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• More kids than ever are becoming educated, especially girls. In the 1980s, only half of girls in developing countries completed elementary school; now, 80 percent do.

one reason for our current complacency is a feeling that poverty is inevitable — and that’s unwarranted.

The world’s best-kept secret is that we live at a historic inflection point when extreme poverty is retreating. United Nations members have just adopted 17 new Global Goals, of which the centerpiece is the elimination of extreme poverty by 2030.

“We live at a time of the greatest development progress among the global poor in the history of the world,” notes Steven Radelet, a development economist and Georgetown University professor, in a terrific book coming in November, “The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World.”

Cynics argue that saving lives is pointless, because the result is overpopulation that leads more to starve. Not true. Part of this wave of progress is a stunning drop in birthrates.

Haitian women now average 3.1 children; in 1985, they had six. In Bangladesh, women now average 2.2 children. Indonesians, 2.3. When the poor know that their children will survive, when they educate their daughters, when they access family planning, they have fewer children.

Despite the images of walking skeletons that greeted American liberators at Buchenwald, the full enormity of the Holocaust was not fully appreciated, even in the Western world, until relatively recently, for the simple reason that “the Americans and the British liberated no part of Europe that had a very significant Jewish population before the war, and saw none of the German death facilities.” Those facilities, and the fields in which the Germans exterminated the vast majority of their Jewish victims, lay in the bloodlands, which were conquered by the Soviets.

But it was in Belarus where the conflagration between Nazis and Soviets, and between collaborationists and partisans, was greatest. By the end of the war, Snyder writes, a full half of the country’s population had either been killed or deported.

To this day, the populations of the former Soviet Bloc, and some elements of their intelligentsia, have yet to come to terms with their historical complicity in the Holocaust, painting their ancestors as victims, which indeed many of them no doubt were, while ignoring the fact that many were erstwhile collaborators.

The Nazi plan to eliminate the Jewish race — a plan which it executed often with the gleeful participation of local collaborators who needed no prompting in rounding up and murdering their Jewish neighbors — is today being downplayed so that Soviet crimes loom larger.

“the vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.” Their murders were personal affairs in that they involved soldiers firing bullets into their bodies; death did not take place within a closed chamber and the murderers saw the faces of their victims. Most of the killing took place in the fields and forests of Eastern Europe.

The perverse irony of both Stalin’s and Hitler’s desire to conquer the bloodlands was that by expanding their empires they diversified them. Suddenly, they had a whole lot of foreigners living under their domain, who would need to be pacified. And so the solution to this problem would have to be the liquidation of massive numbers of people.

What has allowed the Soviet Union to escape the same sort of historical reproach as Nazi Germany is that its killing was carried out in the furtherance of various causes — absolute economic equality, the preservation of a dictatorship, the collectivization of agriculture — that are not commonly considered to exist on the same moral plane as a theory of racial superiority. “In Stalinism mass murder could never be anything more than a successful defense of socialism, or an element in a story of progress toward socialism; it was never the political victory itself,” Snyder explains.

Academics, journalists and political leaders in this region, particularly in the Baltic states, have put forward a “double genocide” approach to understanding this period of European history, which, unlike the more nuanced take of Snyder (who, while placing the Stalinist and Nazi regimes alongside each other as subjects of historical inquiry, does not equate them in terms of moral depravity), is explicitly political.

Snyder reports that the Nazis deliberately killed upwards of eleven million; for the Soviets during the Stalin period the figure was between six and nine million. On the Soviet side, these numbers are far less than what had originally been believed, due to the opening of Eastern European and Soviet archives in the twenty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

This historical airbrushing amounts to “Holocaust obfuscation,” in the words of the academic Dovid Katz, which, he writes, “tries to reduce all evil to equal evil, in effect to confuse the issue in order to write the inconvenient genocide that is the Holocaust out of history as a distinct category.” Last year, for instance, the Lithuanian government passed a law making it illegal to deny that the actions of the Soviet Union in Lithuania constitute “genocide,” as it is illegal to deny the Holocaust.

But his acknowledgement that the period of 1933 to 1945 was marked by several genocides, rather than a single one, does not lead him to promote the “double genocide” theory. Snyder has written elsewhere that “The mass murder of the Jews was, indeed, unprecedented in its horror; no other campaign involved such rapid, targeted and deliberate killing, or was so tightly bound to the idea that a whole people ought to be exterminated.” It is morally specious to compare the Jewish Holocaust to the Soviet “genocide” of Balts or Poles or Ukrainians, awful as the experiences of these peoples were, because of the inherently different nature of the methods the Soviet and Nazi regimes used against their subject populations. The Soviet Union had many local collaborators throughout its occupied and satellite territories. And while the Nazis also had collaborators during their occupation of the Baltic States, there was never any room for a Jewish collaborator in the Nazi project.

