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Her death, by lethal injection, is the 11th execution since the Trump administration resumed use of federal capital punishment in July after a 17-year hiatus.

Under a pseudonym, Ms. Montgomery — who had falsely told others that she was pregnant — expressed interest in buying a dog from Bobbie Jo Stinnett, a rat terrier breeder in Skidmore, Mo. But after she arrived at Ms. Stinnett’s house, Ms. Montgomery strangled her, used a knife to cut her abdomen and extracted the fetus, then claimed the child as her own.

and turned 16 last month on the anniversary of her mother’s death. At least some of those close to Ms. Stinnett or the case said Ms. Montgomery’s execution was a just conclusion to a crime that had haunted the northwest Missouri community for years.

Mr. Chaney rejected the idea that the abuse suffered by Ms. Montgomery should have led to her life being spared, saying many people endured trauma without committing heinous crimes.

Still, Ms. Montgomery’s lawyers cited the repeated physical and sexual abuse she endured as a child in pleas for leniency, arguing that President Trump would affirm the experiences of abuse survivors by commuting her sentence to life imprisonment.

“I think, you know, it’s not right always to say an eye for an eye, but I think the community’s hurt enough that it would definitely help with some closure.”

According to a quarterly report from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, just 2 percent of those inmates on death row are women. With Ms. Montgomery’s execution, there are now no women on federal death row.

Her lawyers had claimed that she was incompetent for execution, citing mental illness, neurological impairment and complex trauma

But the Supreme Court cleared the way for the execution to proceed, as it has done with the previous 10 inmates executed by the Trump administration. On Tuesday, the court overturned both stays, the remaining barriers to her execution, and rejected each of Ms. Montgomery’s requests for reprieve.

“Because this administration was so afraid that the next one might choose life over death, they put the lives and health of U.S. citizens in grave danger,” she said, in part. “We should recognize Lisa Montgomery’s execution for what it was: the vicious, unlawful and unnecessary exercise of authoritarian power. We cannot let this happen again.”

If the prisoners do not succeed in their pleas for delays or clemency, their deaths could be the last federal executions for some time. President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose inauguration is set for Jan. 20, has signaled his opposition to the federal death penalty.

he had never intended to “diminish the voice of any Black American.” Still, he added, “I should have recognized how what I said and what I did could be interpreted by many of you.”

Mr. Lankford and other Republicans had claimed that by challenging the election results, they were exercising their independence and acting in the interests of constituents who were demanding answers.

In a joint statement that night with Senator Steve Daines, Republican of Montana, Mr. Lankford called on “the entire Congress to come together and vote to certify the election results.”

Mr. Lankford has faced calls from Black leaders to resign from the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, which is designed to commemorate the racist massacre in the city’s Greenwood district, an affluent Black community known as Black Wall Street. The massacre, which took place 100 years ago this spring, was one of the worst instances of racist violence in American history. A white mob destroyed the neighborhood and its Black-owned businesses, and up to 300 residents were killed.

Michael Pratt, a spokesman for Operation Warp Speed, also denied the notion the reserve was "exhausted" in a statement to CNN.

"It's just so disappointing," he added. "People are desperate for the vaccine, and we have worked so hard to be able to expand who's eligible, and to not be able to do it is just crushing right now."

Oregon Health Director Patrick Allen, in a letter to Azar in which he recounted a call with Brown and Operation Warp Speed CEO Gen. Gustave Perna on Thursday, demanded that the HHS chief reconcile his statement about "releasing the entire supply" with this revelation.

"I do not believe I misunderstood," Allen said. Allen confirmed that Oregon will have to delay its plan to start vaccinating seniors January 23, since no surge in vaccine is coming.

"I am demanding answers from the Trump Administration. I am shocked and appalled that they have set an expectation on which they could not deliver, with such grave consequences," Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, a Democrat, tweeted Friday. "This is a deception on a national scale. Oregon's seniors, teachers, all of us, were depending on the promise of Oregon's share of the federal reserve of vaccines being released to us."

