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Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who is cited in “The Triple Package,” hadn’t yet read the book, but said he hoped that Chua and Rubenfeld were aware that they’re flirting with a Typhoid Mary. “I’m all for culture,” Patterson said, but “culture is a tricky concept. It has tripped up a lot of anthropologists and sociologists.”

“The Triple Package” is full of qualifications, earnest settings-of-the-terms, explicit attempts to head off misinterpretations at the pass. “This point is so important we’re going to repeat it,” they write in a section about Appalachian poverty, which they argue was caused by geography and industrial decline, rather than by any lack of triple-package values.

Chua remained optimistic.“I feel like it should be a book that if you approach it with an open mind, it actually shouldn’t be controversial. It should be thought-provoking.”

The Tigers were for so long the custodians of the Tamil people’s hope of self-realization. But theirs was a deeply flawed organization. Under the leadership of Velupillai Prabhakaran, the Tigers pioneered and perfected the use of the suicide bomber. This was not simply a mode of warfare, but almost a symbol, an expression of a self-annihilating spirit. And it was to self-annihilation that Mr. Prabhakaran committed the Tamils. He was a man who, like a modern-day Coriolanus, seemed to lack the imagination for peace. He took the Tamils on a journey of war without end, where no offer of compromise was ever enough, and where all forms of moderation were seen as betrayal.

This was an added layer of shame in the Tamil defeat. It was not just that they had lost the war. It was also that the grass-roots movement they originated, and for which they had paid taxes and sacrificed able-bodied men and women, had, in the end, been more vicious to them than to anyone else.

the loss the Tamils feel is really the loss of a story. They are now a people without a story, a traumatized people, devastated by decades of war and migration, whose dream of self-determination was hijacked by the nihilistic vision of their leader and turned to nightmare.

the Immigration Act of 1965, partially responding to the pressures of the Cold War/Space Race, didn't just abolish racial quotas, it also created preference categories for science, math and engineering-trained immigrants to come over.

Not only did this massive wave of post-1965 immigrants change the demographic composition of Asian America, it also influenced the American perception that Asians were somehow naturally gifted in math and science because there was a disproportionate number of immigrants coming from Asia with those skills.

Since being good in math and science proved a boon to our parents, they, in turn, figured it'd be good for their kids.

It’s easy to understand a traditional Chinese drive for perfection in children: it is a huge nation with a long history of people thriving at the top and scraping by at the bottom without much in between. The appeal in contemporary America stems from a sense that our nation is becoming stratified in similar ways and is about to get steamrolled by China. If you can’t beat them, join them.

Aside from being a much cheaper option than babysitters, sleepovers also help children learn to sleep anywhere, in any bed, with any pillow. This is not an ability to be scoffed at. It is, in fact, one of three goals everyone should realistically set for raising their kids: get them to adulthood with no sleeping, eating or sexual hang-ups. Do that and you will have done your job, launching them off with the foundation needed to thrive.

Her broad thesis in Political Tribes is that Americans are almost uniquely blind to the importance of group identities. The US has historically been a “super-group”, made up of a diverse population bound by a strong national identity of Americanness.

Now the US itself is being pulled apart by tribal divisions and the “super-group” is breaking down. Race has split the poor and class has split white Americans.

She writes: “Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. The left believes that rightwing tribalism – bigotry, racism – is tearing the country apart. The right believes that leftwing tribalism – identity politics, political correctness – is tearing the country apart. They are both right.”

There are eight accepted criteria used to determine whether a place is an independent country (also known as a State with a capital "s") or not.

Taiwan is home to almost 23 million people, making it the 48th largest "country" in the world, with a population slightly smaller than North Korea but larger than Romania.

Taiwan is an economic powerhouse - it's one of the four economic tigers of Southeast Asia. Its GDP per capita is among the top 30 of the world. Taiwan has its own currency, the new Taiwan dollar.

promised that there are more high-ranking officials to be toppled.

China’s Supreme People’s Court just publicly released its Fourth Five-Year Reform Plan. The Supreme People’s Court Monitor (and occasional Diplomat contributor) Susan Finder, has the scoop.

“A positive role for China in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” (by Yiyi Chen of Peking University’s Institute for Hebrew and Jewish Studies) to analyzing “China’s interests in preserving the Israeli-Palestinian impasse” (by Robert Bianchi of the University of Chicago Law School).

A Chinese government official I know was put under

shuanggui, the secretive system of internal Communist Party investigation in which victims are detained, questioned without counsel and sometimes tortured

the most probable reason for his travails with the authorities was that his political patron also got in trouble.

The rich middle- and high-school kids Luthar and her collaborators have studied show higher rates of alcohol and drug abuse on average than poor kids, and much higher rates than the national norm.

They report clinically significant depression or anxiety or delinquent behaviors at a rate two to three times the national average

The New York Times columnist Frank Bruni’s Where You Go Is Not Who You’ll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania warns of the dangers of insisting that admission to an elite college is necessary for a successful life.

In the classic comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, the titular characters occasionally play a game known as “Calvinball.” The rules are simple: Hobbes makes them up as he goes. In one strip, the imaginary stuffed tiger declares mid-game that Calvin has entered an “invisible sector” and must cover his eyes “because everything is invisible to you.” The six-year-old boy obeys and asks Hobbes how he gets out. “Someone bonks you with the Calvinball!” Hobbes exclaims, chucking the volleyball at Calvin. And so it goes until Calvin, in the final panel, is dizzy and disoriented. “This game,” he notes, “lends itself to certain abuses.”

