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In Tunisia and Egypt, Islamists, who were long perceived as opponents of the democratic system, are now promoting and joyfully participating in it. Even the ultra-Orthodox Salafis now have deputies sitting in the Egyptian Parliament, thanks to the ballots that they, until very recently, denounced as heresy.

It was the exclusion and suppression of Islamists by secular tyrants that originally bred extremism.

as Fareed Zakaria warned in his 2003 book “The Future of Freedom,” there are illiberal democracies, too, where the majority’s power isn’t checked by constitutional liberalism, and the rights and freedoms of all citizens are not secured. This is a risk for the post-Arab Spring countries, and even for post-Kemalist Turkey. The real debate, therefore, is whether Islam is compatible with liberalism.

Zhang sees a lack of innovation as a persistent problem for China. “Going forward, we need people who can invent. The reason China doesn’t have a Steve Jobs is because of the education system, which needs reform, along with health care and the political system. China does not train enough people to think.”

“In China nowadays, teachers are desperate,” Yang Lan told me over lunch. With her upswept hair and porcelain skin, Yang radiated celebrity power. “They’re worried that all the only children—‘little emperors’—are spoiled and self-centered and no longer appreciate their parents.” She told me how one school had invited 1,000 parents to sit on chairs on the playground, “then asked the kids to wash their parents’ feet in front of everyone—a sign of filial piety.”

China’s “little emperors” are coddled in a distinctly Chinese way. While doted on and catered to, they are also loaded up with the expectations of parents who have invested all their dreams—not to mention money—in their only child. These “spoiled” children often study and drill from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m. every day.

What happens when children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later? The answer is: a good deal of teenage weirdness. Fortunately, developmental psychologists and neuroscientists are starting to explain the foundations of that weirdness.

The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again

The first of these systems has to do with emotion and motivation. It is very closely linked to the biological and chemical changes of puberty and involves the areas of the brain that respond to rewards. This is the system that turns placid 10-year-olds into restless, exuberant, emotionally intense teenagers, desperate to attain every goal, fulfill every desire and experience every sensation. Later, it turns them back into relatively placid adults.

drugs, when used consistently, constantly, destructively, are all anesthesia from pain. The Mexican drug cartels crave money, but they make that money from the way Yankees across the border crave numbness. They sell unfeeling. We buy it. We spend tens of billions of dollars a year doing so, and by some estimates about a third to a half of that money goes back to Mexico.

We want not to feel what’s happening to us, and then we do stuff that makes worse things happen–to us and others. We pay for it, too, in a million ways, from outright drug-overdose deaths (which now exceed traffic fatalities, and of which the United States has the highest rate of any nation except tiny Iceland, amounting to more than thirty-seven thousand deaths here in 2009 alone) to the violence of drug-dealing on the street, the violence of people on some of those drugs, and the violence inflicted on children who are neglected, abandoned, and abused because of them–and that’s just for starters.  The stuff people do for money when they’re desperate for drugs generates more violence and more crazy greed

Then there’s our futile “war on drugs” that has created so much pain of its own.

the secrets of Dubai are slowly seeping out. This is a city built from nothing in just a few wild decades on credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery. Dubai is a living metal metaphor for the neo-liberal globalised world that may be crashing – at last – into history.

There are three different Dubais, all swirling around each other. There are the expats, like Karen; there are the Emiratis, headed by Sheikh Mohammed; and then there is the foreign underclass who built the city, and are trapped here. They are hidden in plain view. You see them everywhere, in dirt-caked blue uniforms, being shouted at by their superiors, like a chain gang – but you are trained not to look. It is like a mantra: the Sheikh built the city. The Sheikh built the city. Workers? What workers?

Sahinal Monir, a slim 24-year-old from the deltas of Bangladesh. "To get you here, they tell you Dubai is heaven. Then you get here and realise it is hell," he says. Four years ago, an employment agent arrived in Sahinal's village in Southern Bangladesh. He told the men of the village that there was a place where they could earn 40,000 takka a month (£400) just for working nine-to-five on construction projects. It was a place where they would be given great accommodation, great food, and treated well. All they had to do was pay an up-front fee of 220,000 takka (£2,300) for the work visa – a fee they'd pay off in the first six months, easy. So Sahinal sold his family land, and took out a loan from the local lender, to head to this paradise. As soon as he arrived at Dubai airport, his passport was taken from him by his construction company. He has not seen it since. He was told brusquely that from now on he would be working 14-hour days in the desert heat – where western tourists are advised not to stay outside for even five minutes in summer, when it hits 55 degrees – for 500 dirhams a month (£90), less than a quarter of the wage he was promised. If you don't like it, the company told him, go home. "But how can I go home? You have my passport, and I have no money for the ticket," he said. "Well, then you'd better get to work," they replied.

college teachers do a good job because of qualities that they already have when they complete their undergraduate education: a high level of intelligence, enthusiasm for ideas and an ability to communicate. In this regard, they are like those who go into other knowledge-based professions

Moreover, as in other knowledge-based professions, college faculties can be trusted to do their jobs well with minimal external supervision, assessment and in-service training

These reflections lead me to a simple proposal. Adopt the same model for grade school and high school teaching that works for colleges. Currently, few of the best students from the best colleges are grade school or high school teachers. (The most encouraging data merely suggest that high school teachers may be a bit above average, while grade school teachers are considerably below average)

Today, however, Europe is talking about “the French question”: can the Socialist government of President François Hollande pull France out of its slow decline and prevent it from slipping permanently into Europe’s second tier?