Vaccine maker Pfizer says it has second doses of coronavirus vaccines ready to ship as needed.

"We are hearing there is not a stockpile of vaccine for second dose but that it was more of a 'paper exercise,' " said Dr. Marcus Plescia, chief medical officer for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials. "The stockpile appears to be all on paper; they were tracking anticipated need but not actually holding back product."

"I think the original message got lost in a lot of overpromising," Plescia said. "Until there is a more robust supply we need to be clear with the public that opportunity to get the vaccine is limited."

"It was a complete surprise," Freeman told CNN on Friday, adding, "To hear that this had been done for several weeks was actually shocking to us."

"I don't know if the right hand knows what the left hand is doing here," she said, adding that there's a risk that people will not be inoculated correctly if the federal government isn't providing reliable numbers for its vaccine supply.

While vaccines were developed in record time, the process of getting them into Americans' arms has moved far more slowly than officials promised. That's largely because the Trump administration left it up to each state to figure out the herculean task of vaccinating its population. But the administration's constantly fluctuating estimates about how much vaccine will be available have also made it difficult for states to craft vaccination plans, state officials have said.

After Mr. Trump’s impeachment for inciting his supporters before the deadly riot at the Capitol, and with Republican leaders turning on him, the pardon power remains one of the last and most likely outlets for quick unilateral action by an increasingly isolated, erratic president.

He has also discussed issuing pre-emptive pardons to his children, his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner, and Mr. Giuliani.

He has paid Mr. Tolman at least $10,000 since late last year to lobby the White House and Congress for a pardon for his son Jeremy Hutchinson, a former Arkansas state lawmaker who pleaded guilty in 2019 to accepting bribes and tax fraud, according to a lobbying disclosure filed this month.

That system favors pardon seekers who have connections to Mr. Trump or his team, or who pay someone who does, said pardon lawyers who have worked for years through the Justice Department system.

“This kind of off-books influence peddling, special-privilege system denies consideration to the hundreds of ordinary people who have obediently lined up as required by Justice Department rules, and is a basic violation of the longstanding effort to make this process at least look fair,” said Margaret Love, who ran the Justice Department’s clemency process from 1990 until 1997 as the United States pardon attorney.

“The criminal justice system is badly broken, badly flawed,” said the former senator, Tim Hutchinson, a Republican who served in Congress from 1993 to 2003.

. Any explicit offers of payment to the president in return could be investigated as possible violations of bribery laws; no evidence has emerged that Mr. Trump was offered money in exchange for a pardon.

A filing this month revealed that Mr. Tolman was paid $22,500 by an Arizona man named Brian Anderson who had retained him in September to seek clemency for Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road founder. Mr. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 for engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise and distributing narcotics on the internet.

The former Trump campaign adviser, Karen Giorno, also had access to people around the president, having run Mr. Trump’s campaign in Florida during the 2016 primary and remaining on board as a senior political adviser during the general election.

Though the name was never publicly disclosed, Mr. Kiriakou was sentenced to 30 months in prison. In the meeting, at the Washington office of his lawyer, Mr. Kiriakou said he had been wronged by the government and was seeking a pardon so he could carry a handgun and receive his pension.

In July 2018, Ms. Giorno signed an agreement with Mr. Kiriakou, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, “to seek a full pardon from President Donald Trump of his conviction” for $50,000 and promised another $50,000 as a bonus if she secured a pardon.

Worried that Mr. Trump might use any unruly demonstrations as pretext for a federal crackdown of the kind seen last summer in Portland, Ore., progressives organized mass gatherings only sparingly and in highly choreographed ways after Nov. 3.

Since the violence of Jan. 6, progressive leaders have not deployed large-scale public protests at all.

For the organizers of the effort, it represents both a good-news story — Mr. Trump was thwarted — and an ominous sign that such exhaustive efforts were required to protect election results that were not all that close.