Now, one month later, GOP lawmakers in multiple states are using lame-duck sessions to hamstring incoming Democratic elected officials, either by reducing their official powers or transferring them to Republican-led legislatures.

Over the past decade, Republican lawmakers in North Carolina mastered the strategy of constitutional hardball to preserve their political muscle even as their electoral advantage shrank. The metastasis of this model today may be an even greater threat to the nation’s political health than Trump himself.

the unarrested progress of climate change and environmental degradation are forcing us to stretch our imaginations beyond specific narratives of loss. We face not just the collapse of particular habitats or particular ecosystems but, as Elizabeth Kolbert documented five years ago, in “The Sixth Extinction,” a vast, general collapse.

a mass extinction will profoundly affect the living things likely to survive it, including us.

The consequences of losing obscure insects and plant life—uncharismatic microflora and fauna, not polar bear or Bengal tigers—are harder to conceptualize. The report’s authors have taken pains to insure we try anyway. “Nature, through its ecological and evolutionary processes, sustains the quality of the air, fresh water and soils on which humanity depends, distributes fresh water, regulates the climate, provides pollination and pest control and reduces the impact of natural hazards,”

the most striking feature of this early age of mammals is that it was almost unbelievably hot, so hot that around 50 million years ago there were crocodiles, palm trees, and sand tiger sharks in the Arctic Circle. On the other side of the blue-green orb, in waters that today would surround Antarctica, sea-surface temperatures might have topped an unthinkable 86 degrees Fahrenheit, with near-tropical forests on Antarctica itself. There were perhaps even sprawling, febrile dead zones spanning the tropics, too hot even for animal or plant life of any sort.

This is what you get in an ancient atmosphere with around 1,000 parts per million (ppm) of carbon dioxide. If this number sounds familiar, 1,000 ppm of CO2 is around what humanity is on pace to reach by the end of this century. That should be mildly concerning.

“You put more CO2 in the atmosphere and you get more warming, that’s just super-simple physics that we figured out in the 19th century,” says David Naafs, an organic geochemist at the University of Bristol. “But exactly how much it will warm by the end of the century, we don’t know. Based on our research of these ancient climates, though, it’s probably more than we thought.”

The world is awash in crude oil, and is slowly running out of places to put it.Massive, round storage tanks in places like Trieste, Italy, and the United Arab Emirates are filling up. Over 80 huge tankers, each holding up to 80 million gallons, are anchored off Texas, Scotland and elsewhere, with no particular place to go.

The world doesn’t need all this oil. The coronavirus pandemic has strangled the world’s economies, silenced factories and grounded airlines, cutting the need for fuel. But Saudi Arabia, the world’s largest producer, is locked in a price war with rival Russia and is determined to keep raising production.Prices have plummeted.

This chaotic mismatch in supply and demand has benefited consumers, who have watched gasoline prices slide lower.And it has been a field day for anyone eager to snap up cheap oil, put it someplace and wait for a day when it’ll be worth more.

The coronavirus is making me experience what Germans poetically call heimweh, the hurt of being far from your native land.

n times of upheaval or natural catastrophe, the State Department often advises Americans to avoid some of the world’s poorest nations.

These warnings speak to a set of assumptions so obvious, they seem almost silly to spell out.

The Illicit Global Ape Trade

Mr. Stiles found an Instagram account offering dozens of rare animals for sale, including baby chimpanzees and orangutans dressed in children’s clothes. He sent an email to an address on the account — “looking for young otans” (the industry standard slang for orangutans) — and several days later received a reply.“2 babies, 7.5k each. Special introductory price.”

Such ape shows are a growing business in Southeast Asia, despite international regulations that prohibit trafficking in endangered apes.

After Mr. Trump repeated his taunt in a tweet late Saturday and threatened that Mr. Kim and his foreign minister “won’t be around much longer” if they continue their invective against the United States, reactions ranged from nervous disbelief to sheer terror.

His strengths as a politician — the ability to appeal in a visceral way to the impulses of ordinary citizens — are a difficult fit for the meticulous calculations that his own advisers concede are crucial in dealing with Pyongyang.

His new chief of staff and his national security team have drawn a line at trying to rein in his more incendiary provocations, fearing that their efforts could backfire with a president who bridles at any effort to control him. What remains unclear — and the source of much of the anxiety in and out of the government and on both sides of the Pacific — is whether they would step in to prevent the president from taking the kind of drastic action that matches his words, if they believed it was imminent.

First recognized outside of China in the early 1900's, Chinese green teas quickly became very popular overseas and in 1915 Xinyang Maojian won gold medal for 'best tea in the world' at the Panama World Expo.

as simple basic drying processes were introduced that increased its availability and allowed the introduction of scented teas, which helped lessen the bitterness green teas had at that time.

During this time, the process of steaming the tea leaves was gradually refined, allowing the production of better tasting, less bitter, green teas.

President Donald Trump attempts a surreal return to normalcy a day after inciting a mob of his supporters to riot, culminating in the first breach the US Capitol in 200 years.

Trump's attempted return to business as usual comes amid the ongoing global pandemic and after a stunning siege he personally incited, leaving four dead and the Capitol building ransacked. In the aftermath, some Cabinet members have had discussions about invoking the 25th Amendment amid concerns about what could happen before Trump leaves office, multiple officials are offering resignations, and there are ongoing questions about what went wrong and what happens next with the presidential transition.

However, due to the fact that the RNC is currently an active crime scene after a pipe bomb was found outside on Wednesday, Trump was forced to cancel his planned Thursday evening video address. It was to be taped with RNC equipment currently inaccessible.