Though Stalin’s murder campaigns were, in many cases, predicated on ethnic antagonism, the difference is that the Soviets did not exterminate for extermination’s own sake. Once Stalin’s discrete policies had been achieved (the collectivization of Ukrainian farms, for instance), the mass murder stopped, and the Soviet Union eventually wound down its widescale deportations and mass killings in the mid- 1950s. Had Hitler’s  regime, with its animalistic understanding of human nature, lasted beyond 1945, its mass murder and terror would not have decreased. For these tactics were not just means but ends; they were the very lifeblood, the weltanschauung, of nazism itself.

The crucial factor one must consider in evaluating these two strains of totalitarianism is their competing long-term visions, and the policies that were required to execute them. Classifying Stalin’s various murder campaigns (alongside Nazi policies towards Roma, gays, educated Poles and Soviet citizens in Belarus and Ukraine) as “genocides,” which Snyder does, while also singling out the Holocaust as the worst of them all, is not mutually exclusive.

Bloodlands is an incredibly original work. It seeks to redirect our understanding of the Holocaust as primarily an eastern phenomenon, and one which took place among a spate of mass killing policies. When popular interest in the Holocaust and an “international collective memory” of it began to form in the 1970s and 1980s, it focused almost exclusively on the experience of German and West European Jews, the wealthiest and most assimilated on the continent, who died in far smaller numbers than did the Jews of Poland, Belarus, and the Baltic States, who were nearly eradicated. “Deprived of its Jewish distinctiveness in the East, and stripped of its geography in the West, the Holocaust never quite became part of European history,”

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.

Once the war came, hundreds of thousands of Irish and German immigrants enlisted in the U.S. Army. For a time this flood of foreign-born soldiers swept nativism away. In the years after the Civil War, 12 states explicitly enfranchised immigrant aliens who had declared their intention to become naturalized but had not yet been made citizens. Voting by non-citizens who planned to become naturalized was “widely practiced and not extraordinarily controversial” in this period, political scientist Ron Hayduk argues.

In the early 1800s, as organized political parties began to fight over issues like banking and infrastructure, that changed; turnout rose to 70 percent in local and state elections. Still, presidential polls remained dull and ill-attended. That changed in Jackson’s second run for the presidency in 1828. Heated debates and even-hotter tempers attracted men to the polls

Democracy for white men did not, however, spill over to democracy for everyone; in this same period several states rolled back laws that permitted free black men to vote.

For white men, the United States became a democracy by degrees, not by design, and it showed in the chaotic voting systems

While colonial Americans cast beans, peas, and corn into containers or called their vote aloud, in the 1800s most men either wrote the candidate’s name on a blank sheet of paper or turned in a ballot helpfully printed for them by the local political party or newspaper. Outside of Massachusetts, almost no one registered to vote

Today, the ubiquity of voter registration blinds us to its impact. It is a price we all pay for voting and so no longer think of as a price at all. But nineteenth-century Americans understood the costs. Registering in person months before the election minimized the chance of fraud but doubled the difficulty of voting and the possibility of interference

Alexander Keyssar’s excellent history of voting called the 1850s a period of “narrowing of voting rights and a mushrooming upper- and middle-class antagonism to universal suffrage.”

the flood of 200,000 black men into the U.S. Army and Navy inspired them — and others — to claim the vote as their due. “If we are called on to do military duty against the rebel armies in the field, why should we be denied the privilege of voting against rebel citizens at the ballot-box?

Another way to bar African-American men was to expand the number of disfranchising crimes. Cuffie Washington, an African American man in Ocala, Florida, learned this when election officials turned him away in 1880 because he had been convicted of stealing three oranges. Other black men were barred for theft of a gold button, a hog, or six fish. “It was a pretty general thing to convict colored men in the precinct just before an election,” one of the alleged hog thieves said.

By the fall of 1867, more than 80 percent of eligible African-American men had registered. During the subsequent elections, at least 75 percent of black men turned out to vote in five Southern states. Democracy has a long history, but almost nothing to match this story.

Smalls and his compatriots tore down racial barriers; established public school systems, hospitals, orphanages, and asylums; revised tenancy laws; and tried (sometimes disastrously) to promote railroad construction to modernize the economy. Reconstruction governments also provided crucial votes to ratify the 14th Amendment, which is still the foundation of birthright citizenship, school desegregation, protection against state limits on speech or assembly, and the right to gay marriage.

, South Carolina, the counter-revolution was brewing in the upcountry by summer 1868. Ku Klux Klans and other vigilantes there assassinated Benjamin Franklin Randolph, a wartime chaplain, constitutional convention member, and newly elected state senator, as well as three other African-American Republican leaders. Nevertheless black South Carolinians turned out in force, carried the 1868 election, and helped elect Ulysses S. Grant president.

