I am a refugee living in the United States and I know what it means to escape death. Still, I warn others not to come – they won’t be safe or welcome here

Don’t come here. If you are afraid for your life and you have no place to go, don’t pick this country. It is not safe for you here any more.

If you try to cross our borders, people in military uniform called border patrol agents, will arrest you, throw you in a freezing cage and subject you to all kinds of abuses. These agents who don’t speak your language will sit you down and interrogate you. It won’t matter if you didn’t understand their questions, they will write whatever they want in dozens of forms, make you sign them, and use them against you later as they try to deport you.

In 1905, British archaeologists descended on a sliver of eastern Africa, aiming to uncover and extract artifacts from 3,000-year-old temples. They left mostly with photographs, discouraged by the ever-shifting sand dunes that blanketed the land. “We sank up to the knees at every step,” E. A. Wallis Budge, the British Egyptologist and philologist, wrote at the time, adding: “[We] made several trial diggings in other parts of the site, but we found nothing worth carrying away.”

The land was inhospitable, and some archaeologists of the era subtly or explicitly dismissed the notion that black Africans were capable of creating art, technology, and metropolises like those from Egypt or Rome. Modern textbooks still treat ancient Nubia like a mere annex to Egypt: a few paragraphs on black pharaohs, at most. Articles republished from Undark MagazineRead more Today, archaeologists are realizing how wrong their predecessors were—and how little time they have left to uncover and fully understand Nubia’s historical significance.

“Only now do we realize how much pristine archaeology is just waiting to be found,” says David Edwards, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.“But just as we are becoming aware it’s there, it’s gone,” he adds. Within the next 10 years, Edwards says, “most of ancient Nubia might be swept away.”

A lot of young conservatives are frustrated by the false choice between no climate action and a big government regulatory scheme.

“Adult leaders have not acted efficiently or effectively on this issue, and we are stepping forward to fill the void,” said Alexander Posner, the founding president of Students for Carbon Dividends and a 22-year-old American history major at Yale University.

But the centrism that annoyed Washington insiders turned out to be perfect for college politicos. Posner was inspired by the plan when he first read about it in the press. He contacted the Climate Leadership Council and ultimately interned there over the summer. When he returned to campus this fall, he was determined to recruit more college conservatives to their cause.

The news that North Korea’s leader Kim Jong Un has offered to hold talks about getting rid of his nuclear weapons has fueled new hopes that the deadly standoff with North Korea may be easing. So far, only South Korea has said these talks will happen. While it remains to be seen what exactly North Korea has offered to discuss if it does indeed confirm its participation—it’s speculated that sanctions relief in exchange for some technical steps to roll back North Korea’s nuclear efforts will be on the negotiating table—it is already clear that Kim, following his successful Olympic charm offensive, is ready to continue playing peacemaker.

What is new, at least at first blush, is the lack of any conditions from North Korea. Press reports indicate that North Korea is ready to pursue talks with the United States even if sanctions continue and the military exercises between the United States and South Korea scheduled for April proceed as planned. Pyongyang has used past such exercises to either cancel talks or conduct missile tests. However, after having declared the completion of its nuclear development program, Kim Jong Un has apparently decided there is more to be gained by putting the United States on the spot by offering diplomacy than by testing nuclear weapons or missiles.

This message is not yet resonating with the South Korean population, but after a year of maximum pressure and no real diplomatic engagement by the United States, South Korea is ready to test the proposition of diplomacy with the North. Washington should be too.

Policy differences with your boss, especially if he is the president, are one thing; reportedly calling him a “moron” and declining to say whether he represents American values are quite another. And yet a little more than a year after Rex Tillerson was sworn in as the U.S. secretary of state, and amid umpteen stories of his imminent departure from that position, including in The Atlantic, he’s still in his job while high-profile Trump loyalists such as Hope Hicks are out.

