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For nearly four years, congressional Republicans have ducked and dodged an unending cascade of offensive statements and norm-shattering behavior from President Trump, ignoring his caustic and scattershot Twitter feed and penchant for flouting party orthodoxy, and standing quietly by as he abandoned military allies, attacked American institutions and stirred up racist and nativist fears.

But now, facing grim polling numbers and a flood of Democratic money and enthusiasm that has imperiled their majority in the Senate, Republicans on Capitol Hill are beginning to publicly distance themselves from the president.

Former President Barack Obama reemerged on the campaign trail Wednesday in Philadelphia, delivering an across-the-board indictment of his successor's first four years in office.

That, for me, is the best and most succinct argument that former Vice President Joe Biden can make in the closing 12 days of this race.

It's about a country absolutely exhausted by Trump -- his norm-busting, his misinformation, his junior high school bullying, and his tweeting, his tweeting, his tweeting...

pocalypse often feels inevitable. After all, aren’t we in the “sixth mass extinction”? Haven’t populations of wild animals already crashed by 60 percent? Don’t we have just “10 years left” to avert climate meltdown? Do we really dare to hope?

in every case, there is a path through.

framing can make extinction feel like a force too huge and powerful to avert.

A string of recent attacks against Asian Americans has communities and advocates on high alert, especially as many in the United States gather this weekend to celebrate the Lunar New Year.

An 84-year-old man from Thailand died in late January after being attacked on his morning walk in San Francisco. Days later, a 91-year-old Asian man was violently shoved to the ground in Oakland's Chinatown. Last week, a 64-year-old woman was robbed outside a Vietnamese market in San Jose, California. And a 61-year-old Filipino man was slashed in the face last week on the New York City subway.

But authorities and advocates for the Asian community say that hate and violence against Asians has been brewing for several months -- and needs to be addressed.

Seven Republicans broke ranks in voting to convict former President Donald J. Trump, and despite moving to acquit the former president, Senator Mitch McConnell condemned him on the Senate floor.

In a 57-to-43 vote, the Senate handed down an acquittal for Mr. Trump for the second time in 13 months. But it was the most bipartisan support for conviction of any of the four impeachments in American history.

Michael T. van der Veen, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, expressed frustration at the possibility of dragging out the proceedings with witness testimony. A trial lawyer in Philadelphia, Mr. van der Veen erupted at times over the lack of judicial norms in the Senate chamber that are typical of courtrooms across the country.

In interviews with well-educated, often middle-class and seemingly moderate young men, I documented what was then the new and growing appeal in the West of Islamist violence built on false history and a deep, debilitating sense of victimhood.

domestic radicalism has deep parallels to jihadist terrorism: Both movements are driven by alienation from the political system and a resulting breakdown in social norms.

For some groups and individuals, this breakdown leads to violence they see as justified to achieve political ends.

FEW THINGS about Donald Trump’s rise are harder to explain than the fact that some of the most religious Americans were behind it.

In 2016, 81% of white evangelicals voted for him.

The popular explanation for this strange nexus is that white Christians overlooked the president’s failings because of his willingness to fight their corner, by nominating conservative judges and opposing abortion

Nonetheless, Stevens’s forthcoming book, “It Was All A Lie,” makes the case that President Trump is the natural outcome of a long chain of events going back to the 1964 election when Barry Goldwater ran for president as an opponent of the Civil Right Act passed earlier that year.

“I have no one to blame but myself,” he declares on the first page. “What I missed was one simple reality: it was all a lie.”

What were the lies? That the Republican Party “espoused a core set of values: character counts, personal responsibility, strong on Russia, the national debt actually mattered, immigration made America great, a big-tent party.”And what is the truth? The Republican Party is “just a white grievance party.”

The Republican Party’s slide away from those values preceded Donald Trump, providing the conditions for his rise. In recent years, the GOP has thrown away its guiding values and embraced its darkest instincts. It has blown up long-standing norms in the Senate, creating divisions that outstrip anything I have seen before; done nothing about rank corruption in the White House and the Cabinet; accepted the politicization of the Justice Department and lies from the attorney general; avoided any meaningful oversight of misconduct; and failed to curb attacks on the independence of inspectors general.