In his March 4, 1869 inaugural, Grant called on states to settle the question of suffrage in a new 15th Amendment. Anti-slavery icon Frederick Douglass said the amendment’s meaning was plain. “We are placed upon an equal footing with all other men.” But the 15th Amendment did not actually resolve the question of who could vote or establish any actual right to vote. It merely prohibited states from excluding voters based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Its own language acknowledged that states could legitimately strip the vote away for other reasons

proposed prohibitions on literacy, education, property, or religious tests died at the hands of northeastern and western Republicans who feared expanding the power of Irish and Chinese immigrants.

Nor did the 15th Amendment protect voters against terrorism. As Smalls and other African-American Republicans gained seats in Congress, they and their white allies tried to defend black voting through a series of enforcement acts that permitted the federal government to regulate registration and punish local officials for discrimination. But the Supreme Court soon undercut those laws

Without hope of victory, federal prosecutions for voting crimes fell by 90 percent after 1873.

Keeping African-American people away on election day was difficult, and potentially bad publicity, so white Democrats over the 1870s and 1880s passed registration laws and poll taxes, and shifted precinct locations to prevent black people from coming to the polls at all. In 1882, the South Carolina legislature required all voters to register again, making the registrar, as one African-American political leader said, “the emperor of suffrage.

To disfranchise rural laborers, Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, North Carolina, and other Southern states doubled residency requirements.

Using data painstakingly compiled by Philip Lampi, historians have discovered that somewhere between half and three-quarters of adult white males were eligible to vote before the Revolution; by 1812, almost the entire adult white male population could cast a ballot.

By the 1880s, this so-called “kangaroo voting” seemed the solution to every political problem. Reformer Henry George and Knights of Labor leaders hoped the Australian ballot would free workingmen from intimidation, while reformers in Boston and New York hoped it might eliminate fraud and make it difficult for illiterate men to fill out ballots.

Massachusetts leapt first in 1889, and by the 1892 election a majority of states had passed the bill. In Massachusetts, turnout dropped from 54.57 to 40.69 percent; in Vermont from 69.11 to 53.02. One statistical survey estimated that voter turnout dropped by an average of 8.2 percent. The Australian ballot’s “tendency is to gradual disfranchisement,” the New York Sun complained.

by stripping political parties’ names from the ballot, the reform made it difficult for illiterate voters, still a sizable portion of the electorate in the late 19th century. But even more profoundly, the effort to eliminate “fraud” turned election day from a riotous festival to a snooze. Over time many people stayed home

In New York, voter participation fell from nearly 90 percent in the 1880s to 57 percent by 1920

The 1888 election was almost a very different turning point for voting rights. As Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and White House for the first time in a decade, they tried to bolster their party by establishing federal control of congressional elections so they could protect African-American voting rights in the south (and, Democrats charged, block immigrant voting in northern cities). The bill’s dual purposes were embodied in its manager, anti-immigrant, pro-black suffrage Massachusetts Congressman Henry Cabot Lodge. Although the bill passed the House, it died in a Senate filibuster. Democrats swept the House in the fall 1890 elections and soon repealed many of the remaining voting rights provisions.

African-American registration in Mississippi soon fell from 190,000 to 9,000; overall voter participation dropped from 70 percent in the 1870s to 50 percent in the 1880s to 15 percent by the early 1900

“We have disfranchised the African in the past by doubtful methods,” Alabama’s convention chairman said in 1901, “but in the future we’ll disfranchise them by law.”

These laws and constitutional provisions devastated voting in the South. When Tennessee passed a secret ballot law in 1889, turnout fell immediately from 78 percent to 50 percent; Virginia’s overall turnout dropped by 50 percent. For African-American voters, of course, the impact was even more staggering. In Louisiana black registration fell from 130,000 to 1,342. By 1910 only four percent of black Georgia men were registered.

Poll taxes, intimidation, fraud, and grandfather clauses all played their part, but the enduring tools of registration and the Australian ballot worked their grim magic, too, and made voters disappear.

In the landmark case Shelby County v. Holder, Chief Justice John Roberts turned the disfranchisement of the 1890s into a racial and regional exception, one that had since been overwhelmed by the national tide of democracy. “Our country has changed,” Roberts wrote in the majority opinion.

This is part of what political scientist Alexander Keyssar critically called the “progressive presumption” that there is an “inexorable march toward universal suffrage” interrupted only by anomalous, even un-American, regional and racial detours.

But the tools that disfranchised Jackson Giles were not all Southern and not only directed at African-American men. When the United States conquered Puerto Rico and the Philippines, it imposed the Australian ballot there, too.

in 1903, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a Massachusetts native, denied Giles’ appeal on the grounds that the court could not intervene in political questions. If citizens like Giles suffered a “great political wrong,” Holmes intoned, they could only look for help from the same political system that had just disfranchised them

The great writer Charles Chesnutt wrote that “In spite of the Fifteenth Amendment, colored men in the United States have no political rights which the States are bound to respect.” It was a “second Dred Scott decision,” white and black activists lamented.