Michael Podhorzer, an A.F.L.-C.I.O. strategist who was one of the architects of the coalition, said it presented both a political model and a cautionary tale about a badly frayed democratic system.

They worried that a traditional political campaign might never attain victory if it did not also prepare to battle a would-be strongman during a deadly pandemic.

A cluster of a few strategists became a coalition of 80 groups, and then of more than 200.

“This whole defending the election once we won it — making sure the election stayed won — was not something a lot of others were focused on.”

during the long hours of election night, the strategy needed a tweak. Mr. Trump’s declaration of victory had been treated by television networks as a galling stunt, and Fox quickly called the key state of Arizona for Mr. Biden. Vote counting was proceeding without major inhibition.

Among those listed were Republican state legislative leaders in battlegrounds like Michigan and Pennsylvania; the Michigan Board of State Canvassers; and Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state. Mr. Trump would soon seek to twist every one of them to his advantage.

They held de-escalation training sessions around the country, aimed at giving people the tools to ease potentially violent conflict.

“We prepared for the worst of the worst: We’re going to get shot at, killed, on Election Day and afterward,” said Ms. Stamp, adding, “You have to understand that a lot of this is coming from movements that have been dealing with a lot of death.”

the group asked a Washington law firm, Arnold & Porter, to compile a report on how votes would be tabulated and electors assigned in every swing state, including a catalog of the pressure points someone like Mr. Trump could exploit.

The rallies were canceled, in favor of more targeted actions: Instead of throngs of protesters carrying Biden-Harris signs and competing for street space with Trump supporters, progressives assembled in smaller groups around vote-counting facilities in Philadelphia and Detroit, aiming to head off any intimidation tactics from the right.

“Organizing any kind of massive ‘It’s a coup’ mobilization, in the midst of those contested days, would have just been bait for the right,” she said.

Art Reyes, leader of the activist group We the People Michigan, directed a two-pronged effort, bombarding legislators’ offices with phone calls and deploying several dozen volunteers to meet the two Republican leaders, Lee Chatfield and Mike Shirkey, at the airport on their way to Washington. A corresponding group was waiting when they landed.

Democratic litigators had been in contact before Election Day with Michigan’s attorney general, Dana Nessel, about the possibility of an attempted electoral heist. “We were prepared to counter it,” Ms. Nessel said in an interview.

“We may have walked back from the brink of a dangerous moment in this country, but this cannot be the norm,” said Rahna Epting, executive director of MoveOn. “It’s not sustainable for democracy.”

Homeland Security and the FBI issued no such bulletin in advance of the Jan. 6 rally in Washington, D.C., despite chatter online that suggested violence could occur that day. The bulletin posted on Wednesday said some extremists may be "emboldened" by the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

It also said that some violent extremists are driven by "long-standing racial and ethnic tension," including opposition to immigration, citing the 2019 shooting at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, where a gunman killed 23 people.

That increases demand, which increases the stock’s price. Which means the brokers have to buy more shares, which means … you get the idea.

This weird little bubble doesn’t just affect the bettors, though. If big investors on the losing side of these trades have to raise money to cover their losses, it could mean dumping enough shares to hurt the prices of otherwise solid stocks.

If the sell-off is big enough, it could have a cascading effect that leads to broader losses for investors who have never bought or sold a share of GameStop.

the Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco traveled around the United States. He embarked on a tour a bit like the one that the French mega-tourist Alexis de Tocqueville took—but this journey was focused not on what America was but on what it wasn’t. Eco produced a travelogue that explored Americans’ “faith in fakes.”

Eco diagnosed an underlying quality of American culture: an assumption that the best kind of art and entertainment is that which is “realer than real.”

By “people like me,” Carlson means his viewers; he means “real Americans,” as Fox has taken pains to define them. Why are the “Dems” and the “libs” to be feared? Because they are not what you are. Why are the media to be mocked? Because they tell lies about your country. They are false flags in human form. And they are coming for you.

