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You gauge the odds; that’s really the crux of choosing where to live. And you hope your political leaders have the foresight to spend money on things that may not have an immediate benefit.

In the Northwest, these are the odds: There is a 10 to 15 percent chance of a magnitude 9 earthquake happening over the next 50 years, and a 30 percent chance of a smaller, though still enormous, collision of plates

201 to 250: “Very Unhealthy.” Throat-clearing brings up a lot of phlegm. The sun looks dim through the haze, like a 30-watt bulb. This must be the way sun looks from Mars, you figure. 251 to 500: “Hazardous.” You can taste the air the moment you wake up, even though you are inside your apartment and the windows are closed. Your cat’s fur smells funny. Outside, the world seems muffled, and the tickle in your throat extends down into your lungs and rests there like a tiny gremlin. You plan a trip to Tokyo or any city outside China.

Above 500: Yes, it actually goes beyond the scale. In Beijing, these are called “crazy bad” days

In the U.S., on the worst day in the worst city—usually somewhere in California—the AQI is typically about 125.

Expats and increasingly Chinese often wouldn’t let their small children outside if the AQI was more than 150. Schools called off games at around 200. I wouldn’t jog above 165, and Deb thought I was crazy for running at that level. When you breathe more deeply, the tiniest particles,─the ones that can do the most damage,─can lodge more deeply in your lungs.

On a day when the AQI reached 746, as it did in January 2013, I couldn’t decide whether the sky over Beijing looked more like it was filled with the smoke from an encroaching forest fire or like the residue of a giant cigarette butt.

Some people left Beijing, which tied for 21st out of 199 Chinese cities for bad air, for Shanghai, which was tied for 121st in the bad-air rankings

“Happiness as a byproduct of living your life is a great thing,” Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, told me. “But happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.”

Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re depriving them of happiness as adults?

Bohn believes many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment—“anything less than pleasant,” as he puts it—with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.

Dan Kindlon, a child psychologist and lecturer at Harvard, warns against what he calls our “discomfort with discomfort” in his book Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age. If kids can’t experience painful feelings, Kindlon told me when I called him not long ago, they won’t develop “psychological immunity.”

Civilization is about adapting to less-than-perfect situations, yet parents often have this instantaneous reaction to unpleasantness, which is ‘I can fix this.’”

Yes, we devote inordinate amounts of time, energy, and resources to our children, but for whose benefit?

“I can’t tell you how often I have to say to parents that they’re putting too much emphasis on their kids’ feelings because of their own issues.

Chua’s book resonated so powerfully because she isn’t so different from her critics. She may have been obsessed with her kids’ success at the expense of their happiness—but many of today’s parents who are obsessed with their kids’ happiness share Chua’s drive, just wrapped in a prettier package. Ours is a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too approach, a desire for high achievement without the sacrifice and struggle that this kind of achievement often requires.

Some experts displayed a top-down style of reasoning: politics as a deductive art. They started with a big-idea premise about human nature, society, or economics and applied it to the specifics of the case. They tended to reach more confident conclusions about the future. And the positions they reached were easier to classify ideologically: that is the Keynesian prediction and that is the free-market fundamentalist prediction and that is the worst-case environmentalist prediction and that is the best case technology-driven growth prediction etc. Other experts displayed a bottom-up style of reasoning: politics as a much messier inductive art. They reached less confident conclusions and they are more likely to draw on a seemingly contradictory mix of ideas in reaching those conclusions (sometimes from the left, sometimes from the right). We called the big-idea experts “hedgehogs” (they know one big thing) and the more eclectic experts “foxes” (they know many, not so big things).

The most consistent predictor of consistently more accurate forecasts was “style of reasoning”: experts with the more eclectic, self-critical, and modest cognitive styles tended to outperform the big-idea people (foxes tended to outperform hedgehogs).

Lehrer: Can non-experts do anything to encourage a more effective punditocracy?