Tillerson’s imprimatur has been the clearest in some of the thorniest issues facing the United States: the future of the Iranian nuclear deal, which is still alive despite Trump’s opposition to it; Qatar’s impasse with its Arab neighbors; and, of course, North Korea, where Tillerson has advocated dialogue from almost the beginning—and pursued a low-key but effective campaign to get other countries to cut ties or exert economic pressure on North Korea.

“I like conflict. I like having two people with different points of view, and I certainly have that,” Trump said at a news conference with the Swedish prime minister when he was asked about potential staffing changes at the White House. “And then I make a decision. But I like watching it, I like seeing it, and I think it’s the best way to go. I like different points of view.”

One inconvenient feature of the global trading system is that efforts to protect the jobs of voting workers in one country risk affecting jobs, and perhaps votes, in another. Thus President Donald Trump’s proposed tariffs on imported aluminum and steel, offered with the rationale that American metalworkers had been losing jobs to foreign competition, alarmed Europe—the continent has its own metalworkers to worry about, whose jobs to some extent depend on access to markets like America’s.

The European Union is the second-largest exporter of steel to the U.S. (behind Canada), and said after Trump first proposed the tariffs that it would consider imposing counter-measures against American exports to Europe, including bourbon whiskey and Harley Davidson motorcycles.

But if somehow the bloc doesn’t manage to meet the standards “friendly nations” must to get out of the tariffs, it has the potential to get much less friendly. After President George W. Bush attempted to impose a 30-percent steel tariff in 2002, the World Trade Organization ruled that the move violated global trade rules, enabling the EU to threaten retaliation with its own tariffs. Those ones were set to target Harley Davidson motorcycles, Michigan-manufactured cars, and oranges from Florida, where the then-president’s brother, Jeb Bush, was governor. The targeted goods were also produced in electoral swing states. Bush ultimately backed down.

As South Korea’s national-security adviser told it on Thursday, Donald Trump will meet with Kim Jong Un this spring for one purpose only: to achieve the “permanent denuclearization” of North Korea. But according to one of the U.S. officials who came closest to striking that kind of deal, the president better lower his expectations. By a lot.

“I don’t think [the North Koreans are] going to want to negotiate giving up all their nuclear weapons,” he added. “But even if they did … I have no idea how we could verify it.”

The years since have brought a series of nuclear agreements that at times froze the North Korean nuclear program, but over the long term failed to prevent the North from becoming a nuclear-weapons state. The achilles heel of many of these accords was the Kim government’s refusal to disclose all its nuclear activities and permit outside monitors to verify that those activities had ceased.

The good news is that the Trump administration has adopted an approach toward North Korea that goes beyond trading insults, or missiles. They are going to talk.  The bad news? Donald Trump intends to do it himself.“I’m elated and horrified at the same time,” said Jim Walsh, a senior research associate at the MIT Security Studies Program and a board member of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “Elated because the parties are talking; horrified by the prospect of the two most unusual leaders in the world together in a room—what could possibly go wrong?”

So, why not have Trump and Kim meet? Direct talks between America’s and North Korea’s heads of state have never been tried, and nothing else has worked. A summit might be a good idea because it is unprecedented.

Trump may have fantasies of being a ruler like Kim, but he is not. In most matters—and certainly those pertaining to Korea—he is his opposite. He is no policy expert, and he has driven out or failed to appoint specialists to advise him. He disdains expertise and experience as a matter of rule, preferring to make great decisions by instinct—his faith in his gut is wider than his considerable waist. He is driven first and foremost by self-promotion, his degree of calculation is tweet deep; and he has set himself up—“I alone can fix this!”—to be a sucker for the grandstand play. He craves spectacle.

At a recent security conference in Munich, Senator James Risch cautioned that a “very brief” conflict “of biblical proportions” could erupt between the United States and North Korea, leaving in its wake “mass casualties the likes of which the planet has never seen.” He then promptly left his stunned audience to catch a flight. This week, back in Washington, D.C., the Idaho Republican explained the warning. He expressed some hope that economic sanctions and other pressure will make North Korean leader Kim Jong Un rethink his pursuit of nuclear weapons. But if that doesn’t happen, he suggested, the nuclear threat from North Korea is so exceptional that the Trump administration could feel obligated to embark on an all-out war.