Carlson, too, long ago abandoned any semblance of decency. He makes claims—claims that are bigoted, cherry-picked, fabricated; claims about the dirtiness of immigrants, about the danger of vaccines, about the existential threats posed by those who are not white or male or Christian—and answers the objections with a ready reply: He is not a journalist. He is merely an entertainer. This is the cynical core of his daily performances; people who criticize him, he insists, are missing the joke. People who believe him are missing the point. Carlson’s new set codifies that logic.

Americana, in Carlson’s vision, is its own justification. The patriot does what he must, not for Americans but for America, the ideal. “Left untended,” Carlson remarks in the concluding chapter of Ship of Fools, “democracies self-destruct.” He continues:

There are two ways to end this cycle. The quickest is to suspend democracy. There are justifications for this. If your voters can’t reach responsible conclusions, you can’t let them vote. You don’t give suffrage to irrational populations, for the same reason you wouldn’t give firearms to toddlers: they’re not ready for the responsibility.

Republicans and business groups have long accused the bureau of regulatory overreach. In 2017, President Trump appointed Mick Mulvaney, now his acting chief of staff, to be the bureau’s acting director, and he promptly suspended much of the agency’s enforcement activity, halting investigations, freezing hiring and stopping data collection.

“It is for such reasons that the framers adopted a strong, unitary executive — headed by the president — rather than a weak, divided one,” he wrote. “Vesting such power in a single person not answerable to the president represents a stark departure from the Constitution’s framework.”

“A single-headed independent agency presents a greater risk than a multimember independent commission of taking actions or adopting policies inconsistent with the president’s executive policy,” Mr. Francisco wrote. “Unlike a multiheaded commission, which generally must engage in at least some degree of deliberation and collaboration, a single director can decisively implement his own views and exercise discretion without those structural constraints.”

In February, after Ms. Kraninger took over, the bureau eliminated tough restrictions on payday lenders that had been set to take effect later in the year. In September, though, she announced that the bureau would continue to publish a database of consumer complaints about financial companies, something Mr. Mulvaney had suggested he might eliminate.

Mr. Francisco wrote that “the proper remedy for the constitutional violation is to sever the provision limiting the president’s authority to remove the bureau’s director.”The law firm, by contrast, wrote that striking the contested provision should have practical consequences. “Parties do not seek this court’s review on constitutional questions for kicks,” its brief said. “They do so in order to obtain meaningful relief.”

“If you are considered to be a spy of the hostile countries or a traitor, when in reality you are simply exercising your basic human rights, you can be suddenly taken by agents of the Ministry of State Security to a kwanliso and never be seen again,” Quintana said. “Suspects’ families are never informed of the decisions or of the whereabouts of their relatives.

North Korea has accepted 132 recommendations from other U.N. member states, including one “to grant immediate, free and unimpeded access to international humanitarian organizations to provide assistance to the most vulnerable groups, including prisoners.” He said this could lead to the first international access to places of detention, “and could therefore be an opportunity to improve prison conditions.”

Located on the European side of the Bosporus (the strait linking the Black Sea to the Mediterranean), the site of Byzantium was ideally located to serve as a transit and trade point between Europe and Asia.

In the west, constant attacks from German invaders such as the Visigoths broke the struggling empire down piece by piece until Italy was the only territory left under Roman control. In 476, the barbarian Odoacer overthrew the last Roman emperor, Romulus Augustus, and Rome had fallen.

The eastern half of the Roman Empire proved less vulnerable to external attack, thanks in part to its geographic location.

As a result of these advantages, the Eastern Roman Empire, variously known as the Byzantine Empire or Byzantium, was able to survive for centuries after the fall of Rome.

Even after the Islamic empire absorbed Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem in the seventh century, the Byzantine emperor would remain the spiritual leader of most eastern Christians.