And if you want to understand the ferocity of the opposition to him on the Catholic right, this is the key. His most determined opponents are far-right closet cases, living in palaces, leading completely double lives, backed by the most vicious of reactionaries and bigots on the European and American far right

As a secular gay journalist, not hostile to the church, he walked into the Vatican and was simply staggered by its obvious gayness.

(Lepore hazards a guess that 80 percent of the Vatican’s population is gay.

as Martel probes deeper and deeper, one theme emerges very powerfully: “Homosexuality spreads the closer one gets to the holy of holies; there are more and more homosexuals as one rises through the Catholic hierarchy. The more vehemently opposed a cleric is to gays, the stronger his homophobic obsession, the more likely it is that he is insincere, and that his vehemence conceals something.”

it’s highly predictable that John Paul II’s pontificate, which launched a new war on homosexuals, turns out to be the gayest of them all — and the one most resistant to any inquiry into stories of sex abuse

Ratzinger, (the future Pope Benedict XVI) personally received notification of every claim of sex abuse in the church under John Paul II, ignoring most, and made the stigmatization and persecution of sane, adjusted non-abusive gay people across the globe his mission instead. There wasn’t a theological dissident he didn’t notice and punish, but barely a single pedophile he found reason to expose

Martel explains how two of John Paul II’s favorite cardinals — whose nicknames within the Vatican are Platinette (after a drag queen) and La Mongolfiera — set up an elaborate and elite prostitution service that continued through the papacy of Benedict XVI, and was financed from the Vatican coffers.

He notices simple things that some might call innuendo, but any gay man will instantly recognize, like the fabulous interiors of the gay cardinals’ palaces, always with their “assistants” or young “relative” on hand

take Martel’s interaction with the Swiss Guards, one of whom vents: “The harassment is so insistent that I said to myself that I was going straight home. Many of us are exasperated by the usually rather indiscreet advances of the cardinals and bishops.”

Or the prostitutes who keep elaborate records of their clients, and have already caused huge scandals in Italy.

Or a confessor-priest in Saint Peter’s who guides Martel into the Vatican with the words: “Welcome to Sodoma.”

If you want to find a figure who crystallizes all this hypocrisy in the narrative, it would be the late Colombian cardinal, Alfonso López Trujillo, tasked by John Paul II in the 1970s to rid Latin America of liberation theology, and then to launch a global crusade against homosexuality and the use of condoms

Trujillo’s own master of ceremonies on these trips tells us: “López Trujillo travelled with members of the paramilitary groups … He pointed out the priests who were carrying out social actions in the barrios and the poorer districts. The paramilitaries identified them and sometimes went back to murder them. Often they had to leave the region or the country.”

“López Trujillo beat prostitutes; that was his relationship with sexuality. He paid them, but they had to accept his blows in return. It always happened at the end, not during the physical act. He finished his sexual relations by beating them, out of pure sadism.”

if the Catholic right wants to weaponize the book, they’ll have to take on their own icons, John Paul II and Benedict XVI, and a whole range of their closest allies in the church.

what was Trujillo’s task in Rome? You guessed it: president of the Pontifical Council for the Family! This was the figure who spearheaded the war on gays in the 1980s and 1990s, who forbade the use of condoms, who spread the lie that condoms don’t protect anyone from HIV. And yet when he died, Benedict XVI gave the homily at the funeral mass.

It is even transphobic, I am now informed, for a gay man not to want to sleep with a trans man who has a vagina. In response to my recent column on the subject, I was told by Sue Hyde, a woman who is at the very heart of the LGBTQIA++ movement, to, yes, give it a try:

And the core thesis of the book — which is that it is the hypocrisy of the closet that is the real problem — is not one the right will be able easily to absorb.

Critically, Martel reaches the same conclusion I did recently — the omertà of the closet was a core reason for sex abuse

Gay priests felt unable to report pedophiles or abusers or hypocrites because they too could be outed by the abusers and forced out

When Trujillo was promoted to Rome, the reckless excesses went into overdrive. A Curia source tells Martel: “Everyone knew that he was homosexual. He lived with us, here, on the fourth floor of the Palazzo di San Calisto, in a 900-square-metre apartment, and he had several cars! Ferraris! He led a highly unusual life.”

There can be no meaningful reform until this closet is ended, and the whole sick, twisted syndrome is unwound.

only a radical change will help. Ending mandatory celibacy is no longer an option

Women need to be brought in to the full sacramental life of the church. Gay men need to be embraced not as some manifestation of “intrinsic moral evil” but as human beings made in the image of God

Francis is nudging the church toward this more humane and Christian future, but the more he does so, the more fervently this nest of self-haters and bigots will try to destroy him.

Everything I was taught growing up — to respect the priests and hierarchs, to trust them, to accept their moral authority — is in tatters.

the last drops of moral authority the Vatican might hope to have evaporate with this book. It is difficult to express the heartbroken rage so many of us in the pews now feel.

It tells you a lot about the LGBTQIA++ movement that it’s now lost Martina Navratilova.