“The president of the United States has said over and over again that he does not telegraph what and when and how he is going to do something,” he continued. “He proved it once in Syria, in response to [President] Assad using chemical weapons against his people, and he proved it a second time in Afghanistan when he delivered” the “mother of all bombs” against ISIS targets. “Both of those times that he pulled the trigger were very surgical, very direct, accomplished exactly what they were supposed to accomplish.”

Isn’t the possibility of miscalculation a good argument for talking to the North Koreans, if only to handle crises? “Of course it is,” Risch said. “Civilized people would do that, wouldn’t they?” But North Korea’s “recklessness” and “maliciousness” mean that its leaders are “entirely different than the civilized people we’re dealing with who are nuclear powers,” he said.

Here is the central tenet of Facebook’s business: If lots of people click on, comment on, or share an ad, Facebook charges that advertiser less money to reach people. The platform is a brawl for user attention, and Facebook sees a more engaging ad as a better ad, which should be shown to more users.

And yet, in the context of the 2016 Presidential Election, this way of auctioning advertising—originally developed by Google and normalized in the pre-Trump age—can seem strange, unfair, and possibly even against the rules that govern election advertising.

Trump, of course, was the canny marketer, while Clinton’s team was the unengaging competitor. While most everyone covering the digital portion of the election has known this, the logical conclusion that follows can still feel startling.

The world’s next great space telescope is falling behind.The James Webb Space Telescope, NASA’s successor to the famed Hubble, is at risk of experiencing significant delays in development, according to a new report from a government agency that audits federal programs.

Webb is an $8.8 billion project two decades in the making. Last September, NASA announced it was delaying the telescope’s launch by at least five months, from October 2018 to between March and June 2019. At the time, NASA officials said the change wasn’t due to any problems with the hardware, but because assembling the telescope’s many complex parts was “taking longer than expected.”

This is a disheartening forecast for many parties, including NASA; Northrop Grumman, the telescope’s main contractor; and the European and Canadian space agencies, contributors to the telescope’s design and construction. There’s no question that the Webb will launch. After 20 years of development and construction, most of the money has already been spent and the hardware rigorously tested. But the road to the launchpad may be bumpier than everyone expected.

oe to you, because you build tombs for the prophets, and it was your ancestors who killed them.” Jesus’s rebuke to the Pharisees descended upon me on a cold January morning in 2017, in West Potomac Park in Washington, D.C. On that Monday, the national holiday dedicated to the man at whose memorial I stood, the capital bustled in anticipation of a more pressing political event. That’s why I was at the park, pondering this granite stone of hope, carved out of a mountain of despair. The memorial to Martin Luther King Jr. cast its shadow over me, its presence just as conflicted as those tombs.

After the Voting Rights Act was passed, in 1965, the revolution’s center of gravity shifted north, along with the stragglers of the Great Migration—toward de facto as opposed to de jure racism. Baldwin’s frequent premonitions of unrest in the streets began to come true. In his 1966 essay, “A Report From Occupied Territory,” he discussed the “powder keg” of poverty, joblessness, and discrimination in urban ghettos and warned that it “may blow up; it will be a miracle if it doesn’t.” King, by then, had sensed the same trouble brewing in the slums as Baldwin had. In his 1966 campaign against segregated housing in Chicago, which moved his strategy of nonviolent protest from the South to the North, he tried to wield his activism machine against the social and economic troubles that Baldwin described. He was repaid with violent counterprotests.

King spoke of a “white backlash”—a term he helped popularize—to his movement. But in retrospect, the strength of the reaction he predicted and endured often receives short shrift. The support of white moderates who recoiled at images of Negro children sprayed by hoses and attacked by dogs was instrumental in passing laws that ended legal segregation and protected voting rights.

At a moment when many of his former voters believe that America is facing a genuine democratic crisis, former President Barack Obama has been largely silent about what is happening in American politics. Other than a handful of appearances—an interview with David Letterman in a new Netflix show, or an oral history project at MIT—he insists on following protocol and tradition for former presidents, resisting the temptation to jump back into the political fray.