Justinian I, who took power in 527 and would rule until his death in 565, was the first great ruler of the Byzantine Empire

Justinian also reformed and codified Roman law, establishing a Byzantine legal code that would endure for centuries and help shape the modern concept of the state.

By the end of the century, Byzantium would lose Syria, the Holy Land, Egypt and North Africa (among other territories) to Islamic forces.

Known as Iconoclasm—literally “the smashing of images”—the movement waxed and waned under various rulers, but did not end definitively until 843, when a Church council under Emperor Michael III ruled in favor of the display of religious images.

Though it stretched over less territory, Byzantium had more control over trade, more wealth and more international prestige than under Justinian.

Monks administered many institutions (orphanages, schools, hospitals) in everyday life, and Byzantine missionaries won many converts to Christianity

The end of the 11th century saw the beginning of the Crusades, the series of holy wars waged by European Christians against Muslims in the Near East from 1095 to 1291.

During the rule of the Palaiologan emperors, beginning with Michael VIII in 1261, the economy of the once-mighty Byzantine state was crippled, and never regained its former stature.

The fall of Constantinople marked the end of a glorious era for the Byzantine Empire.

In the centuries leading up to the final Ottoman conquest in 1453, the culture of the Byzantine Empire–including literature, art, architecture, law and theology–flourished even as the empire itself faltered.

Long after its end, Byzantine culture and civilization continued to exercise an influence on countries that practiced its Eastern Orthodox religion, including Russia, Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece, among others.

In central Italy, on the other hand, and especially in Florence, it was the clear contour that predominated, the closed and firmly circumscribed form, the static and plastic character.

The draftsmen of Venice and northern Italy preferred an open form with loose and interrupted delineation in order to achieve even in drawing the pictorial effect that corresponded to their painters’ imagination.

In drawing produced north of the Alps, the characteristic features lie in the tendency to pictorial compactness and precise execution of detail.

North of the Alps the autonomy of drawing was championed in the first instance by Albrecht Dürer, an indefatigable draftsman who mastered all techniques and exercised an enduring and widespread influence. The delineatory constituent clearly predominates even in his paintings. This corresponds to the general stylistic character of 16th-century German art, within which Matthias Grünewald, with his freer, broader, and therefore more pictorial style of drawing, and the painters of the Danube school, with their ornamentalizing and agitated stroke, represent significant exceptions.

What Barr’s speeches presuppose, basically, is what if it wasn’t? What if everything you believed before Trump, you can still believe today?

In the Notre Dame speech, this reassurance manifests itself in a restatement of the assumptions that have guided organized religious conservatism since the 1960s: that the chief threat to religious faith comes from secularizing elites

Many of these broad analytic strokes still apply to the contemporary scene. The hostility of elite cultural institutions to traditional Christianity is an enduring fact of American life. Barr’s account of liberal-led legal harassment of conservative religious institutions is accurate. The connection he draws between the weakening of religious practice and the working class’s social crisis is contestable but entirely plausible.

But there’s no attempt in the speech to address the recent trends that complicate religious conservatism’s ’70s-era vision

For instance, there’s no mention of the extent to which conservative lawyers already won a series of battles against the harder sort of secularism

There’s no mention of how much of that erosion has happened under administrations friendly to conservative Christianity, and therefore probably reflects internal weakness, division and scandal more than pressure from outside

and it didn’t matter much to the cultural erosion of their faith.

There’s no reckoning with the tension between the G.O.P.’s religious and libertarian wings, the clear support of many religious conservatives for the welfare state that official conservatism decries

And there’s no acknowledgment that a familiar tag like “moral relativism” may be a poor fit for a woke progressivism whose moral fervor is increasingly the opposite of relativist

a similar accounting of trends in presidential power makes the thesis of his Federalist Society speech look totally implausible.