Tetlock: Yes, non-experts can encourage more accountability in the punditocracy. Pundits are remarkably skillful at appearing to go out on a limb in their claims about the future, without actually going out on one. For instance, they often “predict” continued instability and turmoil in the Middle East (predicting the present) but they virtually never get around to telling you exactly what would have to happen to disconfirm their expectations. They are essentially impossible to pin down. If pundits felt that their public credibility hinged on participating in level playing field forecasting exercises in which they must pit their wits against an extremely difficult-to-predict world, I suspect they would be learn, quite quickly, to be more flexible and foxlike in their policy pronouncements.

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His newfound interest in cars and racing, he said, was in some ways connected to his interest in tech.

“It’s a fiddly technological skill that you can always improve on,” Mr. Schachter said. “The same kind of guy who might be upgrading the video card on their computer for better performance might also be upgrading their car.” There’s also the visceral thrill. “When you make software, it’s an unreal product,” he said. “Building something physical is attractive in different ways.”

Then there’s the fact that cars are becoming much more like computers. Racecars now carry something like an automotive Fitbit, sophisticated sensors that precisely measure just about everything that’s happening on the track, from G-force to where drivers are braking and accelerating. All this data can be tracked and analyzed, turning racing into a sport of empiricism as much as of instinct.

At some point during every conversation I had with a tech guy who is interested in racing, there would come an awkward moment in which he would ask me not to paint him as an extravagant, sexist cretin. Mr. Schachter told me, “Try to tone down the rich guy hobby thing.

Mr. Bonforte said that many of his friends preferred to stay silent about racing because “the things that make us smell like the 1 percent, we’re very nervous about.” He added that while he has invited several women to come to the track, none had accepted his offer. The rise of a new boys’ club in Silicon Valley — one that was apparently leading to new deals and other business prizes — was “a totally valid concern,

Mr. Schachter pointed out that the most popular car for racing enthusiasts is a Mazda Miata, older models of which sell for less than $5,000. Renting a car for a day on the track costs a few hundred.

Newspaper accounts pointed out that in Denmark, the flag—affectionately called the Dannebrog or “Danish cloth” in ancient Danish—is everywhere. It flies on public buildings and churches to celebrate local and national holidays, including Denmark’s Flag Day—on June 15. It is hoisted over private homes to mark occasions like weddings and funerals, anniversaries and graduations, or just plain fine weather. It is printed on gift-wrapping paper. It decorates birthday cakes and Christmas trees.

Throughout Scandinavia, the flags of Norway, Sweden, and Finland are revered and domesticated broadly; they are considered people's flags, not state's flags.

Our forefathers so cherished that motto they didn’t put it on a hat. They put it on coins and then on the dollar bill. For a guy with so many of those, Trump should have noticed by now.

Cultural orientation class.

According to the World Health Organization, “lead affects children’s brain development resulting in reduced intelligence quotient (IQ), behavioral changes such as shortening of attention span and increased antisocial behavior, and reduced educational attainment. Lead exposure also causes anemia, hypertension, renal impairment, immunotoxicity and toxicity to the reproductive organs. The neurological and behavioral effects of lead are believed to be irreversible.”

The Hurley Medical Center, in Flint, released a study in September that confirmed what many Flint parents had feared for over a year: The proportion of infants and children with above-average levels of lead in their blood has nearly doubled since the city switched from the Detroit water system to using the Flint River as its water source, in 2014.

The crisis reached a nadir Monday night, when Flint Mayor Karen Weaver declared a state of emergency. “The City of Flint has experienced a Manmade disaster,” Weaver said in a declaratory statement. 1 of 11 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × fa fa

The mayor — elected after her predecessor, Dayne Walling, experienced fallout from his administration’s handling of the water problems — said in the statement that she was seeking support from the federal government to deal with the “irreversible” effects of lead exposure on the city’s children. Weaver thinks that these health consequences will lead to a greater need for special education and mental health services, as well as developments in the juvenile justice system.

