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The announcement was presented — in official news reports, on social media — as a major victory for Chinese women. The government was set to overhaul its law governing women’s rights for the first time in decades, to refine the definition of sexual harassment, affirm prohibitions on workplace discrimination and ban forms of emotional abuse.

The proposed revisions are the latest in a series of conflicting messages by the Chinese government about the country’s growing feminist movement. On paper, the changes, which China’s legislature reviewed for the first time last month, would seem to be a triumph for activists who have long worked to push gender equality into the Chinese mainstream.

At the same time, the authorities, ever leery of grass-roots organizing, have detained outspoken feminist activists and sought to control the country’s fledgling #MeToo movement. Sexual harassment lawsuits — already rare — have been dismissed.

A bitterly divided U.S. House of Representatives voted narrowly on Wednesday to censure Representative Paul Gosar, Republican of Arizona, for posting an animated video that depicted him killing a Democratic congresswoman and assaulting President Biden.

The vote was 223 to 207, with just two Republicans, Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, joining Democrats in favor. One other Republican, Representative David Joyce of Ohio, voted “present.”

They said the rapid move to pass a censure resolution exposed the Democrats’ true agenda: silencing conservatives by branding them as instigators of violence.

a judge appointed by Donald Trump issued a stunning injunction forbidding a lengthy list of White House officials from making contact with social media companies to report misinformation.

The order bars individuals including Xavier Becerra, the US health secretary, Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general, and Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House Press Secretary, among dozens more officials, from “urging, encouraging , pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech posted on social-media platforms”.

it is a major victory for campaigners who have argued that democratic governments overstepped their power during the pandemic, including restrictions on free speech.

The demise of affirmative action, in Carter’s view, was both necessary and inevitable. “We must reject the common claim that an end to preferences ‘would be a disastrous situation, amounting to a virtual nullification of the 1954 desegregation ruling,’” he wrote, quoting the activist and academic Robert Allen. “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and a chance.”

For Carter, affirmative action was a necessary stopgap measure to remedy historical discrimination. Like many people today — both proponents and opponents of affirmative action — he expressed reservations about relying on diversity as the constitutional basis for racial preferences.

the implication of recruiting for diversity, Carter explained, had less to do with admitting Black students to redress past discrimination and more to do with supporting and reinforcing essentialist notions about Black people.

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

Critical historians who thought they were winning the fight for control within the academy now face dire retaliation from outside the academy. The dizzying turn from seeming triumph in 2020 to imminent threat in 2022 has unnerved many practitioners of the new history. Against this background, they did not welcome it when their association’s president suggested that maybe their opponents had a smidgen of a point.

a background reality of the humanities in the contemporary academy: a struggle over who is entitled to speak about what. Nowhere does this struggle rage more fiercely than in anything to do with the continent of Africa. Who should speak? What may be said? Who will be hired?

One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.

This sort of rhetoric cooled, for a time, after Trump’s victory. But then came Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and possible collusion. And the subsequent arrests of some of the president’s closest confidants. Then came the first impeachment of Trump himself. By the time his reelection campaign got under way, Trump was fashioning himself a wartime president, portraying himself on the front lines of a pitched battle between decent, patriotic Americans and a “deep state” of government thugs who aim to enforce conformity and silence dissent.

Voter after voter told me there had been a plot to sabotage Trump’s presidency from the start, and now there was a secretive plot to stop him from winning a second term. Everyone in government—public-health officials, low-level bureaucrats, local election administrators—was in on it. The goal wasn’t to steal the election from Trump; it was to steal the election from them.

This kind of thinking explains why countless individuals would go on to donate their hard-earned money—more than $250 million in total—to an “Election Defense Fund” that didn’t exist. It explains why others swarmed vote-counting centers, intimidated poll workers, signed on to shoddy legal efforts, flocked to fringe voices advocating solutions such as martyrdom and secession from the union, threatened to kill elections officials, boarded buses to Washington, and ultimately stormed the United States Capitol.

Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel “The Oppermanns,”

It’s been nearly 90 years since its publication, but reading it now is like staring into the worst of next week. It’s all there: The ways in which a country can lose its grip on the truth. The ways in which tribalism — referred to in “The Oppermanns” as “anthropological and zoological nonsense” — is easily roused to demonize others. The ways in which warring factions can be abetted by the media and accepted by a credulous populace.

The novel reads like a five-alarm fire because it was written that way, over a mere nine months, and published shortly after Hitler became chancellor, only lightly fictionalizing events as they occurred in real time.

Kilimnik shared a secret plan whose significance would only become clear six years later, as Vladimir V. Putin’s invading Russian Army pushed into Ukraine.

Known loosely as the Mariupol plan, after the strategically vital port city, it called for the creation of an autonomous republic in Ukraine’s east, giving Putin effective control of the country’s industrial heartland, where Kremlin-armed, -funded and -directed “separatists” were waging a two-year-old shadow war that had left nearly 10,000 dead. The new republic’s leader would be none other than Yanukovych. The trade-off: “peace” for a broken and subservient Ukraine.

Trump was already suggesting that he would upend the diplomatic status quo; if elected, Kilimnik believed, Trump could help make the Mariupol plan a reality. First, though, he would have to win, an unlikely proposition at best. Which brought the men to the second prong of their agenda that evening — internal campaign polling data tracing a path through battleground states to victory. Manafort’s sharing of that information — the “eyes only” code guiding Trump’s strategy — would have been unremarkable if not for one important piece of Kilimnik’s biography: He was not simply a colleague; he was, U.S. officials would later assert, a Russian agent.

In 1991, Stephen L. Carter, a professor at Yale Law School, began his book “Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby” with a discomfiting anecdote. A fellow professor had criticized one of Carter’s papers because it “showed a lack of sensitivity to the experience of Black people in America.”

“I live in a box,” he wrote, one bearing all kinds of labels, including “Careful: Discuss Civil Rights Law or Law and Race Only” and “Warning! Affirmative Action Baby! Do Not Assume That This Individual Is Qualified!”

The fact that Thomas was very likely nominated because he was Black and because he opposed affirmative action posed a conundrum for many supporters of racial preferences. Was being Black enough? Or did you have to be “the right kind” of Black person? It’s a question Carter openly wrestles with in his book.

By keeping evidence that seemed to provide ammunition to proponents of a lab leak theory under wraps and resisting disclosure, U.S. officials have contributed to making the topic of the pandemic’s origins more poisoned and open to manipulation by bad-faith actors.

Treating crucial information like a dark secret empowers those who viciously and unfairly accuse public health officials and scientists of profiting off the pandemic. As Megan K. Stack wrote in Times Opinion this spring, “Those who seek to suppress disinformation may be destined, themselves, to sow it.”

According to an Economist/YouGov poll published in March, 66 percent of Americans — including majorities of Democrats and independents — believe the pandemic was caused by research activities, a number that has gone up since 2020

We are in the throes of a reading crisis.

While right and left are hardly equivalent in their stated motivations, they share the assumption that it’s important to protect vulnerable readers from reading the wrong things.

But maybe the real problem is that children aren’t being taught to read at all.

Why wellness became a seedbed for the far-right is one of several subjects that Naomi Klein explores in her latest book, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

She observed that people working in the field of bodily care seemed particularly drawn to anti-vax, anti-mask, “plandemic” beliefs. The Center for Countering Digital Hate’s report on the Disinformation Dozen – a list of 12 people responsible for circulating the bulk of anti-vax content online – was populated by a chiropractor, three osteopaths, and essential oil sellers, as well Christine Northrup, the former OB-GYN turned Oprah-endorsed celebrity doctor who claimed the virus was part of a deep state depopulation plot, and Kelly Brogan, the “holistic psychiatrist” and new age panic preacher.

some of this crossover made economic sense: for people working with bodies, social distancing often meant the loss of their livelihoods, and these “grievances set the stage for many wellness workers to see sinister plots in everything having to do with the virus”.