At stake is whether a social democratic system that for decades prided itself on being the model for providing a stable and high standard of living for its citizens can survive the combination of globalization, an aging population and the acute fiscal shocks of recent years.

France’s friends, Germany in particular, fear that Mr. Hollande may simply lack the political courage to confront his allies and make the necessary decisions.

Georgia and Patterson Inman were among the wealthiest kids in America: When they turn 21, the family claims, the twins will inherit a trust fund worth $1 billion. They and their father were the last living heirs to the vast Industrial Age fortune of the Duke family, tobacco tycoons who once controlled the American cigarette market, established Duke University and, through the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, continue to give away hundreds of millions of dollars.

Raised by two drug addicts with virtually unlimited wealth, Georgia and Patterson survived a gilded childhood that was also a horror story of Dickensian neglect and abuse. They were globe-trotting trust-fund babies who snorkeled in Fiji, owned a pet lion cub and considered it normal to bring loose diamonds to elementary school for show and tell. And yet they also spent their childhoods inhaling freebase fumes, locked in cellars and deadbolted into their bedrooms at night in the secluded Wyoming mountains and on their ancestral South Carolina plantation. While their father spent millions on drug binges and extravagances, the children lived like terrified prisoners, kept at bay by a revolving door of some four dozen nannies and caregivers, underfed, undereducated, scarcely noticed except as objects of wrath.

As a 13-year-old orphan in 1965 taken in by his aunt Doris Duke, Walker – then called "Skipper" – had romped around her lavish 14,000-square-foot Hawaiian estate without regard for property or propriety, shooting her Christmas ornaments with a dart gun, setting fire to crates of expensive teak and exploding a bomb in her pool. He was hideously spoiled, and stinking rich from three trust funds: one from his father, Walker Inman Sr., heir to an Atlanta cotton fortune and stepson to American Tobacco Company founder "Buck" Duke; one from his mother, Georgia Fagan; the third from his grandmother, Buck's widow Nanaline Duke, who left the bulk of her $45 million estate to her little grandson. Altogether, on Walker's 21st birthday he would inherit a reported $65 million ($500 million in today's dollars), a fortune so vast that Time predicted the boy would rank as "one of the wealthiest men of the late 20th century."

Thousands of Syrian civilians have finally been allowed to leave the besieged Damascus suburb of Moadamiya.

The exodus of civilians has been made possible by an apparent relaxation of a blockade by government forces.

The situation has become so desperate that earlier this month Muslim clerics issued a religious ruling allowing people to eat cats, dogs and donkeys just to survive.

Syria is a small, poor, and crowded country. On the map, it appears about the size of Washington state or Spain, but only about a quarter of its 185,000 square kilometers is arable land. That is, “economic Syria” is about as large as a combination of Maryland and Connecticut or Switzerland.

Except for a narrow belt along the Mediterranean, the whole country is subject to extreme temperatures that cause frequent dust storms and periodic droughts. Four years of devastating drought from 2006 to 2011 turned Syria into a land like the American “dust bowl” of the 1930s.

The most important physical aspect of these storms, as was the experience in America in the 1930s, was the removal of the topsoil. Politically, they triggered the civil war.

she has not had running water for more than five months — nor is there any tap water in her near future — because of a punishing and relentless drought in California

In the Gallegos household and more than 500 others in Tulare County, residents cannot flush a toilet, fill a drinking glass, wash dishes or clothes, or even rinse their hands without reaching for a bottle or bucket.

For months, families called county and state officials asking what they should do when their water ran out, only to be told that there was no public agency that could help them.

There were many possibilities before 1914. One ingenious proposal was for a United States of Austria, which would have carved the empire into a series of federal language-based states, including small urban enclaves to protect (but also isolate) German speakers. This could have been achieved only by the destruction of Magyar imperialism, but Franz Ferdinand at different points seems to have seen this as worth risking. The archduke also toyed with universal suffrage, knowing that the threat alone might keep the Magyar and German minorities in line.

these are ghosts that have haunted Europe ever since — possibilities whose disappearance unleashed evils inconceivable in the stuffy, hypocritical, but relatively decent and orderly world of the Hapsburg empire.