A pioneering open lesbian who had an openly transgender coach in her glory years, who did more for gay visibility than any gay group ever has, is now being disowned by Athlete Ally, a New York–based organization that supports LGBT athletes

She argued in an op-ed that a trans woman who started out in life as male has an unfair advantage in sports over women who have never biologically male. For this, her comments have been condemned as “transphobic, based on a false understanding of science and data, and perpetuate dangerous myths that lead to the ongoing targeting of trans people.”

The truth, of course, is that the science is firmly behind Navratilova.

If you take this argument seriously — that biology is entirely a function of gender identity — then the whole notion of separate male and female sports events is in doubt

denying reality is stupid, can easily backfire, and will alienate countless otherwise sympathetic people

if the Equality Act were to pass — a priority for Nancy Pelosi — it would be illegal to bar a trans woman from competing against biological females, as it is already in many states.

There is no “gay lobby.” There is a “honeycomb of closets,” often insulated from each other, built on deception and self-hatred, that amounts to a system where protecting the image of the church became far more important than saving children from rapists.

Maybe. Or maybe I’ll sleep with whomever I want — you know, something we used to call sexual freedom.

Once upon a time, the religious right would tell me that I should sleep with women because I might find the right one and finally be happy. Now the intersectional left is telling me something almost exactly the same. What has happened to this movement? Where on earth has it gone?

Smollett was dumb and incompetent in his elaborate hoax. But he was smart about one thing. The most noble thing in our current culture is victimhood

Smollett aimed for the jackpot — physically attacked for being gay and black by Trump supporters

so all good liberals instinctively and with good intentions believed him, embraced him

His identity as gay and black rendered him instantly innocent, just as the Covington boys’ whiteness rendered them instantly guilty.

Booker, Harris, Pelosi: They’ll never apologize for their rush to judgment. This may not have been “precisely, factually, and semantically correct,” you see, but it was morally true.

Believe Jussie. Just believe. He may have made up an entire story, but “he’s not lying.”

for most of human history, men worked in really nasty jobs that damaged their health for three reasons: to support themselves, to support their families, and because that was what manliness required.

we have simply failed to replenish what we inherited from the Greatest Generation of these sources of identity for the Americans who cannot pat themselves on the back because they’ve made it to Harvard

: religion, patriotism, community, and yes, pro-social masculinity.

For most of humanity’s history, masculinity was something achieved, not given, and it pointed men in directions that their society defined as pro-social

Above all, in modern times, to work and marriage. The connections between work, marriage, fatherhood, and manhood unleashed enormous social energy

Being a husband and a father was a socially and sexually reinforced masculine identity. It wasn’t just being a parent or a caretaker

A good husband and father worked. The guy who didn’t was not just a deadbeat, not just a social menace, but a failure as a man.

The redefinition of masculinity into personhood has not produced a generation of men who act like women. The deep sources of motivation are not the same for both genders.

Today we’ve defined men as the enemy unless they pretend to conform to the idea that gender doesn’t matter.

Adult men are now retreating to the world of video games where their aggressive impulses are valorized, not despised — without risk and without real reward.

If the future of work isn’t quite biased against men, it certainly seemed biased against the traditional idea of manliness. Construction and manufacturing, two male-dominated industries, are down 3 million jobs since 2008. Most of those jobs are dead, forever.

Meanwhile, the only occupations expected to add more than 100,000 jobs in the next decade are personal care aides, home health aides, medical secretaries, and marketing specialists, all of which are currently majority female.

What are these young men doing?

“The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one for one with leisure time. Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games.” And, so far, they like it pretty well this way: “Happiness surveys actually indicate that they [are] quite content compared to their peers,”

this situation is largely voluntary: Not only are these men not looking for work, “only a minority report that they’ve left the labor force because they cannot find a job.”

“Ever-greater numbers of working-age men simply have dropped out — some for a while and some forever — from the competition for jobs. These men have established a new and alternative lifestyle to the age-old male quest for a paying job.”

Almost 40 percent of all Americans without work are now male.

Between 1948 and 2015, the proportion of women between 25 and 64 in the workforce doubled from 34 percent to 70 percent, masking the continuing retreat of men from work.

By the late 1990s, women’s workforce participation stopped rising. “Only then did the overall work rate for U.S. adults begin to register a decline,” he writes. “For two full generations, the upsurge of employment for women disguised the steady decline in work for men.”

the number of working-age men without work is still almost 10 million, or about 10 percent of the working-age male population.

Between 1965 and 2015, the share of working-age men who are jobless more than doubled, from 10 percent to 22 percent. Among “prime age” men, the percentage without jobs shot from 6 percent to nearly 16 percent

A new ABC News national poll released Sunday had Clinton 12 points up on Trump, clinching the support of 50% of likely voters nationwide. CNN's Poll of Polls gives the Democratic nominee a nine-point edge. The mounting evidence seems to be fueling a realization in the Trump camp that he may be too far behind to catch up — with hundreds of thousands of ballots already cast in some early voting states.

