It was a fact of life. It need hardly be said that, 230 years after the essay's November 1787 publication, this condition no longer obtains. The question is what replaces it.

The answer is that the converse of each assumption on which Federalist No. 10 relies is a restraining virtue.

If Federalist No. 10 assumes at least consensus as to the existence of an objective morality, pure moral relativism must be challenged.

If the immediate translation of preferences into policy is possible but detrimental, patience must intervene. I

If technology has erased the constitutional distance between officeholders and constituents, self-restraint and deference may be required.

If it has also shrunk attention spans to 140 characters, an ethic of public spiritedness will have to expand them.

What unites these is civic virtue, and thus the American regime must now get serious about its recovery

He wrote in Federalist No. 55: As there is a degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and distrust, so there are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence. Republican government presupposes the existence of these qualities in a higher degree than any other form. Were the pictures which have been drawn by the political jealousy of some among us faithful likenesses of the human character, the inference would be that there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government; and that nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.

At Virginia's ratifying convention, similarly, Madison noted the propensity to assume either the worst or the best from politicians. He replied:

But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks — no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea.

Still, the traditional means of inculcating virtue — the family and institutions such as local schools — are themselves under pressure or subject to political capture.

A national effort to instill civic virtue would almost certainly careen into the kind of politicization that has been witnessed in Education Department history standards and the like.

Consequently, subsidiarity, the diffusion of authority to the most local possible level, would be vital to any effective effort to revive civic virtue. That is, it could not be uniform or imposed from on high. Political leaders could help in cultivating an awareness of its necessity, but not in dictating its precise terms.

The first part of this combination is moral virtue, which the ethic of subsidiarity teaches is likelier to come from the home than from school, and from life lessons than from textbooks.

Students as early as elementary school routinely learn the virtues of the Bill of Rights, in part because it is shorter and simpler to teach than the main body of the Constitution.

The success of civic education is nowhere clearer than in the arguably distorting effect it has had in provoking what Mary Ann Glendon calls "rights talk," the substitution of assertions of rights for persuasive argumentation about politics

Of these virtues, patience will surely be the hardest to restore. This is, to be clear, patience not as a private but rather as a civic virtue.

It asks that they consider issues in dimensions deeper than a tweet or, more precisely, that they demand that those they elect do so and thus do not expect their passions to be regularly fed.

Perhaps the best that can be achieved here is refusing to allow the positive state to reach further into the minutiae of economic life, generating more spaces for minority factions to hide

As any reader of Lincoln's Temperance Address knows, neither heroic self-restraint nor clobbering, moralistic education will succeed in inculcating such virtues as patience and moderation. A combined educational program is necessary, and politics in any modern sense can only account for part of it.

civic education can achieve constitutional ends. Of course, rights as contemporarily understood are entitlements; they supply us with something. Civic virtue, by contrast, demands something of us, and as such presents a more substantial political challenge.

The second is a shift in civic education from the entitlement mentality of the Bill of Rights to the constitutional architecture of the overall regime, with the latter engendering an appreciation of the cadences and distances at which it is intended to function and the limited objects it is intended to attain.

While Madison's "mean extent" for a republic has, in the modern United States, far exceeded the scope possible for forming a public will with respect to most particular issues, it may still be possible to form a coherent if thin understanding of the regime and, consequently, a defensive concert to safeguard it.

a recognition that virtue is more necessary now than it used to be — when empirical conditions imposed patience and distance — does not rely on virtue in any blind or total sense. It does not, for example, seek to replace the institutional mechanisms Madison elucidates elsewhere with virtue. It simply recognizes that the particular assumptions of Federalist No. 10 no longer operate without added assistance. In other words, as Daniel Mahoney has argued, we must theorize the virtue that the founders could presuppose.

The issue, then, is not that civic virtue is all that is important to the Madisonian system; it is that civic virtue is more important than it used to be for one pillar of that system.

Samuelson did write a best-selling textbook that brought Keynesian economics — the idea that changes in government spending and taxes can be used to manage the economy — to American college classrooms. And his concept of the “neoclassical synthesis” — markets can work, but only with government-created guardrails — in effect provided the intellectual justification for the postwar economy. But it’s clear that for him politics was never more than a peripheral concern.

Still, most economists continued to believe that a more flexible form of monetary policy could keep things under control — that the Federal Reserve could manage the economy without bringing Congress into the act

his magnum opus, “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960” (with Anna Schwartz), while a magisterial work of scholarship, clearly had a major political ax to grind. For its big takeaway was the claim that the Great Depression wouldn’t have happened if the Federal Reserve Board had done its job and stabilized the money supply. That is, simple technocratic measures would have been sufficient — no need for all that Keynesian stuff.

