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I’m cautiously optimistic that what’s happened over the last handful of election cycles makes that second option, at least to a degree, a real possibility. Not because of some magical Obama effect but because of something much more concrete: demographic trends have hit a tipping point where they appear to be a net loser for the GOP.

Does this mean the GOP is ‘racist’? No. At least not in its entirety. But it benefited mightily from it. What it means is that our politics is significantly framed around the politics of race and, on

t’s been a winning issue for the GOP for the 40 or 50 odd years since white Southerners moved into the Republican party and created a powerful electoral anchor for the party. They raised their sails to the winds of racial animosity and it worked in spades. For decades, you got more white votes pushing this brand of politics than you lost in minority votes. It was a good political bargain

America is itself a footnote to Caryl’s book, as are the Soviet Union and the European Union. Globalization may be Caryl’s subject, but he does not see it as a process advanced by American foreign policy and the American economy. Globalization reflects “the twin forces of markets and religion,” most vividly, the Chinese market and political Islam.

The book’s temporal frame is intended to provoke. Caryl accords the Paris or Berkeley or Prague of 1968 no lasting political stature. Nor is 1989 the year in which everything happens. Those years imply a Eurocentric emphasis, too rooted in the socialist dream or too disconnected from the salience of modern religion. Caryl argues that market capitalism and political Islam were the primary forces shaping the past 34 years. Embodying these forces were Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II, and the Ayatollah Khomeini. The successive collapse of Western-style modernization and of Soviet-style communism in Afghanistan completes Caryl’s story.

Economics and technology are limited in their explanatory capacity, Caryl concludes in his epilogue. Hence, “politics is ultimately a category unto itself. And we cannot understand political dynamics without recourse to the ideas that motivate people to action.” Religion is the deepest motivation, especially when it activates “the cherished sources of identity that give meaning to [people’s] lives.”

electric cars are currently a bit greener than gasoline cars — per mile. Driving one hundred miles in a Nissan Altima results in the emission of 90.5 pounds of greenhouse gases. Driving the same distance in an all-electric Nissan Leaf emits 63.6 pounds of greenhouse gases — a significant improvement. But while the Altima driver pays 14 cents a mile for fuel, the Leaf driver pays less than 3 cents per mile, and this difference, thanks to the law of supply and demand, causes the Leaf driver to drive more.

What do you expect when you put people in cars they feel good (or at least less guilty) about driving, which are also cheap to buy and run? Naturally, they drive them more. So much more, in fact, that they obliterate energy gains made by increased fuel efficiency.

The real problem with cars is not that they don’t get enough miles per gallon; it’s that they make it too easy for people to spread out, encouraging forms of development that are inherently wasteful and damaging … The critical energy drain in a typical American suburb is not the Hummer in the driveway; it’s everything else the Hummer makes possible — the oversized houses and irrigated yards, the network of new feeder roads and residential streets, the costly and inefficient outward expansion of the power grid, the duplicated stores and schools, the two-hour solo commutes.

Penn State Settlements Tied to Jerry Sandusky Abuse Date Back to 1971

Penn State's legal settlements with Jerry Sandusky's accusers cover alleged abuse dating to 1971, which was 40 years before his arrest, the university said Sunday, providing the first confirmation of the time frame of abuse claims that have led to big payouts.

Responding to questions about the president's statement and claims against the school, university spokesman Lawrence Lokman told The Associated Press he could confirm that the earliest year of alleged abuse covered in Penn State's settlements is 1971.

One of the company’s goals now is “managing out dead wood,” aided by performance-management software that helps track and evaluate salaried workers’ progress and quickly expose laggards. Turnover is now about twice as high it was a decade ago, with approximately 10% of U.S. employees leaving annually, voluntarily or not, the company said.

Armed with personalized goals for employees and large quantities of data, Kimberly-Clark said it expects employees to keep improving—or else. “People can’t duck and hide in the same way they could in the past,” said Mr. Boston, who oversees talent management globally for the firm.

Coca-Cola Co. KO -0.41 % in June approved pushing its new performance-management process from the pilot stage to a global rollout. The new system encourages managers to conduct a monthly “reflection” on every direct report, answering five questions that include “Given his/her performance, would you assign this associate to increased scale, scope, and responsibilities?” and “Is this associate at risk for low performance?”