Numerous other Osage had died suspiciously — the cause of death often cloaked behind alcoholic poisoning or wasting illness or as simply unknown. Despite evidence that the victims had been murdered for their oil money, the cases were never properly investigated. Moreover, they could not be linked to the same killer caught by the bureau. The history of the Reign of Terror was less a question of who did it than who didn’t do it.

It was about a widespread culture of killing. It was about prominent white citizens who paid for killings, doctors who administered poisons, morticians who ignored evidence of bullet wounds, lawmen and prosecutors who were on the take and many others who remained complicit in their silence — all because they were profiting from what they referred to openly as the “Indian business.” The real death toll was undoubtedly higher than 24. One bureau agent admitted: “There are so many of these murder cases. There are hundreds and hundreds.”

The Osage had these events seared in their memories. Yet most Americans had excised even the bureau’s sanitized account from their consciences. Like the Tulsa Race Massacre, which occurred during the same period, the Osage Reign of Terror was generally not taught in schools, even in Oklahoma

Nathan Thrall’s searing new book, “A Day in the Life of Abed Salama,” struck me as important even before the obscene massacres and mass kidnappings committed by Hamas this month lit the Middle East on fire. Today, with people still struggling to understand the contours of this deeply complicated conflict, the book seems essential.

An expanded version of Thrall’s widely praised 2021 New York Review of Books article of the same name, the book follows a Palestinian man named Abed Salama as he searches for his 5-year-old son after a deadly school bus crash in the West Bank, a search hindered by Israel’s restrictions on Palestinian movemen

Thrall, the former director of the Arab-Israeli project at the International Crisis Group, uses his reported account of the Salama family’s tragedy to offer a panoramic look at life under Israel’s occupation. He is deeply concerned with Palestinian grief, but also writes rich portraits of Israelis, including Beber Vanunu, founder of a settlement in the West Bank, and Dany Tirza, architect of the separation wall that cuts through the territory.

mainstream platforms learned their lesson, accepting that they should intervene aggressively in more and more cases when users post content that might cause social harm.

During the wildfires in the American West in September, Facebook and Twitter took down false claims about their cause, even though the platforms had not done the same when large parts of Australia were engulfed in flames at the start of the year

Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube cracked down on QAnon, a sprawling, incoherent, and constantly evolving conspiracy theory, even though its borders are hard to delineate.

of universities. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but partisan outfits.” They should “abandon this long misadventure into politics . . . and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.”

This was a realistic and straightforward assessment of where the universities are and what they should do. It would be helpful if all on the sane left would drop their relative silence, rise up and end the misadventure.

I have been reading Edmund Wilson’s 1940 classic, “To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History.” It famously offers a portrait of the groundbreaking French historian Jules Michelet (1798-1874), a father of modern historiography. The whole section reads like a tribute to the idea of learning, of understanding, of telling. It is not too much to say it is a kind of paean to the idea of the university.

Reading through TASP’s website, I was seduced by its promises—a thoughtful community, where, for once, I’d be surrounded by free-thinking academics and learning from leaders whom I deeply admired.

Like Carlos told us on the very first day, we didn’t know what was best for us. Not because we were working to decide for ourselves, but because someone else already knew. TASP was no longer a democratic experiment—it had morphed into a factory for totalitarian instincts, and it operated like an oligarchy.

“If I could give you one piece of advice,” he said, “make sure you befriend someone who is entirely different from you. As many people as you can. Talk to them about everything you disagree on—you’ll only be better for it.”

The book, “A Trail of Crab Tracks,” explores the birth of independent Cameroon in the 1960s and its subsequent descent into civil war. Nganang, 52, wanted to get the details just right, from the experience of guerrilla fighters in the jungle to the names of plants and local rivers.“I was very careful,” Nganang said last month as a torrential spring rain fell outside his New Jersey home. “I didn’t want an older person to read it and say, ‘Come on, my son. It’s not right!’” His laughter, like a thunderclap, filled the room.

“The government was declaring war and cracking down on Anglophone protests,” he says. “They hadn’t started killing yet.”

Finally released and expelled from the country, Nganang emerged with a deeper commitment to his overarching project: an examination of Cameroon’s national identity, and how it has held within it the seeds of both great promise and disappointment.