To those living in Flint, the announcement may feel as if it has been a long time coming. Almost immediately after the city started drawing from the Flint River in April 2014, residents began complaining about the water, which they said was cloudy in appearance and emitted a foul odor.

Since then, complications from the water coming from the Flint River have only piled up. Although city and state officials initially denied that the water was unsafe, the state issued a notice informing Flint residents that their water contained unlawful levels of trihalomethanes, a chlorine byproduct linked to cancer and other diseases.

Protesters marched to City Hall in the fierce Michigan cold, calling for officials to reconnect Flint’s water to the Detroit system. The use of the Flint River was supposed to be temporary, set to end in 2016 after a pipeline to Lake Huron’s Karegnondi Water Authority is finished.

Through continued demonstrations by Flint residents and mounting scientific evidence of the water’s toxins, city and state officials offered various solutions — from asking residents to boil their water to providing them with water filters — in an attempt to work around the need to reconnect to the Detroit system.

That call was finally made by Snyder (R) on Oct. 8. He announced that he had a plan for coming up with the $12 million to switch Flint back to the Detroit system. On Oct. 16, water started flowing again from Detroit to Flint.

But Trump is, fundamentally, a blustering political opportunist courting votes in a democratic system; he has not called for the violent overthrow of the system itself

Nearly 30 years after Il Duce Mussolini, Italy’s dictator from 1922 to 1945, was executed by a partisan firing squad, his ideas were still wreaking havoc across the country; the 1970s were years of clashes between neofascist and communist terrorists that we in Italy called the Anni di Piombo, or years of lead.

In October of that year, on a day when I was on duty selling the leftist newspaper Il Manifesto, I watched nervously as a squadraccia, a gang of fascist thugs, paraded across the street from me in full arms, heavy bats in hand, chains wrapped around their chests, black helmets on their heads, brass knuckles shining.

This was the menace at the heart of fascism, defined by the display of organized violence and terrorism to win political power, and the ultimate imposition of a totalitarian system hostile to capitalism and individual freedom.

Dad had often reminisced about growing up under Il Duce, calmly noting that “In school they taught us that ‘Il Duce’ will soon trash America and those Negroes.’ And I believed them.” It was a Sicilian barber, just returned to Italy after spending much of his life as a steelworker in Pittsburgh, who changed his mind. “I have seen America, worked in America,” the barber told my father. “America is too strong for us.”

Trump, too, is benefitting from voter discontent. Polls show that many Trump supporters come from the white middle- and working-class, a group whose status and salaries have stagnated for decades; these voters are evidently looking for a leader ready to dignify, if not solve, their problems.

From Hitler’s Mein Kampf to Mussolini’s speeches on the Palazzo Venezia balcony, fascists told the crowd openly what their goals were and kept a nefarious, disciplined pace to realize them. Mussolini boasted about reducing Italy’s Parliament “to a fascist barrack,” “stopping any antifascist brain from thinking,” and “creating a new Roman Empire.”

Trump has no clear plan of any kind. He is not about to dissolve the Democratic Party and banish the Clintons, Obama, Noam Chomsky, Michael Moore and Jimmy Fallon to exile on Randall’s Island.

Men and women left in the cold by globalization and rising inequality, scared of immigrants often lumped together with foreign terrorists in the media and the popular imagination: This is not the base for the new Western World Fascist Party, but it is a powder keg powerful enough to inflame societies on both sides of the Atlantic.

It will not destroy Western democracies, but it may poison them. Witch-hunts, racism, repression, and state surveillance may plague a democracy without morphing it into a fascist dictatorship.

As Western democracies continue to face the crises of wars and terrorism abroad, and growing inequality and cultural and political unrest at home, it would be a tragedy to go through them so bitterly divided.

"This is a unique arrangement," one U.S. official said. "This is a humanitarian gesture."

The Obama administration has been criticized by several Republican presidential candidates, including GOP front-runner Donald Trump, for reaching the nuclear deal with Iran while the Americans remained imprisoned.