Will economic populism lead Democrats to victory? Senate results should make us skeptical.

Interestingly enough, in two of those crucial Midwestern states that flipped to Trump, Democratic Senate candidates campaigned on economically populist platforms — but they did notably worse than Hillary Clinton.

Meanwhile, the two Democratic Senate candidates in competitive races who outperformed Clinton the most both self-consciously presented a moderate image rather than running as liberal firebrands.

And Ms. Trump has used the carefully cultivated image of her own career and family to sell both her brand and her father’s political ambitions. Her Instagram feed is full of images with motivational captions about the importance of stay-at-home motherhood or maternal multitasking, often with the hashtag #WomenWhoWork. “I have a few very important roles, but being a mother will always be my favorite,” she posted with a family photo.

Ms. Trump embodies a feminine ideal, even while she lives a more feminist reality.

Her push for paid parental leave is certainly laudable and especially out of the box for the Republican Party, but the policy she urged her father to propose wasn’t really about parents — it offered maternity leave only, emphasizing that the task of raising children remains the domain of women (even “women who work”). And her soft-focus feminism is put to use covering for her father’s boorishness: Mr. Trump has repeatedly boasted of his refusal to do any child care whatsoever for his five children, but his daughter nevertheless deems him “a feminist.”

What is the psychological mechanism underpinning this resentment?

Democratic politicians and the media have struggled to enter the minds of Trump voters, who are evidently enraged by the imposition of norms of political correctness that they see as enforced by “Stalinist orthodoxy.”

Trump has capitalized on the visceral belief of many white voters that government-enforced diversity and other related regulations are designed “to bring Americans to submission” by silencing their opposition to immigration — legal and illegal — to judicial orders putting low-income housing in the suburbs, and to government-mandated school integration, to name just a few of their least favorite things.

of the top 50 philosophy doctoral programs in the English-speaking world, only 15 percent have any regular faculty members who teach any non-Western philosophy.

while the American Philosophical Association has slowly broadened the representation of the world’s philosophical traditions on its programs, progress has been minimal.

Many philosophers and many departments simply ignore arguments for greater diversity; others respond with arguments for Eurocentrism that we and many others have refuted elsewhere. The profession as a whole remains resolutely Eurocentric.

a clear majority of American adults no longer live in the middle class, a demographic reality shaped by decades of widening inequality, declining industry and the erosion of financial stability and family-wage jobs

hile much of the attention has focused on communities hardest hit by economic declines, the new Pew data, based on metro-level income data since 2000, show that middle-class stagnation is a far broader phenomenon.

The decline of the American middle class is "a pervasive local phenomenon," according to Pew, which analyzed census and American Community Survey data in 229 metros across the country, encompassing about three-quarters of the U.S. population. In 203 of those metros, the share of adults in middle-income households fell from 2000 to 2014.

the questions he raises. Chief among them: How much should he hold his hillbilly kin responsible for their own misfortunes?

In Mr. Vance’s estimation, the answer is: a lot. Economic insecurity, he’s convinced, accounts for only a small part of his community’s problems; the much larger issue is hillbilly culture itself. Though proud of it in many ways, he’s also convinced that it “increasingly encourages social decay instead of counteracting it.”

“Political scientists have spent millions of words trying to explain how Appalachia and the South went from staunchly Democratic to staunchly Republican in less than a generation,” Mr. Vance writes. He suspects those cellphones have a lot to do with it. “I could never understand why our lives felt like a struggle while those living off of government largess enjoyed trinkets that I only dreamed about.”

Trump sees the world in terms of a zero-sum game. In reality, globalisation, if well managed, is a positive-sum force: America gains if its friends and allies – whether Australia, the EU, or Mexico – are stronger.

But Trump’s approach threatens to turn it into a negative-sum game: America will lose, too.

Previous administrations have always taken seriously their responsibility to advance US interests. But the policies they pursued usually were framed in terms of an enlightened understanding of national interest. Americans, they believed, benefited from a more prosperous global economy and a web of alliances among countries committed to democracy, human rights, and the rule of law.

Everything imagined above—and everything described below—is possible only if many people other than Donald Trump agree to permit it. It can all be stopped, if individual citizens and public officials make the right choices. The story told here, like that told by Charles Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, is a story not of things that will be, but of things that may be. Other paths remain open. It is up to Americans to decide which one the country will follow.

