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How do people reconcile a belief in individual autonomy with nationwide wage stagnation?

“Many middle-class wage earners are victims of the economy, and, perhaps, of that great, glowing, irresistible American promise that has been drummed into our heads since birth: Just work hard and you can have it all.”

This sentiment taunts at two sacred and quintessentially American convictions—that success is self-determined and that advancement is inevitable for anyone with a serious work ethic. According to a 2014 Pew Global Attitudes Study, people in the United States are much more likely to hold these two beliefs than many of their European counterparts.

The emerging popular consensus about our biological predisposition to warfare is troubling. It is not just scientifically weak; it is also morally unfortunate, as it fosters an unjustifiably limited vision of human potential.

Conflict avoidance, reconciliation and cooperative problem solving could also have been altogether “biological” and positively selected for.

Chimpanzees, we now know, engage in something distressingly akin to human warfare, but bonobos, whose evolutionary lineage makes them no more distant from us than chimps, are justly renowned for making love instead.

The army disabled the cellphone networks, so residents scramble to higher ground to capture stray signals from Afghan networks. And Internet cafes were shut, on orders from the Taliban, after complaints that young men were watching pornography and racy movies.

That ban distressed families that use the Internet to communicate with relatives working in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and across the Persian Gulf states.

Journalists face particular risks.

In the telling of some American officials, the C.I.A. drone campaign in Pakistan has been a triumph with few downsides

and the pace of the strikes, which officials frequently describe as “surgical” and “contained,” has dropped sharply over the past year.

Pakistani town that has become a virtual test laboratory for drone warfare,

Prime Minister David Cameron has ordered an inquiry into the activities in Britain of the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most prominent Islamic organizations, to determine in part whether it is using London as a base for planning extremist attacks following the military crackdown in Egypt, officials and media reports said on Tuesday.

“Given the concerns now being expressed about the group and its alleged links to violent extremism, it’s absolutely right and prudent that we get a better handle of what the Brotherhood stands for, how they intend to achieve their aims and what that means for Britain,”

Word of the inquiry first emerged in The Times of London, which said leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood met in London last year to plan their response to Mr. Morsi’s overthrow.

The boy's death happened at about 6:25 a.m. on the tracks just south of the city's Churchill Avenue, near the elegant century-old high school on an oak-studded Spanish Mission campus, directly across the street from Stanford University, in a ZIP code synonymous with success. Two student suicides earlier this school year at neighboring Gunn High School led to a flurry of community meetings and teen outreach, and the district has been working to overhaul its teen mental-health policies since a much-publicized cluster of student suicides in 2009.

the very life of the school district has been altered in ways large and small. Social studies classes start with meditation. Teachers and staff have been taught to help identify teens struggling with depression or in distress. The district is accelerating construction of a student wellness center at Gunn High School, where students can talk to counselors and mental health professionals and nutritionists to decompress.To reduce stress, the school district -- home to the progeny of top Stanford faculty and many of Silicon Valley's tech titans -- reformed its homework policy in 2012, but the plan was never fully implemented. Now it is back on the school board's agenda. The district also recently contracted with a data-analysis firm called Hanover Research Group to analyze homework, grading practices and curriculum.

Both Gunn and Paly have convened sessions to listen to students. A similar communitywide gathering was held last week, and another is scheduled. Teachers offer academic accommodations -- like not collecting homework, or delaying tests -- and Paly economics teacher Alexander Davis created a "Gratitude Wall" in his classroom for students to write what they are grateful for on sticky notes.Paly, many students say, is a place where teachers care about their well-being. But the causes of suicide are complex.The school offers an array of electives and resources. "There's journalism, glassblowing, theater -- there may be a little more pressure, but a lot more opportunity here," said senior Jack Brook. "People are happy when they find a passion, and there's a lot of opportunity to find a passion here."

Chicago police officer sues victim's family over shooting

A white Chicago police officer who fatally shot a black teenager last December is suing his family for $10m (£6.9m), claiming emotional distress.

The investigation is focusing on the use of force by officers and the department's accountability procedures.

The way we think about cancer is outdated. Here’s how to change that.

The cancer death rate has dropped by 23 percent since 1991, with some even larger gains in types of cancer that used to be extremely lethal.

Under the non-Hodgkin lymphoma umbrella alone, there are 60 different subtypes — and each has a different disease progression.

It’s become a predictable pattern: One act of violence in the world overshadows a similar, concurrent violent act, inviting a backlash against this imbalance in scrutiny, sympathy, and grief. But that predictability doesn’t make the pattern any less distressing. Each time there’s a major terror attack in an American or European city—New York, Madrid, London, Paris, Paris again—it captures the attention and concern of Americans and Europeans in a way that similar atrocities elsewhere don’t seem to do. Seldom do events line up so neatly, offering a clear comparison, as the bombings in Beirut and the rampage in Paris.

Onepotential explanation is simple: There were three times more deaths in Paris than in Beirut. Beyond that are a host of other, intertwined reasons. Perhaps chief among them is familiarity. Americans are much more likely to have been to Paris than to Beirut—or to Cairo, or to Nairobi, or to any number of cities that have experienced bloody attacks. If they haven’t traveled to the French capital themselves, they’ve likely seen a hundred movies and TV shows that take place there, and can reel off the names of landmarks. Paris in particular is a symbol of a sort of high culture.