When news first broke of the incident involving the sailors, tensions were high, the official said. But the way it was quickly resolved allowed the parties to return to wrapping up negotiations on the prisoners.

Iran had initially insisted Jason Rezaian's fate could only be decided by Tehran's judicial system rather than through political accommodation with the U.S. But the nuclear deal, reached last year, held out hope for increased dialogue about Rezaian and the other Americans.

"There are a number of Iranians in the United States who are imprisoned, who went to prison as a result of activities related to the nuclear industry in Iran," he said through an interpreter.

"I have raised them in all of our sessions. We've had a lot of conversations. We are continuing those conversations now. And I am hopeful that the day will come soon, obviously sooner rather than later, but soon, when all of our citizens can come home," Kerry said.

Over and over, the President explained that his proposal will not affect most people's ability to buy a gun and it will not eliminate all gun violence. He repeatedly stated it will eliminate current channels that criminals do take advantage of to purchase guns. If one of every 30 guns sold online is purchased by a felon, as the President suggested, why wouldn't we try and stop that from happening?Tonight, the President wa

modest, respectful and reasonable. He was there to listen and to have a conversation. It was a conversation about gun control yes, but it was wrapped inside a bigger theme -- the nature of change.

The men decided they needed to do something to bridge that emotional gap, and within a few weeks, they’d gathered 10 Trump voters and 10 Hillary Clinton voters for a discussion in Ohio. With a nod to the notion that the U.S. was a house divided against itself, they recruited Bill Doherty, a veteran family therapist, to design and lead the talk.

“It was just really for all of us a transformative experience,” Blankenhorn said. “We felt we had lightning in a bottle. You remember right after the election, emotions were very high. Words of real anger, passion, fear. At the end of the day, they decided that they wanted to continue to talk together. They said it was the first time they’d actually talked together after a year and a half of talking at and about each other.”

After introductions, the reds and blues split up, each with a facilitator, and were asked to list stereotypes that they believe the other side has about them. Then they were asked to assign a “kernel of truth” to each stereotype—that is, to accept why the other side might hold it.

The goal is simply to create a space and method for people who disagree to talk politics, conversations that have become surprisingly rare.

A 2017 study by political scientists at the University of California at Davis found that three in four Americans almost exclusively talk politics with people with whom they agree. More and more, Americans avoid discussing politics with people they know hold opposite views—if they mix with them at all.

The workshop I attended in Cary was the three-hour version. What immediately jumped out was how little time blues and reds spent talking about the opposite side. Instead, the format forced them to speak almost exclusively about themselves

So the nascent Better Angels hosted another session. And then another. Then they had a bus tour. They created a day-long workshop, and then a three-hour truncated alternative. They began recruiting members and held a national convention in Harrisonburg, Virginia, in summer 2017. The group has now hosted hundreds of workshops and claims roughly 5,400 dues-paying members

The exercise also demonstrated how difficult self-critique is. I sat with the red group, and while the crew quickly named racism as a stereotype, they were deeply reluctant to identify the kernel of truth. Linda Gupton, a member of the red group, tried to argue that there are white-supremacist elements in the Republican coalition, but was shut down. Only as the exercise finished did she convince the rest of the reds, pointing to the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017.

What was surprising was that rather than just come up with different answers, they almost seemed to have been answering different questions. The red group compiled a list almost entirely composed of feelings—“closed-minded,” “racist.” The blue group, meanwhile, brought back a list of policy-heavy words, such as “socialist.”

After a break came the fishbowl exercises, as participants laid out why they believed their side’s policy prescriptions were good for the country, and then what reservations they had about those ideas

The fishbowl exercises seemed to build real goodwill. The reds were excited to hear blues voice concern about self-righteousness on the left, and about their fears that a social safety net might create a culture of dependency. The blues were heartened by red concerns that conservative social policies would leave people behind.