"I never want to look back," he said. "I never want to say that about myself."

"Now even though we're doing pretty good in the polls, I don't believe in the polls anymore," he said.Trump's campaign manager Kellyanne Conway admitted the campaign's struggling position Sunday, but was loathe to give Clinton any credit for her lead.

'We are behind'

He's showing that he will continue to lash out, is happy to settle scores with GOP critics like House Speaker Paul Ryan while he still can, and will use the media spotlight to wage his own personal battles before the American people

But Trump characteristically stole his own headlines, threatening to sue women who accused him of sexual assault after the election and lambasting the media for rigging the race against him.

Speaking with Jake Tapper Sunday on CNN's "State of the Union," Conway declined to say if she knew that her boss would weave such a personally focused tirade into his Gettysburg speech.

"He wasn't off message," she said. "That is his message."Increasingly, Trump supporters are forced to cherry pick polls that show their candidate competitive, or to place their faith in crowd sizes and enthusiasm on the trail, metrics that often seem attractive to lagging campaigns.

"I think a lot of folks think that the polls don't reflect reality," Vance said on CNN's "Smerconish" on Saturday. "If Trump loses, as the polls tell us he will, I do think a lot of folks are going to be very surprised."

"I do think there is a Brexit out there ... I am almost positive there is a Brexit out there. I don't know how big it is, I think that remains to be seen," Andre Bauer, the former Republican Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina said on CNN on Thursday night.

CNN's Jeff Zeleny reported on Sunday that Clinton had already reached out to some Republican senators, including allies from her days on Capitol Hill, saying she hopes to work with them to govern. And in another sign the campaign is looking to the future, her running mate, Tim Kaine, named Wayne Turnage as his transition director.

"We don't want to get ahead of skis here, so we're just as focused on Ohio, North Carolina, Florida, other states as we have ever been," Mook told Tapper. "We have a very clear message to our supporters: Let's double down, nose to the grindstone, and keep working."

To make this happen, we must ramp up technology to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, protect the oceans and land that absorb half of our emissions already, and transform the world’s food system from a major carbon emitter into a major carbon store.

A carbon law of halving emissions every decade can be adopted at all levels: for individuals, families, communities, companies, cities and nations. Those with the biggest carbon footprint need to do the most.

nstallation of renewables in the energy sector is doubling every five to six years and has been on this course for a decade. If we keep doubling at this pace, renewables will reach 100 percent before 2050.

The researchers say halving emissions every decade should be complemented by equally ambitious, exponential roll-out of renewables

For example, doubling renewables in the energy sector every 5-7 years, ramping up technologies to remove carbon from the atmosphere, and rapidly reducing emissions from agriculture and deforestatio

They propose that to remain on this trajectory all sectors of the economy need decadal carbon roadmaps that follow this rule of thumb, modeled on Moore's Law.

Moore's Law states that computer processors double in power about every two years. While it is neither a natural nor legal law, this simple rule of thumb or heuristic has been described as a "golden rule" which has held for 50 years and still drives disruptive innovation

a "carbon law" offers a flexible way to think about reducing carbon emissions. It can be applied across borders and economic sectors, as well as both regional and global scales.

"Our civilization needs to reach a socio-economic tipping point soon, and this roadmap shows just how this can happen. In particular, we identify concrete steps towards full decarbonization by 2050.

no single solution will do the job, and that this deep uncertainty thus implies starting today pursuing multiple options simultaneously.

Following a "carbon law," which is based on published energy scenarios, would give the world a 75% chance of keeping Earth below 2°C above pre-industrial temperatures, the target agreed by nations in Paris in 2015

How to get there: 2020: remove fossil fuel subsidies. Put a price on carbon starting at $50 per ton rising to $400 per ton by 2050. Large-scale energy efficiency measures and large scale trials of carbon sequestration begin at 100-500MtCO2/yr.

Those Democratic grandparents, especially, tend to be more moderate, more swayed by traditional government experience and more keenly focused on the tactics they believe are needed to defeat President Trump, strategists and pollsters said.

“Older voters, after African-American voters, have been the single most important constituency for Joe Biden,” said Celinda Lake, a veteran Democratic pollster and political strategist who works with the Biden team but spoke in her personal capacity.

But politically, the primary results this election season have highlighted the extraordinary, sustained power of older Americans: Exit polls, surveys and interviews with political strategists and demographers show that the concerns and preferences of these voters have played a critical role in defining the trajectory of the Democratic race so far, and are poised to do so in the general election as well.

Certainly, Mr. Sanders, the overwhelming favorite with younger voters, is continuing to campaign. And while the Vermont senator has acknowledged that younger voters did not appear to turn out at the rate he had hoped for, polls and exit surveys show that Mr. Biden faces major challenges with that constituency, a liberal slice of the electorate that, his advisers acknowledge, he will need to energize if he is the nominee.