There is also a troubling tribal, or racial, component to this familiarity factor as well: People tend to perk up when they see themselves in the victims.

Revolutionary Guards release 10 US sailors who entered Iranian waters

The US military confirmed the sailors’ release after the Guards issued a statement claiming they were freed into international waters after an apology from Washington.

The sailors’ two small navy craft brieflywent missing on Tuesday while crossing the Gulf from Kuwait to Bahrain. Pentagon sources later said the vessels entered Iranian waters because of technical difficulties.

Who Will Become a Terrorist? Research Yields Few Clues

Not long after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, for instance, Alan B. Krueger, the Princeton economist, tested the widespread assumption that poverty was a key factor in the making of a terrorist. Mr. Krueger’s analysis of economic figures, polls, and data on suicide bombers and hate groups found no link between economic distress and terrorism.

Rather, the murky science seems to imply that nearly anyone is a potential terrorist. Some studies suggest that terrorists are likely to be educated or extroverted; others say uneducated recluses are at risk

There are three fundamental, complicating truths about adoption. First, every single adoption begins with profound loss. Through death, abandonment, or even loving surrender, a child suffers the loss of his or her mother and father. Second, the demographics of those in need of loving homes do not precisely match the demographics of those seeking a new child. Adoptive parents are disproportionately white. Adopted children are not. Thus, multiracial families are a natural and inevitable consequence of the adoption process. Third, American culture has long been obsessed with questions of race and identity

I’m an evangelical Christian, and ever since I was a young man, two Bible verses have tugged at my soul.

The first comes from the Book of James, and defines “pure” religious practice in part as looking after “widows and orphans in their distress.

The young men voted for Hillary, they called home in shock when Trump won, they talked about flipping the House, and they followed Peterson to other podcasts—to Sam Harris and Dave Rubin and Joe Rogan

What they were getting from these lectures and discussions, often lengthy and often on arcane subjects, was perhaps the only sustained argument against identity politics they had heard in their lives.

With identity politics off the table, it was possible to talk about all kinds of things—religion, philosophy, history, myth—in a different way. They could have a direct experience with ideas, not one mediated by ideology

For Republican Leaders in Congress, the Headaches Keep Mounting

Republican leaders in Congress are under attack from all sides of their own party, battered by voters from the right and left, spurned by frustrated donors and even threatened by the Trump White House for ineffective leadership and insufficient loyalty.

Republicans are increasingly mystified by their own grass roots, an electorate they thought they knew, and distressed that a wave of turnover in their ranks could fundamentally change the character of Congress. They fear that the inchoate populism that Mr. Trump personifies, and which Mr. Bannon is attempting to weaponize against incumbents, is on the march.

Feminists have wrestled with their relationship to pornography ever since the early ’70s, when the Rimbaud-loving Jersey girl Andrea Dworkin joined forces with America’s most lighthearted legal scholar, Catharine MacKinnon, and created sex-negative feminism. Their arguments about the nexus between violence against women and hard-core pornography were powerful, but the whole enterprise was a hard sell in the midst of the sexual revolution.

“No woman needs intercourse; few women escape it,” Dworkin said—what happened to Rimbaud?—from deep within her overalls, and she lost the crowd. MacKinnon’s legal argument depended on pornography’s potential violation of the equal-protection clause, a delicate proposition, and one she was advancing at a time when free speech was at the very center of the youth movement

The women were raising important questions, but in 1988 the World Wide Web arrived, blotting out the sun and giving us porn without end

The very idea of the British Raj—the British rule over India—seems inexplicable today.

Indian written history stretches back almost 4,000 years, to the civilization centers of the Indus Valley Culture at Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Also, by 1850 C.E., India had a population of some 200 million or more.

Britain, on the other hand, had no indigenous written language until the 9th century

Philip, the only legitimate son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V (r. 1530-56), and known to history as Philip II of Spain (r.1556-98), was King of England for rather more than four years. He achieved that dignity when he married Queen Mary (‘Bloody Mary’, r.1553-58) in July 1554, and surrendered it when she died in November 1558

Philip of Spain, he was the bitter enemy of Elizabethan England, against whom a twenty-year war was fought

potentially his reign was one of huge significance. Had Mary borne him children, particularly a healthy son, the entire subsequent history of England could have been different

the dispute will be whether the King of England or of France shall be the Monarch of the West Indies, for the King of Spain cannot hold it long

The wars between the Kings of France and Britain were, on the contrary, waged for supremacy in the Caribbean itself and it was this aspect that gave West Indian history, from Cromwell’s Protectorate to the battle of Trafalgar, its special stamp

a handful of stubborn and self-reliant Commonwealth soldiers within five years got the better of the King of Spain

For eleven years, from his defeat at the Boyne in July 1690 until his death in September 1701, James II lived at Saint-Germain-en-Laye (near Versailles) in one of the most spectacular royal palaces of the Baroque period

Louis was obliged to recognise William III as de facto King of England, as a condition for signing the peace treaty of Ryswick, which marked the end of the War of the League of Augsburg. The treaty in no way affected James II’s status as de jure king, nor his son’s status as de jure Prince of Wales, but James now had to tolerate the presence in Paris, and occasionally at the French Court, of a hostile English ambassador

At the tercentenary of the King’s death, it is surely time to take a closer look at the life that James led in France