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he takes the responsibility of communication very seriously. It’s a moral obligation, he believes, if you’re advising on aspects of science that profoundly affect people’s lives.

Yet as he is at pains to remind us, advise is all he does. “You’d find it hard to find an interview clip of me saying the government should do this. I’m very careful.”

All the same, he’s not without his opinions about policy, which he tends to restrict to the past rather than making public suggestions about the future

Statusization — to coin a useful term — is ubiquitous, no matter what your altitude. While you’re in your hospital bed spooning up red Jell-O, a patient in a private suite is enjoying strawberries and cream. On your way to a Chase A.T.M., you notice a silver plaque declaring the existence within of Private Client Services. This man has a box seat at a Yankees game; that man has a skybox. And the skybox isn’t the limit: high overhead, the 1 percent fly first class; the .1 percent fly Netjets; the .01 fly their own planes. Why should it be any different up above from down below?

In his new book, “The Great Degeneration,” the historian Niall Ferguson confirms my intuition. His argument is that we’ve seen a precipitous decline in social mobility over the last 30 years: “Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from ‘rags to riches’ in a generation.

flying has become like driving — only instead of collapsing bridges and potholed roads, the hazards a traveler in economy faces are crippling back pain and plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches tossed on a tray by hassled flight attendants. It’s just another infrastructure in collapse.

Historically, Missouri has been a swing state, though is often assumed by pundits to be a Republican giveaway. In 2008, Republican John McCain won the state’s electoral votes by a margin of less than 1% – mere thousands of votes. In 2012, Republican Mitt Romney won the state by 10%, but liberal Democrat Claire McCaskill also kept her seat in the US Senate by more than 15%. The state also has a Democrat governor.

During 2014’s high-profile race for St Louis County executive following the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, Democratic candidate Steve Stenger – who visited Bosnian mosques and distributed Bosnian-language campaign literature while his Republican opponent did not – won, but by fewer than 2,000 votes. Had Bosnian voters stayed home, he probably would have lost.

St Louis is home to one of the largest populations of Bosnian Muslims in the world outside Bosnia-Herzegovina itself. The community has its origins in the Balkan refugee crisis in the 1990s, when Yugoslavia was ripped apart at its seams, displacing millions. Bosnian refugees were resettled in St Louis by the thousands, and eventually the city became the anchor of the United States’ Bosnian diaspora

The Chicago Police Department routinely violates civil rights, uses unnecessary force, discriminates against minority residents, and fails to hold officers accountable — creating a climate of distrust, violence, and fear that makes residents and cops unsafe. That’s according to a massive new report that the US Department of Justice released on Friday.

The investigation followed the police shooting of Laquan McDonald in October 2014. Officer Jason Van Dyke, who shot McDonald, initially claimed that the black 17-year-old lunged at police officers and posed a dangerous threat. But a dashboard camera video released in 2015 showed that McDonald was at least 10 feet away from the officers and didn’t move toward police. The revelation worsened already-tense community relations with the police, leading the Justice Department to get involved in its biggest investigation of a local police department yet.

For example, raw statistics show that Chicago police officers use force almost 10 times more often against black residents than against their white counterparts.

True, the federal deficit has fallen to about 4% of GDP this year from its 10% peak in 2009. The bad news is that, even as discretionary expenditure has been slashed, spending on entitlements has continued to rise—and will rise inexorably in the coming years, driving the deficit back up above 6% by 2038

A very striking feature of the latest CBO report is how much worse it is than last year's. A year ago, the CBO's extended baseline series for the federal debt in public hands projected a figure of 52% of GDP by 2038. That figure has very nearly doubled to 100%.

Only a fantasist can seriously believe "this is not a crisis." The fiscal arithmetic of excessive federal borrowing is nasty even when relatively optimistic assumptions are made about growth and interest rates. Currently, net interest payments on the federal debt are around 8% of GDP. But under the CBO's extended baseline scenario, that share could rise to 20% by 2026

The most dangerous uprising that's threatening America's stability isn't black protests in places like Ferguson or Baltimore. It's taking place among an aging white majority that is losing its bearing on reality and destroying the gears of government, media and public welfare. At its center is an inexplicable, illogical and dangerous fear that some sociologists are now defining as white fragility.