Even in the midterm elections in 2018, hailed as a high-water mark for youth voting because the share of 18- to 24-year-olds nearly doubled from the previous midterm election, the gap with older voters remained about the same. About 66 percent of eligible older people turned out, compared with about 36 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution.

Mr. Biden, who once faced significant competition for older Americans, emerged in recent weeks as the dominant front-runner among those highly committed Democratic voters who have now helped bring him to the cusp of his party’s presidential nomination.Older voters have punched above their political weight for years, with turnout among those 65 and older often double, or more, that of the youngest voters. As Americans age and become more rooted in their communities, political participation tends to rise with their stake in society.

“The irony is that the pattern is about to reverse in the general,” Ms. Lake said, pointing to Mr. Trump’s overall strength with older voters, even as she added that “Donald Trump is despised by younger voters.”

The virus has thrown politics completely, and unpredictably, up in the air. What will happen in Florida’s retirement communities — some of the most vulnerable in the nation to the virus — if Mr. Trump’s push to reopen the country fast comes to pass? It’s a question with potentially partisan implications.

Older people have long leaned Republican. A majority have chosen Republicans in four of the last seven presidential elections, according to Mr. Frey. In recent years they have also become more demographically distinct from the rest of the country: About 78 percent of eligible senior voters are white, compared with just 67 percent of eligible voters in the country as a whole.

This presents a challenge for Mr. Biden, should he win the nomination: how to get younger voters — who did not prefer him to begin with — to turn out for him, while persuading their older counterparts, who tend to choose Republicans, to vote for him over Mr. Trump.

In recent weeks, Mr. Biden has increased his efforts to appeal to younger and more progressive voters, ramping up outreach and embracing portions of proposals from Mr. Sanders and Senator Elizabeth Warren that take aim at the student debt burden.

Older Americans will soon be even more important. Mr. Frey noted that the large “Baby Boom” generation has only just begun entering the older American voting bloc. He has calculated that the number of senior eligible voters will rise to 68 million in 2028 from 47 million in 2016.

But first, there is still a primary contest, and the age gap between Mr. Biden and Mr. Sanders has been on vivid display all year. The senator favored large rallies that attracted devoted young people, while Mr. Biden’s events, even in his strongest states, tended to be smaller, with crowds that tilted older.

Trump’s shift to more fully blame China coincides with widening devastation from the virus in the United States and increasing criticism that his administration missed opportunities to prepare and respond. For weeks in January and February, Trump publicly dismissed the outbreak as of very little risk to Americans, even as he banned air travel for non-U.S. citizens traveling from China.

Trump’s recent criticism of China also aligns the president with the tougher message that Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and other members of his administration have voiced for weeks.Trump went further Thursday, saying China could have stopped all spread beyond the Wuhan area but deliberately chose not to do so.

After being egged on by a reporter from the pro-Trump One America News Network, Trump blamed the media for its coverage of the crisis and for accusations that his use of “Chinese virus” was racist or xenophobic.

What’s happening here, in this country, was avoidable. Nearly every flaw in America’s response to the virus has one source: America did not test enough people for COVID-19.

If there is one thing about the novel coronavirus that you must understand, it’s that it is a firecracker with a long fuse. Here is what the explosion looks like: Every six days, the number of people infected by the disease doubles

Every six days that the country did not test, every six days that it did not act, the number of infected Americans doubled.

“If you don’t know where the disease is early in the epidemic, you have no hope of containing it,” Bhadelia said. “Even now, [testing is] that Achilles’ heel; it’s the crack that is making its way throughout our entire response.”

Testing should have answered the all-important question in any pandemic: How many people are sick right now? Had the nation known that, the systems that were put into place over years of pandemic planning could have powered on, protecting millions of Americans and containing the illness.

An invisible fuse sets off this burst of disease. If someone is infected with the coronavirus on Monday, she may start being contagious and infecting other people by Wednesday. But she may not start showing symptoms until Friday—meaning that she was spreading the virus before she even knew she had it. And in some cases, infected people take 14 days to start showing symptoms.

the CDC hit a disastrous roadblock, as it began to send test kits to public-health labs across the country. Two of the test’s reagents were fine, in most cases, but a third chemical initially deemed necessary for the test simply did not work. For the time being, every test for COVID-19 would have to be conducted by the CDC.As the CDC struggled to find a solution, other laboratories tried to bring their own tests online. They found themselves hamstrung by the FDA, which, though it repeatedly loosened the rules, could not move as fast as the coronavirus.

No one at the federal level was moving fast enough to actually deal with the looming disaster.

On February 26, the CDC confirmed what should have been clear much earlier: Community transmission in the United States had begun. The coronavirus was now spreading among Americans who had not traveled abroad or known a confirmed case. At least 60 people in the country now had the virus, according to the CDC’s totals at the time—and, as researchers and analysts soon realized, the true number was almost certainly much higher.