Nonetheless, there was a warm, fuzzy feeling as the workshop wrapped up. I left feeling a little better about partisans’ ability to have reasoned conversations. That’s exactly what Blankenhorn said Better Angels workshops can provide. The goal is to lower negative partisanship.

A bigger reach also means expanding offerings. In addition to holding workshops and national conventions, Better Angels has started local chapters where people can get together on a semi-regular basis, in a less structured format. Better Angels is also working to establish debates, having found that some reds prefer that to the arguably touchy-feely vibe of the workshops.

The bigger problem is that the kind of people who are willing to spend a morning or a day on such an exercise are the kind of people who are already convinced that dialogue is important, and are more willing to hear the other side out. As participants went around, many had strong political views, but many had also participated in other efforts at cross-partisan dialogue.

“I have a lot of friends who are much more conservative than me, and they are very hesitant to come to a table with people from the other side of the table because they’re afraid they’re going to get beat up,” she said. “But here, you’re not debating people from the other side of the table.”

There was also a conspicuous absence of strong Trump supporters. The reds mostly fit into the more classic business-friendly conservatism of, say, Mitt Romney. They weren’t necessarily Never Trumpers, but many were Reluctant Trumpers.

Selbst thought the format was good as far as it went, but he worried it didn’t go very far. “[The facilitators] tended to give equal weight to everyone’s argument and were not interested in any negativity toward that argument [from] the other people,” he said. “I firmly believe everyone should be treated with respect, but not every opinion is equally valuable.

That’s the rub, even if you don’t agree with Selbst about which opinions are valuable and which aren’t. Ultimately, politics is about issues—not just the ability to talk, and not just procedures

Blankenhorn is disarmingly open about these challenges, though he told me, “I’ve worked for lost causes in this country. I know what it’s like to not get much response for something you’re trying to do. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

Still, other drivers said the job wasn’t overly difficult. “It’s about being alert, if you can’t be alert for a few straight hours then you’re not a very good driver,” a former Waymo test operator said. Video taken from inside the Uber vehicle, released by Tempe police, appears to show the vehicle heading straight into the pedestrian without slo

It is the second time in a year that Uber has ​temporarily halted testing following an accident involving one of its autonomous cars.

Uber began making the transition to using single test operators nearly three years after embarking on self-driving vehicle development. General Motors Co.’s Cruise Automation self-driving unit, which was founded in 2013, still has two test drivers in every car. Waymo—which has logged more than five million testing miles, by far the most of any company—began using one safety operator in many of its cars in 2015, about six years after its program began. Waymo now runs most vehicles without humans behind the wheel in the Phoenix area and plans to launch a commercial robot service later this year.

d under stress. California, where a lot of testing occurs, requires companies to disclose such “disengagements” of the autonomous technology, and unnecessary disengagements can interfere with learning and improving the technology.

“We are in uncharted territory in terms of trade policy,” said Chad Bown, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute of International Economics. “What President Trump has done is make everything uncertain in trade policy. You don’t know on almost a day-to-day basis what trade policy is going to be and businesses find it very difficult to operate in that kind of environment.”

Ross said in an interview with The Washington Post that Trump was acting within his authority. He said that under Section 232 of a key U.S. trade law Trump “has very broad powers. He can raise the tariffs. He can lower them. He can let countries in and let them out.”

The Marsy's Law campaign says it expects to spend millions of dollars to support the amendment. But the idea that a California billionaire could lead the charge to amend the New Hampshire Constitution is also rubbing some local lawmakers the wrong way.

Amanda Grady Sexton, state director for the Marsy's Law campaign, disagrees with the argument that the amendment isn't a response to a local problem. Sexton has worked with the New Hampshire Coalition Against Domestic and Sexual Violence since 2001 and says acquiring constitutional rights for crime victims has long been a goal for her organization.

"I've got a woman whose husband was killed in a car accident in August of last year and she can't get the crime report from [the Department of] Public Safety because they're afraid to release the information," Mickelson said. "They're not sure if there was a crime, and if there was, who the victim is."