There are two ways to read Barr’s inaccurate-but-ideologically-reassuring portraits of our politics — these twin attempts, as Damon Linker puts it, to achieve the “full assimilation” of the Trump presidency into “the conservative movement and the story it tells itself” about the world

If conservatives believe that even today’s presidency is much too constrained and that secular elites can be blamed for all our problems, then we should fear an authoritarian cascade on the right

A conservatism that constantly reconverts itself to the worldview of the Reagan era isn’t poised to claim sweeping, authoritarian power, in the service of religious revolution or any other cause. It’s poised for repetition, gridlock and failure

The recent victories in Syria in favor of the Iran- and Russia-backed forces of President Bashar Al-Assad as well as the end to UN sanctions on Iran have the potential to aggrandize newer groups in the military, state, and business elites.

Shortly after the death of founding Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, Mansour Moaddel examined the socioeconomic counterrevolution that occurred in the late 1980s against peasant and worker movements for social change unleashed starting in 1978. The revolution shattered the control of western corporations and their foreign agents. Appealing to religious revolutionary ideology, farmers seized land from their landlords and workers organized to support better conditions and nationalizing industries.

The clerics, however, were mostly conservative and sympathetic to the sanctity of property ownership. They dismantled working class organizations and reversed nationalizations. Led by individuals like Rafsanjani, their policies ultimately empowered the middle class bazaari merchants and mid-sized entrepreneurs.

But without democratic oversight, the influx of European business and investment after sanctions has the potential both to increase corruption in state enterprises and to polarize inequality within the upper and middle classes.

Even if President-Elect Trump does not significantly alter the status quo in U.S. and Western diplomacy with Iran, many countervailing factors prevent such a simplification of Iranian politics. Many large Islamic charitable organizations exercise considerable economic and political power semi-independently from state institutions.

Factionalism continues to fire ideological rhetoric, discouraging diplomacy and foreign business engagement in Iran.

Perhaps the most frightening of this year’s many apocalyptic books is The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. Its chapter titles read: Heat Death. Hunger. Drowning. Dying Oceans. Unbreathable Air. Wildfire. Plagues. Economic Collapse. Climate Conflict. It’s intended to be a forecast of the planet’s near future that will shock readers out of their complacency. But during the 2010s almost all the disasters that the book names have already started to happen.

As one of the New Optimists’ favourite sources, the website Our World in Data, had to admit this year: “In some aspects the data suggests the world is getting worse.”

the awareness that much of modern life – air travel, car travel, eating meat, shopping, using plastics – has malign consequences has grown from a minority preoccupation in the 1970s into an everyday topic.

Sometimes in the 2010s, it has felt as if the whole world we have made, from the tiniest exhaust particle to the most sprawling conurbation, is toxic.

Nowadays, the fear is almost universal. The creation of social media networks over the last decade and a half, starting with Twitter in 2006, and the conversion of traditional media into non-stop news services, have made awful events seem relentless and impossible to ignore. We have become perpetually anxious.

In a working world that requires quick switches between inactivity and activity, that values powers of endurance, caffeine is a vital drug. In many British town and city centres during the 2010s, otherwise emptied out by online commerce, cafes proliferated, replacing shops and pubs as the busiest indoor spaces.

When people say “It is what it is”, they are rarely challenged. Instead, they are usually heard in respectful silence. In a difficult world, fatalism and stoicism are useful qualities.

Another coping mechanism is escape. Possibly the most revealing leisure activity of the 2010s is shutting yourself away with a TV series: typically a drama set in another country or another era, with an addictive, slowly resolved plot, many characters, elaborate settings, and enough episodes to allow for watching in binges. In an age of squeezed incomes, TV dramas are worlds you can explore on the cheap.