The GOP now distinguishes itself by inaction. It has stood and watched as this administration separated children from their parents at the border, mistreated asylum seekers, botched its response to a hurricane in Puerto Rico, attacked science, and opened new avenues for toxic materials in our air and water. It said and did nothing about Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and is actively blocking efforts to combat a recurrence in 2020

It has refused to pass a new Voting Rights Act after the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder eviscerated the legislation, which, reflecting the GOP of the past, had passed the House unanimously. It has refused to deal in any fashion with urgent problems such as climate change, immigration, global competition, hunger, and poverty. It confirmed nominees who lied to the Senate, who inflated résumés, and who failed to meet minimum qualifications for the job. It confirmed judges who were unanimously rated unqualified by the American Bar Association.

The philosopher Ronald Dworkin considered this type of parental conundrum in an essay called “What Is Equality?,” from 1981. The parents in such a family, he wrote, confront a trade-off between two worthy egalitarian goals. One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved.

Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations.

Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly.

David Carballo: At its most ambitious, archaeology can cover the totality of the human story, from our evolution as a species to today, since the focus is on material culture rather than on texts—though we typically examine both in tandem. By material culture I mean the places we inhabit (“sites”) and the stuff we use (“artifacts”). Much of our history as a species has no written records and can only be accessed through material remains like sites and artifacts, whereas for other places and times we may have texts, but they represent the official transcripts of the rich and powerful. In those cases, archaeology can provide a voice to the “99 percent” who were non-elites yet played their part in shaping history.

Lacking large domesticated animals, Mesoamerican civilizations developed other solutions to common concerns. Rather than extensive, plowed-field systems, Mesoamericans intensified agriculture in various ways. The ingenious system of lakeshore fields called chinampas is especially noteworthy, as they permitted multiple crop harvests per year and led to a population boom in the Aztec period.

Lacking pack animals, Mesoamericans moved commodities using human porters over land and using canoes over water. For maximizing the circulation of goods in this environment, it made economic sense for populations to nucleate and develop brisk marketplace exchange, daily in larger cities and on a rotating schedule in more rural areas. The twin-city capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco, was the largest of these, and likely larger than any city in Europe at the time except for Paris.

Already, the American death toll is of a different order of magnitude than in most other countries. With only 4 percent of the world’s population, the United States has accounted for 22 percent of coronavirus deaths. Canada, a rich country that neighbors the United States, has a per capita death rate about half as large

Together, the national skepticism toward collective action and the Trump administration’s scattered response to the virus have contributed to several specific failures and missed opportunities, Times reporting shows:a lack of effective travel restrictions;repeated breakdowns in testing;confusing advice about masks;a misunderstanding of the relationship between the virus and the economy;and inconsistent messages from public officials.

Some Republican governors have followed his lead and also played down the virus, while others have largely followed the science. Democratic governors have more reliably heeded scientific advice, but their performance in containing the virus has been uneven.

NOT SO long ago, asylum seekers turned to the United States, seeking refuge from repressive states. Now the United States is one of those repressive states.

That’s the gist of a Canadian federal court ruling, which would scrap a 16-year-old bilateral treaty called the Safe Third Country Agreement, under which Canada and the United States each recognize the other as a safe place to seek refuge. Justice Ann Marie McDonald ruled that Canada’s practice of turning back third-country refugees who try to cross at official points of entry along the U.S.-Canada frontier — on the theory that they have already reached a safe harbor in the United States — no longer makes sense given the atrocious treatment to which they are subjected south of the border. Canada, she wrote, can no longer turn a blind eye to the reality that the United States denies decent and dignified treatment to asylum seekers.

The judge found that the “accounts of the detainees demonstrate both physical and psychological suffering because of detention, and a real risk that they will not be able to assert asylum claims” in the United States.

it’s unlikely the world will be able to get to net-zero without serious changes in personal behavior. The Green New Deal also mandates “sustainable farming,” which usually includes reductions in methane emissions from livestock, while the Dutch law takes aim at ham through limits to pork production.