What is spreading today is repressive kleptocracy, led by rulers motivated by greed rather than by the deranged idealism of Hitler or Stalin or Mao. Such rulers rely less on terror and more on rule-twisting, the manipulation of information, and the co-optation of elites.

the American system is also perforated by vulnerabilities no less dangerous for being so familiar. Supreme among those vulnerabilities is reliance on the personal qualities of the man or woman who wields the awesome powers of the presidency.

certain mental skills will become less valuable because computers will take over. Having a great memory will probably be less valuable. Being able to be a straight-A student will be less valuable — gathering masses of information and regurgitating it back on tests. So will being able to do any mental activity that involves following a set of rules.

what human skills will be more valuable?

In the news business, some of those skills are already evident.

The Russian military intervention in Ukraine’s autonomous republic of Crimea has brought relations between the United States and Russia to their lowest level in a quarter century. It has transgressed the sovereignty of one of the most populous countries in Europe, violated the terms of a diplomatic agreement to respect Ukraine’s borders, and placed Russia on a war footing with one of the few states in the post-Soviet world that has managed to hold multiple free elections. It is a military operation that is unsanctioned by any international body, wholly open-ended, and blessed only by the Russian Parliament.

The Cathedral of St. Vladimir rests on a small hill on Crimea’s southwestern coast. The church is a modern creation, gilded and graceless, but it stands on an auspicious site: the place where, it is thought, Vladimir adopted Christianity in 988 as the state religion of his principality, Rus.

To Russians, Vladimir is the first national saint and the truest progenitor of the modern Russian state. To Ukrainians, he is Volodymyr the Great, founder of the Slavic civilization that would eventually flourish farther north, in medieval Kiev.

there was a constructive search for clarity. After Sachs spoke of the importance of fostering a “global ethics,” Stefano Zamagni, an economics professor at the University of Bologna, cautioned that it was important to qualify such statements. “When we talk about ethics we mean different things,” he said, rattling off a list of ethical frames ranging from utilitarian to neo-contractualist.

So far, he’s gone virtually unchallenged. He has said the 2008 financial crisis “was the first time ever that markets were broken and could not fix themselves” (ever hear of the Depression?), and that he “could have caught a number of different crises” during his tenure at the Fed (which begs the question of why he didn’t). Journalists have asked such penetrating questions as, "You were knighted. Does that come with a title or anything?" Even the tough-minded Binyamin Applebaum called Greenspan "one of the nation’s most astute economic observers." Overall, the media has presented Greenspan's book as part of a soul-searching quest for why he missed the greatest economic collapse in decades—a frame that is needlessly obsequious and suggests he was a bystander to the disaster, not a central actor.

what makes Francis different is really a matter of which Catholic beliefs he has elevated to the level of communal concerns—public policy—and which he has framed as individual choices. To Francis, sharing wealth and fixing global warming are matters that governments should address, while not committing homosexual acts or having abortions are individual choices he endorses. (As he famously put it: “Who am I to judge?”

This is quite different from the American Catholic church, which has poured its political energy into laws banning gay marriage and restricting abortion.

The pope’s speech at the White House on Wednesday fit this framework. When it came to religious liberty, a hot-button issue for American conservatives, Francis extolled its virtues in the abstract. But in the case of climate, Francis called for government action:

but after surviving a beheading attempt and witnessing true moments of horror, he began to feel complicit in the violence around him.

The Australian journalist is the only war correspondent to survive being kidnapped by al-Qaeda in Iraq, and became obsessed with its founder Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He has opened up about his experiences in the film Only The Dead, which is showing at the Sydney Film Festival.

He now believes it was the first-ever attack by what the world now knows as the Islamic State.

Do you know what technology is? We commonly think about technology as anything that was invented after you were born. My friend Denny Hills made kind of a version of that through his statement, "It's anything that doesn't work yet."

Wired, which was not about the technology, but about the culture around the technology. We like to think of ourselves as a lifestyle magazine. We are a magazine about technology culture in the way that Rolling Stone is a magazine about music culture.

This book came out of a little bit of my own efforts to try to understand what technology meant and where it should fit into the realm of the world. When a new technology came along, should we embrace it, or hold off?