In her 2011 academic pedagogical analysis titled “White Fragility,” DiAngelo goes into a detailed explanation of how white people in North America live in insulated social and media spaces that protect them from any race-based stress. This privileged fragility leaves them unable to tolerate any schism or challenge to a universally accepted belief system. Any shift away from that (like a biracial African-American president) triggers a deep and sustaining panic. Racial segregation, disproportionate representation in the media, and many other factors serve as the columns that support white fragility

misunderstanding was caused by misidentification of what white privilege and power means. Privilege doesn’t mean automatic wealth and health. What “white privilege” means is that society is rooting for one particular segment of the population to succeed over all others, and has installed a disproportionately high amount of institutional and psychological helpers every step of the way.

There are two broad schools of thought on why the West rules. Proponents of ‘Long-Term Lock-In’ theories such as Jared Diamond suggest that from time immemorial, some critical factor – geography, climate, or culture perhaps – made East and West unalterably different, and determined that the industrial revolution would happen in the West and push it further ahead of the East. But the East led the West between 500 and 1600, so this development can’t have been inevitable; and so proponents of ‘Short-Term Accident’ theories argue that Western rule was a temporary aberration that is now coming to an end, with Japan, China, and India resuming their rightful places on the world stage. However, as the West led for 9,000 of the previous 10,000 years, it wasn’t just a temporary aberration. So, if we want to know why the West rules, we need a whole new theory. Ian Morris, boldly entering the turf of Jared Diamond and Niall Ferguson, provides the broader approach that is necessary, combining the textual historian’s focus on context, the anthropological archaeologist’s awareness of the deep past, and the social scientist’s comparative methods to make sense of the past, present and future – in a way no one has ever done before.

“The nearest thing to a unified field theory of history we are ever likely to get. With wit and wisdom, Ian Morris deploys the techniques and insights of the new ancient history to address the biggest of all historical questions: Why on earth did the West beat the Rest?

It is not, he reveals, differences of race or culture, or even the strivings of great individuals, that explain Western dominance. It is the effects of geography on the everyday efforts of ordinary people as they deal with crises of resources, disease, migration, and climate.

said her relatives seemed more outraged by the demonstrations than the killing, which she saw as an injustice.

Race has never been an easy topic of conversation in America. But the recent high-profile deaths of black people at the hands of police officers in Ferguson, New York, Cleveland and elsewhere — and the nationwide protests those deaths spurred — have exposed sharp differences about race relations among friends, co-workers, neighbors and even relatives in unexpected and often uncomfortable ways.

Put bluntly, many people say, they feel they are being forced to pick a team.

“Dear White People” brilliantly uses the complexities of Obama-era racial consciousness to explore a basic paradox of interpersonal interaction. We are all stereotypes in one another’s eyes and complicated, unique individuals in our own minds. Somehow, within the compass of a compact, modestly budgeted (and independently financed) feature, Mr. Simien holds the antics of an astonishing variety of recognizable human types up to critical scrutiny. At the same time, he explores the desires and frustrations of a motley collection of plausible human beings with amused compassion.

“Dear White People” does not point the way toward a happy, huggy, post-racial future. Nor does it prophesy a revolutionary fire next time. And it does not pretend that “race” is a symmetrical problem to be solved by acts of reciprocal good will on both sides. This is in part a movie about racism, about how deeply white supremacy is still embedded in institutions that congratulate themselves on their diversity and tolerance. It is, in other words, about how the distance from a place like Winchester to a place like Ferguson, Mo., is not as great as some of us might wish or suppose.