The Hapsburg rulers might have been shortsighted, cynical and incompetent, but they ruled over a paradise compared to the horrors that followed. The successor states were desperately weak, and almost all contained fractions of those minorities that had caused the Hapsburgs such problems.

As I and other scholars have tried to show, Hirohito, from the start of his rule in 1926, was a dynamic, activist and conflicted monarch who operated within a complex system of irresponsibility inherited from his grandfather, the Meiji emperor, who oversaw the start of Japan’s epochal modernization.

Hirohito (known in Japan as Showa, the name of his reign) represented an ideology and an institution — a system constructed to allow the emperor to interject his will into the decision-making process, before prime ministers brought cabinet decisions to him for his approval. Because he operated behind the scenes, the system allowed his advisers to later insist that he had acted only in accordance with their advice.

In fact, Hirohito was never a puppet. He failed to prevent his army from invading Manchuria in 1931, which caused Japan to withdraw from the League of Nations, but he sanctioned the full-scale invasion of China in 1937, which moved Japan into a state of total war. He exercised close control over the use of chemical weapons in China and sanctioned the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. Even after the war, when a new, American-modeled Constitution deprived him of sovereignty, he continued to meddle in politics.

ATHENS — The United States, wading into the international efforts to shape Greece’s economic and geopolitical orientation, is pushing the leftist government in Athens to resist Russia’s energy overtures.

The dueling sales pitches, reminiscent of a Cold War struggle, come as debt-burdened Greece is desperate for new sources of revenue of the sort that a gas pipeline could bring.

That pipeline would carry Russian gas to Europe through Turkey and Greece, bypassing pipelines that run through Ukraine.

Coates demonstrates that white Americans’ fear of black Americans, and their impulse to control blacks, are integral to the rise of the carceral state. A result is that one of every four black men born since the late 1970s has spent time in prison, at profound cost to his family. For this, Coates holds Moynihan, in part, responsible.

My argument is that mass incarceration is built on a long history of viewing black people as unequal in general, and criminal in the specific.

Moynihan presented a portrait to the president of an America riven by two groups—hard-working, law-abiding, working-class whites and criminal and scheming blacks.

n recent years, historians have rubbed much of the luster from the Civil War and questioned its sanctification. Should we consecrate a war that killed and maimed over a million Americans? Or should we question, as many have in recent conflicts, whether this was really a war of necessity that justified its appalling costs?

Unlike the revisionists of old, Goldfield sees slavery as the bedrock of the Southern cause and abolition as the war's great achievement. But he argues that white supremacy was so entrenched, North and South, that war and Reconstruction could never deliver true racial justice to freed slaves, who soon became subject to economic peonage, Black Codes, Jim Crow, and rampant lynching.

Nor did the war knit the nation back together. Instead, the South became a stagnant backwater, a resentful region that lagged and resisted the nation's progress. It would take a century and the Civil Rights struggle for blacks to achieve legal equality, and for the South to emerge from poverty and isolation.

American education is not without its problems, but, as Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz masterfully demonstrated in their recent book The Race Between Education and Technology, the issue isn’t that schooling has actually gotten worse, it is that the rate of progress has slowed down.

That’s not ideal, but it hardly amounts to a collapse of the social fabric

Brooks is right that materialist explanations for social decline are unpersuasive, but if the streets are safer and kids are doing better in school than their parents, then what is it that needs explaining?

Symbols matter. They say at a glimpse what words cannot, encapsulating beliefs and aspirations, prejudices and fears. Having no intrinsic value, they take meaning from the way we use them, changing over time along with our actions. The most obvious example is the ancient “gammadion,” which in early Eastern cultures meant “god,” “good luck,” “eternity” and other benign conjurations. We know it today as the swastika, and a quarter-century of usage by the Nazis forever poisoned it in Western culture.

Southern “heritage” groups who oppose removing the battle flag are reluctant to acknowledge that this same dynamic has tainted their cherished emblem. But it has.

Whatever the flag meant from 1865 to 1940, the flag’s misuse by a white minority of outspokenly bigoted and often violent people has indelibly shifted that meaning. It is now remembered around the world with images of defiant governors standing in schoolhouse doors, with the snapping dogs of Birmingham, with police barricades to keep black youths out of classrooms, with beatings and lynchings in the night, with churches set ablaze, with fear, intimidation, hatred and the constant reminder that the descendants of slaves were not welcome in their own country.

Life might be easier for European churches if a neat line could be drawn between (i) benighted lands far away, where bad things happened and co-religionists had to be supported, and (ii) the flatter, more orderly playing-field of Europe where people could expect, from the moment they arrived, to be treated as free and equal human beings, so that no group needed or deserved more help or attention than any other. For better or worse, no such line exists. The bad developments of benighted lands have arrived in Europe's heart, and European churches are having to make their choices, some of them difficult, accordingly.