For the past year, President Trump has worked with the Republican Congress to dismantle crucial parts of Obama’s legacy, including affordable health care, progressive taxation, climate-change regulation, oversight of the financial system, and immigration reform. Discussions of Medicare and Medicaid cuts surfacing in recent weeks suggest that an effort to roll back Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society might be next.

ut what Trump has done over the past 14 months is anything but usual. He has employed recklessly bellicose rhetoric against dangerous adversaries such North Korea, created massive conflicts of interest by refusing to separate himself from his business empire, risked setting off a debilitating trade war without any careful deliberation, generally ignored overwhelming evidence that the Russians tampered and plan to continue tampering in our elections, and has been willing to play in the sandbox with noxious white nationalism.

did not understand how poor my family was until my maternal grandmother told me a story about sackcloth dresses and beans. I was in my 20s, and we were sitting in her kitchen, the tickle of cool air from the window air-conditioning unit barely on us, when she told me that while she was a child, her mother made dresses for her and her siblings from sackcloth, and that she was always disappointed because the sacks with pretty patterns were taken by the time she was given the opportunity to choose. “We ate beans every week when I was little,” my grandmother said.

Perhaps I was blind to my poverty because it was so ubiquitous that it was rendered invisible. As a child, I lived in my grandmother’s house with my parents and siblings and our extended family. Thirteen of us shared five bedrooms (one was a converted dining room). We had no central heat, no central air. My grandmother installed gas heaters in the long hallway bisecting the house and, later, a fat wood-burning stove in the living room. During the summer, box fans hummed in all the windows. My mother says we never starved, and this is true. I had it better than my grandparents and my mother did when they were young, but I remember hunger. I think it was the hunger of childhood, the need for fuel to grow, but it was blinding sometimes

As an adult, this is how I carry the poverty of my Mississippi youth forward with me: by remembering the emptiness inside me. By remembering how that emptiness permeated every bit of me. How I was hungry in my belly and ravenous to fill my brain with something that would one day help ensure that I would not be hungry forever.

n April 24, 2017, a 28-year-old-man met an 11-year-old girl in a park in Montmagny, just north of Paris, after which, he took her home where he had oral and vaginal sex with her. When it was over, the girl called her mother and described what had happened, and her mother called the police. “She thought … that she didn’t have the right to protest, that it wouldn’t make any difference,” the mother told Mediapart, a French investigative site which first reported on the allegations of the case. The accusations were of an adult raping a child—a crime that, in France, can lead to a 20-year prison sentence for the perpetrator when the victim is 15 or younger.

But it initially wasn’t charged that way. When the case first went to court in September, the man faced only charges of “sexual infraction,” a crime punishable with a maximum of five years in jail and a €75,000 fine. Under French law, a charge of rape requires “violence, coercion, threat, or surprise,” even if the victims are as young as the girl in the Montmagny case. When the case, initially postponed, went back to court in February, the man’s attorneys did not deny the sexual encounter but argued that the girl had been capable of consenting. “She was 11 years and 10 months old, so nearly 12 years old,” defense lawyer Marc Goudarzian said. Sandrine Parise-Heideiger, his fellow defense lawyer, added: “We are not dealing with a sexual predator on a poor little faultless goose.”

“It is indefensible that a girl of 11 could be considered consenting with a 28-year-old man. This is shocking,” she added.

I lived in Rome for many years but moved away in 2013. Maybe I’ve changed since then, maybe it’s the #MeToo moment, but coming back to Italy this time, what struck me most wasn’t the political chaos, the populism, the dysfunction, or even the beauty, since a person can get used to all that. It was the fact that there were barely any women playing leading roles in the election coverage.

As the returns came in, the main talk shows had all-male panels of experts. Some of the reporters in the field were women, and some of the interviewers, too. But men dominated the debate.