The influence of Friedman’s monetary ideas peaked around 1980, then went into steep decline. Both the United States and Britain tried to implement Friedman’s belief that the authorities could stabilize the economy by ensuring steady, slow growth in the money supply; both efforts failed dismally

Friedman was no mere propagandist: He was a brilliant analytical economist capable of doing pathbreaking academic work when he set his mind to it. His work on monetary policy, in particular, persuaded many economists who disagreed with him about almost everything else.

But a number of economists had looked closely at Friedman’s arguments about the Great Depression, and found them wanting. And the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis vindicated the doubters. Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair and a huge Friedman admirer, did everything Friedman and Schwartz said the Fed should have done in the 1930s — and it wasn’t enough. Soon Bernanke was pleading for help from fiscal policy — that is, pleading for Keynesianism to come to the rescue.

What about Friedman’s broader faith in free markets? Libertarian policies reached a high-water mark in the 1990s, as industries from power generation to banking were deregulated. But all too many of these deregulatory ventures ended in grief, with incidents like the California power crisis of 2000-1 and, yes, the banking crisis of 2008.

And where are we now? If you look at the Biden administration’s proposals

they sound a lot like what Paul Samuelson was saying decades ago.

So by all means you should read Wapshott’s history of the disputes that roiled economics over much of the second half of the 20th century

you should also ask a question I don’t think the book answers: Was all of this just a grand, ideologically driven detour away from sensible economic theory and policy? And why did that happen?

DeSantis, whose “anti-woke” agenda has put Florida at the forefront of revising how Black history is taught, has come under fire for supporting a set of standards for middle school instruction that include teaching “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

It all portends hopeless bifurcation, Zimmerman said, suggesting that America is becoming a place where what students learn about the country’s past will depend whether they live in a conservative or liberal state.

Conservatives contend that instruction on race and history has shifted since then to reflect liberal ideologies and values in ways inappropriate to the schoolhouse. They have advocated returning to a more traditional way of teaching American history, one less critical of the nation’s past flaws and less explicit about linking current inequalities to past injustices.

The dueling American histories “are about not just what has happened, but what we do about it going forward,” he said. “If you can tell a story that removes the harm that has been done, if you can tell a story that removes the violence, that removes the disenfranchisement, that removes the targeting of certain communities — then what you do is you change the way we believe we have to deal with it.”

Events during Trump’s presidency — including a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the murder of George Floyd and the publication of the New York Times’s 1619 Project reexamining the role of slavery in America’s founding — propelled the country toward a cultural conflagration over the idea that America’s history of systemic racism was still affecting minorities today.

Various institutions embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and sought to take actions aimed at acknowledging and curing past injustices. The movement was especially potent among liberals, and then-candidate Biden reoriented much of his campaign in the summer of 2020 to focus on “equity.”

A string of recent activity — from Supreme Court decision striking down college affirmative action programs to mass shootings by white supremacists to book bans by some Republican officials — has propelled the issue back to the forefront of Democratic agenda.

After the 2020 protests over Floyd’s murder, more than 160 Confederate memorials were removed, relocated or renamed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Still, a January 2022 report found that there were still 723 monuments and 741 roadways dedicated to Confederates, as well as hundreds of schools, counties, parks, buildings and holidays.

“There are states that can remove history from a textbook, but they can never destroy the physical places where history happened,” Leggs said. “Historic preservation is all the more important at this moment in our history, and through our work, we can ignite both a cultural reckoning and cultural renaissance.”

ather than yet another history book telling you how humanity got here, they take their respective disciplines to task for dealing in myths.

this thought-provoking book is armed to the teeth with fascinating ideas and interpretations that go against mainstream thinking

Colonisation exposed us to new ideas that shocked and confused us. Graeber & Wengrow focus on the French coming into contact with Native Americans in Canada, and in particular on Wendat Confederacy philosopher–statesman Kandiaronk as an example of European traders, missionaries, and intellectuals debating with, and being criticized by indigenous people. Historians have downplayed how much these encounters shaped Enlightenment ideas.

Its legacy, shaped via several iterations, is the modern textbook narrative: hunter-gathering was replaced by pastoralism and then farming; the agricultural revolution resulted in larger populations producing material surpluses; these allowed for specialist occupations but also needed bureaucracies to share and administer them to everyone; and this top-down control led to today’s nation states. Ta-daa!