In a brilliant, now largely forgotten, lecture delivered in 1819, Constant wrote that the democrats of Greece and Rome, like the revolutionaries of his own day, “admitted as compatible with this collective freedom the complete subjection of the individual to the authority of the community.” By contrast, Constant wrote, “the aim of the moderns is the enjoyment of security in private pleasures, and they call liberty the guarantees accorded by institutions to those pleasures.”

Constant wasn’t thinking of Marie Antoinette’s right to play at shepherdess while her subjects starved, but the right to open a shop and build yourself a home rather than be drafted into Napoleon’s army spreading republicanism across the face of Europe. We moderns build institutions, and establish tacit norms, to guarantee the security of such private pleasures. That’s liberal individualism

here are questions as to whether the leftward shift seen in the polls “is short-term or reflects a long-term trend.” Whites’ racial attitudes, Banks wrote:are fairly stable. Once their attitudes are crystallized, they tend not to change. It would take a shifting of racial norms to change the country’s (e.g. whites’) views about policing and the black community.” He added that “much more would need to be done from both political parties and activists to cause a major change in the politics of race.

White Americans have a history of losing interest in racial justice soon after they acknowledge injustice, as if their acknowledgment, rather than actual changes in the world, was the end of the matter. We saw as the Sixties progressed, many whites who were appalled by dogs attacking black children eventually lost patience with demands for greater economic equality for blacks and resisted changes in their own communities.

He warned that “this is a moment when it’s especially dangerous to misunderstand what public opinion surveys tell us.”The fundamental analytical danger is to believe that the result of opinion polling matters in any straightforward way. That’s not how America works, otherwise we would have had stricter gun control after Parkland, etc. The actual question is not whether a majority of Americans say they want X on a survey, but whether enough Americans care enough about X in their lives to overcome the resistance and resources of those who benefit from/believe in X as well as a system of government that puts up enormous procedural barriers against the kinds of X’s we are talking about.

Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency?

the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.

They are, as an American Psychological Association feature describes them, men who adhere to norms such as “toughness, dominance, self-reliance, heterosexual behaviors, restriction of emotional expression and the avoidance of traditionally feminine attitudes and behaviors.”

most voters are basing their assessments of Trump’s performance less on their actual daily experiences and more on their preexisting viewpoints about his tumultuous and norm-shattering presidency

The biggest exception to that dynamic is older Americans, including older white voters, who polls suggest have clearly cooled on Trump as he and other Republicans have signaled—or flat out declared—that more deaths among seniors might be an acceptable price for reopening the economy.

mostly, the intense pressure of the pandemic appears to be fortifying, rather than fracturing, the long-standing divisions in the electorate that Trump has already widened since 2016

1. Models

On Friday we talked about how the much-maligned COVID models have actually been pretty helpful in understanding the spread and death toll from the coronavirus.

Panaggio pulled the predictions for the big-12 COVID models and ran them against observed results to see how well they did.

Only 11 miles from Manhattan, Hart Island has been the final resting place for New York’s unclaimed and poor for over a century.

It is the largest mass grave in the United States. At least 1,000 bodies are buried on the island a year, and more than 1 million can be found in the plots of its potter’s field, known as City Cemetery.

Its earliest iteration was as a training ground for soldiers during the Civil War. Purchased by the city in 1868, the land in the Long Island Sound has been home to a boys reformatory, asylum, prison, rehab center and even a Nike missile silo

The National Bureau of Economic Research produced a working paper on Monday after analyzing data from 315 cities that had protests.  “We find no evidence that net COVID-19 case growth differentially rose following the onset of Black Lives Matter protests, and even modest evidence of a small longer-run case growth decline,” the researchers concluded. 

They even found that net stay-at-home behavior actually increased while the protests roiled urban centers, hypothesizing that the demonstrations compelled non-protesters to more diligently stay home and avoid public spaces. 

She pointed to two features of the protests in her home city of New Orleans that appear to be shared with demonstrations in other cities: they are taking place outside, and the majority of participants are wearing masks.