Is it really possible that in a country of 60 million people, there were barely any women weighing in on the results on the front pages of the country’s most prominent newspapers, and barely any woman there with regular political columns?

t a White House stag dinner in February 1954, President Dwight Eisenhower shocked the new chief justice of the United States. Earl Warren was Eisenhower’s first appointment to the Supreme Court and had been sworn in just four months earlier. Only two months into his tenure, Warren had presided over oral arguments in the blockbuster school-segregation case Brown v. Board of Education. As of the dinner, the case was still under advisement. Yet Eisenhower seated Warren near one of the attorneys who had argued the case for the southern states, John W. Davis, and went out of his way to praise Davis as a great man. That alone would have made for an awkward evening. What happened next made it fateful. Over coffee, Eisenhower took Warren by the arm and asked him to consider the perspective of white parents in the Deep South. “These are not bad people,” the president said. “All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black bucks.”

Warren had been a prosecutor and a governor, and was no choirboy; he had heard bigoted language before. Yet as the chief justice, he embodied the impartiality of the entire federal judiciary. He was a man who believed in fairness and dignity. The president’s words had shaken him.

When the Court ruled on the remedies phase of Brown in 1955, a decision known as Brown II, the president was even less voluble. He said nothing about the Court’s delegation of supervisory duties to the district courts, or its famous directive that school districts should begin to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.” The following year, Eisenhower personally rewrote the Republican platform to read that the party “accepts” the original Brown decision, rather than “concurs” with it.

. Their model has been the Hungary of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, systematically at work on an illiberal project since 2010. The process is gathering pace.

The Law and Justice Party has turned the Polish lower house of Parliament, or Sejm, into a rubber stamp for its agenda. It has also waged a relentless campaign against an independent judiciary.

“We are witnessing a slow but insistent and intentional process of undermining the courts so that they will not enforce the Constitution against the executive and the legislature,” Sarah Cleveland, the American member of the Venice Commission and a law professor at Columbia University, told me. “It’s a process of death by 1,000 cuts.”

I was 10 years old when, in 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered 12 students at Columbine High School, in what was then the most-deadly school shooting in American history. What I can recall most from my childhood mind from the time aren’t the gruesome details in the news reports or even the sense of dread that gripped students and teachers across the country, but the feeling that something central about the country had changed. Something about America had shifted, and it was significant enough that even a child’s understanding could grasp it.

Almost two decades later, after multiple mass shootings and dozens of slain children, it’s clear that what changed wasn’t the mobilization of a country to stop events like Columbine, but the beginning of the normalization of those events.

The theme of most of the night was criticism of Rubio, who often appeared hesitant in the face of withering boos and tough questions. As the New Yorker writer Evan Osnos put it: “The pummelling of Rubio felt like an expression of collective rage at the falseness of so much that happens in Washington.” The usual rhetorical feints and misdirections employed by politicians in more milquetoast town halls only seemed to anger the crowd more.

Like many Austrian fraternities, Germania zu Wiener Neustadt sometimes uses a songbook at its get-togethers. It looks ordinary enough, with its red cover, gold crest, and curling script. The cover is studded with metal nails called “Biernagel” that keep the book slightly elevated so it doesn’t get wet when lying in beer.Unlike most other songbooks, however, it contains lyrics about killing Jews. “Step on the gas,” one line reads. “We’ll manage the seventh million.”

The party had gotten negative press just two weeks earlier, when its minister of the interior proposed “concentrating refugees into camps.” The Jewish community of Vienna, where the majority of the country’s 12,000 to 15,000 Jews live, has been boycotting the FPÖ; it refused to participate in the government’s official Holocaust memorial ceremony last month.

Austria has many high school and university student associations. What makes these fraternities (“Burschenschaften”) unique is that they’re infused with German nationalism. They originated in German university towns in the first half of the 19th century and stood for a united German nation. During the Nazi era, the fraternities were merged with the Nazi students’ associations. They reemerged after the war. Today, not all members of these fraternities are far-right extremists, anti-Semites, or neo-Nazis; some are right-wing conservatives who adhere to old traditions, like a mask-free fencing ritual that often leaves members with scarred faces.