During the decade, it became cooler than usual in Britain to eat comforting things: bread, cakes, pies, even grilled cheese sandwiches. The Great British Bake Off, first broadcast in 2010, made cooking with lots of carbs and sugar respectable again

Clothes have become more cocooning: enormous puffer jackets, scarves the size of small blankets, fleeces and woolly hats. In the 2000s, clothes and silhouettes were leaner and more formal – tight suits, skinny trousers – as if people expected to seize exciting new opportunities, or at least to work in offices. In the 2010s, social mobility has stalled, and many of the jobs being created – and often taken by middle-class graduates – involve zero-hours contracts and outdoor work

“It is what it is.” Usually, it means: “I’m learning to live with something negative” – a personal setback, a wider injustice, difficult circumstances. It’s a mantra for an age of diminishing expectations, when many people no longer assume – unlike their postwar predecessors – that they will become richer than their parents, and live in an ever more sophisticated or just society, on an ever more hospitable planet

Another way to cope with the 2010s has been to work obsessively on yourself. From the 1950s to the 1990s, being young in the west was often associated with lounging around, or rebelling, or living for the moment. But in the 2010s being young often means relentlessly working and studying, polishing your public persona, and keeping fit

Yoga, marathons, triathlons – it’s not hard to see their renewed popularity over the last decade as an effort by people, conscious or otherwise, to hone themselves for a tougher world.

this self-optimisation can be measured, and compared with the efforts of others, as never before. This process has created a new hierarchy, particularly within the American middle class, but increasingly in its European counterpart, too, which privileges the leanest people, the most punishing exercise classes, the most body-conscious brands of workout clothes.

finally, the harsher world of the 2010s has also prompted many people to undergo a more private, less visible toughenin

They have got used to walking past the decade’s casualties in the street, and not giving them much thought. In the 2010s, as in Victorian times, if you want an untroubled mind, it doesn’t pay to look at the world around you too hard.

the difficulties since 2010 of so many previously dominant value systems – capitalism, centrism, traditional conservatism, white male supremacy – have opened up space for new political movements, at a rate not seen since the 1960s.

the 2010s have reacquainted voters with the idea that politics can be about big promises and fundamental choices.

the 2010s have also brought a renewed realisation that culture is political – after decades when most creative people and cultural critics avoided that conclusion. Literary and art prizes now regularly go to people whose work is overtly political, such as Margaret Atwood

Although prizes are inherently elitist, they are now also increasingly expected to promote greater equality in society as a whole. It is a contradiction characteristic of the decade’s politics, where a greater awareness of the injustices suffered by many social groups, and sometimes a greater willingness to redress them, co-exists with an intensifying individualism – with a growing preference for letting people self-identify and respecting each person’s particular life experience

In 2012, Mark Fisher said that Britain was suffering from “depression economics and boomtime politics”: the disengagement prompted by the relatively comfortable 1990s and 2000s was lingering on, despite the reopening of so many economic issues by the financial crisis. Seven years later, apathy remains a habit for many Britons

digital technology, far from enabling more creativity, had actually made it both harder and less essential for artists. Instead of coming up with new ideas, they could now roam the internet’s infinite archives, and build careers out of clever hybrids and pastiches of previous forms.

Pop culture from the 1990s, in particular, such as the cosy TV series Friends, has become hugely popular again. In our often backward-looking society, “Time itself seem[s] to become sluggish,” wrote Reynolds, “like a river that starts to meander”

Hundreds of thousands of people from around the country have taken to the streets in opposition to the law since its passage. Opponents say the measure is discriminatory and violates India’s secular ethos.

Monday, a member of Parliament from the ruling party said that any protester who damaged public property should be shot or jailed.

Several protests have devolved into showdowns with the police, who have responded with force. Since December, 24 people have died nationwide, nearly all of them in Uttar Pradesh, India’s largest state.

The peaceful sit-in at Shaheen Bagh began after police stormed a nearby university campus and assaulted unarmed student protesters. The first night, the demonstration consisted of four women and six men. In the following days, the men went to work, but the number of women coming out of their homes kept growing. Now the protest is led by women while the men watch from the sidelines.