Mr. Simien serves harsh medicine with remarkable charm and good humor. He is an incisive writer and a disciplined and decorous filmmaker, framing and cutting his scenes with clean, almost classical economy.

the public has become more adverse to the use of force by government. The most obvious example, he wrote in response to my email inquiry, is war

Pinker cited 13 other examples in support of his position that people have become less tolerant of violence, including “concern over police violence. During the 1960s race riots, police would kill dozens of young black men in a single night, but the public barely noticed”; “Capital punishment is on the way out”; “Domestic violence (e.g., wife-beating) used to be a joke (as in Jackie Gleason’s “One of these days, Alice – Pow! Right in the kisser”), now it is an abomination”; “Corporal punishment (strapping and paddling) are on their way out of American schools”; “Bullying in the playground, once thought to be a normal or even desirable feature of boyhood, has become a national issue”; and “American football may soon be revolutionized by concern about concussions.”

Jonathan Haidt, a professor of social psychology at N.Y.U., noted in an email that for liberals, “compassion for those who are suffering is the most crucial virtue.” Conservatives, in contrast, “believe more in ‘just deserts’ and making criminals pay.”

In the previous four years under President George W. Bush, the Justice Department had stopped taking police departments to court over allegations of misconduct or violations of civil rights.

In the nearly seven years since Obama came to office, his Justice Department has investigated 21 police departments -- big departments, including New Orleans and Detroit, and small ones, such as East Haven and Ferguson, Mo. 

both Frum and D’Souza changed since the 1980s, but they have tacked in different directions.

Frum still identifies as a conservative. But he opposed Barack Obama without thinking of him as un-American or the devil incarnate. For that act of moderation, he lost some affiliations but cemented his status as a heterodox public intellectual during a time when folks only wanted to hear from partisan thought leaders.

So is this merely a tale of one intellectual losing power while drifting toward the center while another intellectual is gaining power by becoming more partisan? No, because there are few tidy endings in “The Ideas Industry.”

Some of the Russian ads placed on Facebook apparently targeted Ferguson and Baltimore, which were rocked by protests after police killings of unarmed black men; another showed a black woman firing a rifle. Other ads played on fears of illegal immigrants and Muslims, and groups like Black Lives Matter.

The beginning of the Cold War coincided with the beginning of the civil rights movement, and the two became intertwined—both in how the Soviets used the racial strife, and how the Cold War propelled the cause of civil rights forward

“Early on in the Cold War, there was a recognition that the U.S. couldn’t lead the world if it was seen as repressing people of color,” says Mary Dudziak, a legal historian at Emory,

When she was a mere sprout of 14, Mary Beard tuned into the first episode of Sir Kenneth Clark’s famous BBC documentary, Civilisation, and felt a “slight tingle.”

“It had never struck me,” she wrote last year, “that it might be possible to trace a history of European culture, as Clark was to do, in 13 parts, from the early middle ages to the 20th century.”

on her way to becoming an accomplished classicist, would start to feel queasy. She became “decidedly uncomfortable with Clark’s patrician self-confidence and the ‘great man’ approach to art history—one damn genius after the next—that ran through the series.”

It is as if the creators of the standards had not picked up a book of recent world history scholarship. Not even a textbook.

At what point does a course claiming to be world history that is regionally and therefore ethnically and racially compartmentalized, a history driven by European Western Civilization canon, a history prioritizing Westerners over Resterners, where the twain of East and West, Global South and Global North never meet go beyond Eurocentrism or ethnocentrism into racism, even if by neglect or ignorance?

Unfortunately, the course that would be taught in combination would be using outdated world history [sic]standards.

Like all the black men and women in my family, he believed in hard work, but like all the black men and women in my family, no matter how hard he worked, he never got ahead.

So when I was young, that flag outside our home never made sense to me. How could this black man, having seen firsthand the way his country abused black Americans, how it refused to treat us as full citizens, proudly fly its banner? I didn’t understand his patriotism.

I had been taught, in school, through cultural osmosis, that the flag wasn’t really ours, that our history as a people began with enslavement and that we had contributed little to this great nation. It seemed that the closest thing black Americans could have to cultural pride was to be found in our vague connection to Africa, a place we had never been