And cities did not automatically imply social stratification. The Dawn of Everything fascinates with its numerous examples of large settlements without ruling classes, such as Ukrainian mega-sites, the Harappan civilization, or Mexican city-states.

ake agriculture. Rather than humans enthusiastically entering into what Harari in Sapiens called a Faustian bargain with crops, there were many pathways and responses

Experiments show that plant domestication could have been achieved in as little as 20–30 years, so the fact that cereal domestication here took some 3,000 years questions the notion of an agricultural “revolution”. Lastly, this book includes many examples of areas where agriculture was purposefully rejected. Designating such times and places as “pre-agricultural” is misleading, write the authors, they were anti-agricultural.

The idea that agriculture led to large states similarly needs revision

correlation is not causation, and some 15–20 additional centres of domestication have since been identified that followed different paths. Some cities have previously remained hidden in the sediments of ancient river deltas until revealed by modern remote-sensing technology.

“extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization”

this simplistic tale of progress ignores and downplays that there was nothing linear or inevitable about where we have ended up.

These instead relied on collective decision-making through assemblies or councils, which questions some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology about scale: that larger human groups require complex (i.e. hierarchical) systems to organize them.

e what is staring them in the face

humans have always been very capable of consciously experimenting with different social arrangements. And—this is rarely acknowledged—they did so on a seasonal basis, spending e.g. part of the year settled in large communal groups under a leader, and another part as small, independently roving bands.

Throughout, Graeber & Wengrow convincingly argue that the only thing we can say about our ancestors is that “there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration […] If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements […] maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?

Next to criticism, the authors put out some interesting ideas of their own, of which I want to quickly highlight two.

The first is that some of the observed variations in social arrangements resulted from schismogenesis. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined this term in the 1930s to describe how people define themselves against or in opposition to others, adopting behaviours and attitudes that are different.

The second idea is that states can be described in terms of three elementary forms of domination: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma, which express themselves as sovereignty, administration, and competitive politics.

Asking which past society most resembles today’s is the wrong question to ask. It risks slipping into an exercise in retrofitting, “which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states”

I have left unmentioned several other topics: the overlooked role of women, the legacy of Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s ideas, the origins of inequality and the flawed assumptions hiding behind that question

There are so many historical details and delights hiding between these covers that I was thoroughly enthralle

If you have any interest in big history, archaeology, or anthropology, this book is indispensable. I am confident that the questions and critiques raised here will remain relevant for a long time to come.

I was particularly impressed by the in-depth critique by worbsintowords on his YouTube channel What is Politics? of (so far) five videos

This makes it especially useful in classrooms, where it can help students understand different perspectives and imagine themselves in distant situations

Once maligned as lowbrow, the genre has gained popularity over the past two decades. In 2009, Jay Parini hypothesized one reason for this: “In our high-velocity, high-volume world, the present can seem just too bright, too close. We need the filter of memory to pull reality into focus.”

the Cromwell of Mantel’s creation begins to “double” Mantel by the end of the series. He spends much of the trilogy’s final book looking at himself “with a novelist’s wonderment at a character who defies understanding.” Mantel’s resurrected version of the man, unlike the real Cromwell, seems to know that he’s a character in a narrative—and the effect is thrilling.

Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.

CliffsNotes guides cover not only literature, but also foreign languages, math, science, history and other topics, and many of the guides are free online.

In booklet form, 159 literature study guides are available, costing about $6 to $10 each. But more than 250 are available online, and all can be viewed free. Downloading them as PDF files costs $5 to $10 each. A comparatively paltry 39 CliffsNotes for literature are available for mobile at $1.99 each for the iPhone.

CliffsNotes, owned by Wiley Publishing, also offers free podcasts called CramCasts, which are three- to five-minute overviews of books with a plot summary.

Dr. Fisher liked the idea behind Shmoop’s “Why Should I care?” section. It explains the satire in “Candide” by comparing it to modern satires like “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy.” The problem, he said, is that the writing strains to relate to students. “It makes an interesting attempt to be hip,” he said, “but it is just so high school-y.”

This book tells the stories of those who decided otherwise.

Tsu weaves linguistic analysis together with biographical and historical context — the ravages of imperialism, civil war, foreign invasions, diplomatic successes and disappointments. This approach not only adds background and meaning to the script debate, but also terrific color to what might have otherwise read like a textbook.

Could any alphabet account for the tones needed to differentiate among characters?

Each step of the way, these innovators had to ask questions like: How can the Chinese script be organized in a rational way? Could the language be written with an alphabet?

By examining these questions closely, Tsu helps the novice to Chinese understand both the underlying challenges and how they were conquered.

Mao, Tsu notes, “went down in history as, among other things, the political figure who guided the Chinese language through its two greatest transformations in modern history.”

With more than 90 percent of the population illiterate, Mao embraced the movement to reduce the number of strokes in more than 2,200 characters to render them easier to learn and write. (Taiwan, rejecting simplification, still sees itself as the guardian of traditional Chinese culture.)