“In all my 35 years of working with Muslim women, I had never witnessed a scene such as this,” activist Syeda Hameed, chair of the Muslim Women’s Forum, wrote after a visit. “What I was witnessing was the new generation of Muslim women who speak boldly without an iota of fear.”

India’s powerful home minister, Amit Shah, has said the citizenship law will be followed by a nationwide push to verify all citizens, an exercise that many believe targets Muslims.

As the protest has endured, there have also been points of friction. There are arguments over who should be allowed on stage, whether to accept donations of supplies and how to keep away local politicians. Some chief volunteers recently tried to call off the protest to avoid its becoming a tool for political parties, but the women did not leave. Rumors about impending action by police to clear the road has not deterred them, either.

Putin also has options to be speaker of the Duma (parliament) or leader of its main party, United Russia, thereby exercising power behind the scenes in the manner of Jaroslaw Kaczyński, leader of Poland’s Law and Justice party.

The accompanying, enforced resignation of the entire government, including the prime minister, Dmitri Medvedev, is Putin’s attempt to reset his administration before Duma elections next year. Analysts say he feared Medvedev’s unpopularity – he has been accused of corruption – was beginning to rub off on him.

Although these changes are dressed up as desirable constitutional reforms, they clearly serve one common purpose: establishing Putinism in perpetuity. By showing he has no intention of retiring, Putin hopes to nip a possible succession battle in the bud.

Putin’s supposedly transformative national spending projects worth an eye-watering $390bn have largely failed to materialise. His promises of economic modernisation and raised living standards must be set against a consecutive five-year fall in real wages and cuts to state pensions.

The continuing drag on Russia’s development caused by western sanctions, imposed after the illegal annexation of Crimea, symbolises the broader, negative aspects of perpetual Putinism.

Putin is in cahoots with Turkey’s leader, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and his campaign against pro-western Kurds in north-east Syria. More recently, he has inserted Russian mercenaries into the war in Libya, backing rebels against the UN-recognised government in Tripoli.

And speaking of poison, who doubts that Putin and his henchmen were behind the unpunished attempt to assassinate Sergei and Yulia Skripal in Salisbury and last year’s murder of a Chechen separatist in Berlin?

The prospect of Putin prolonging and strengthening his nihilistic reign is a terrible one. Putin’s is the face of the enemy. Henceforth he must be recognised as such.

More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.

None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.

I don’t want to treat our fellow citizens with open contempt, or to confront and berate them

Rather, I am arguing for silence. The Trump loyalists who still cling to conspiracy theories and who remain part of a cult of personality should be deprived of the attention they seek, shunned for their antidemocratic lunacy, and then outvoted at the ballot box.

Perhaps most important, much of our own sense of well-being will be lost if we continue to engage with people who believe that millions of votes were falsified from coast to coast, that the military should move into the swing states and hold new elections, or even that thousands of Chinese troops were bombed into submission on the border of Maine.

No content anchors it; no program or policy comes from it. No motivating ideology stands behind it, unless we think of general grievance and a hatred of cultural and intellectual elites as an “idea.

when views are incoherent and beliefs are rooted in fantasies, compromise is impossible. Further engagement is not only unwarranted, but it can also become counterproductive.

We already understand: Trump tapped into traditions of ethnic and regional grievances and social resentments that are present in every democracy and wedded them to bizarre theories and conspiracies.

If we’ve learned one thing about “Trumpism,” it is that there is no such thing as “Trumpism.”

Ordinary people should tune out the noise. No one needs to think one more minute about why a woman from New York would speed along in her car while ranting into her phone about stolen elections when she ought to have been watching the road.

And the media have a particular obligation to end their fascination with these Trump voters. We don’t need yet another pilgrimage to diners and gas stations to hear from people whose only sources of information are cable-news hosts plumping fantasies about Venezuelan voting machines.

the rest of us no longer need to participate in long chin-pulling exercises about “what they really want” or why they cannot grasp reality.