By the end of February, the disease had not only established itself in the United States. It had been circulating for close to six weeks. Seattle, on March 1, found itself in the same position as Wuhan did on January 1, with a growing coronavirus outbreak that was on the verge of exploding.

February was our chance to get this right. We lost that entire month. And we now live in a new era of work stoppages, overwhelmed hospitals, dead elders, and a wrecked economy.

Despite expressing his support for the anti-lockdown movement, Trump said on Wednesday that he “strongly” disagrees with Georgia governor Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen bowling alleys, hair salons and other businesses this weekend. Many of the state’s business owners have also concluded it is “way too early” to return to normal.

A tale of two states.

Kentucky

The pandemic has made it almost impossible to register new voters using traditional methods in states across the US. That could have a huge impact on November’s election, writes Sam Levine.

Mainland China reported 55,000 cases of coronavirus in the country’s first wave of infections. But a study by researchers in Hong Kong suggests that number would have been more like 232,000, had the later adopted definition of a Covid-19 case been applied from the outset.

…Mexico, at least 21 doctors and nurses have suffered violent attacks, in public, after being wrongly accused of spreading the disease.

This California town is testing everyone

doctor from Bolinas, California, says her small town north of San Francisco is hoping to become a “model” for the rest of the country, after resolving to test every single member of its community for Covid-19. The town raised $300,000 through GoFundMe to buy testing equipment for its population of 1,600, to help researchers understand how the virus s

cats

Two cats in New York state have tested positive for the virus, apparently after catching it from humans – the first confirmed cases of US pets catching Covid-19.

Catastrophic’ flooding is coming soon. That’s according to new research, which has found that the number of people affected by floods will double to around 147 million annually by the end of the 2020s.

The effects will be less dire but still increasingly serious in the US, where the risk is highest for coastal flooding. The US ranks third among countries with the most to lose from urban coastal flooding in the next 10 years, after China and Indonesia.

$38bn in 2050, with half the country’s exposed population in just three states – Louisiana, Massachusetts and Florida.

What are now once in a lifetime floods could become daily occurrences for most of the US coastline, according to a separate study.

River floods will get worse in the US, but those damages will stay about the same, as large investments will be made in flood protection.

The US could now see 134,475 deaths by early August -- nearly double the prediction just last week of 74,000 deaths by a model from the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

So far, the US has recorded more than 1,180,600 infections and at least 68,934 deaths. Over the weekend, parks in New York City and Atlanta drew crowds as residents began venturing out of their homes. In the city of Miami Beach, more than 7,300 warnings were issued to people who weren't wearing face covers, while more than 470 warnings were given to those who failed to practice social distancing.

California was one of the states where crowds gathered over the weekend as thousands of protesters descended on the state's Capitol and an Orange County beach to protest social distancing orders.

“The prevailing story is that this is the best of all possible worlds — cheap food, widely available. If you don’t think about it too hard, it makes sense,”

A closer look, however, reveals a much different story, he said. “To put it in stark terms: The diet is killing us.”

Part of the problem, he added, is a natural tendency for people to overeat as they can afford more food.

The prevalence of obesity has doubled in 73 countries since 1980, contributing to four million premature deaths, the study found.

The story is as much about economics as it is nutrition. As multinational companies push deeper into the developing world, they are transforming local agriculture, spurring farmers to abandon subsistence crops in favor of cash commodities like sugar cane, corn and soybeans — the building blocks for many industrial food products.

the rising clout of big food companies also translates into political influence, stymieing public health officials seeking soda taxes or legislation aimed at curbing the health impacts of processed food.

For a growing number of nutritionists, the obesity epidemic is inextricably linked to the sales of packaged foods, which grew 25 percent worldwide from 2011 to 2016, compared with 10 percent in the United States,

The same trends are mirrored with fast food, which grew 30 percent worldwide from 2011 to 2016, compared with 21 percent in the United States

For some companies, that can mean specifically focusing on young people, as Ahmet Bozer, president of Coca-Cola International, described to investors in 2014. “Half the world’s population has not had a Coke in the last 30 days,” he said. “There’s 600 million teenagers who have not had a Coke in the last week. So the opportunity for that is huge.”

, Brazil is a microcosm of how growing incomes and government policies have led to longer, better lives and largely eradicated hunger.

now the country faces a stark new nutrition challenge: over the last decade, the country’s obesity rate has nearly doubled to 20 percent, and the portion of people who are overweight has nearly tripled to 58 percent. Each year, 300,000 people are diagnosed with Type II diabetes, a condition with strong links to obesity.

It takes fathoms of cynicism to get away with this and unknown depths of denial to believe it. But the GOP has oodles of both on hand — and certainly more than the Dems. You get the feeling at times that if some Trump voters were to witness a brutal rape right in front of them, the first question they’d ask would be: Is the perpetrator a Republican or a Democrat? And did the victim vote for Hillary?

This is what Trump has enabled. It has won the GOP one election. It would be foolish, it seems to me, to underestimate its power.