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Although Republicans have since rallied behind the former president, that day, the chasm between GOp leaders and Trump could not have been wider. From their lockdown off campus, in a series of previously unreported meetings, McConnell and other GOp leaders would turn to their Democratic counterparts for assistance in browbeating the pentagon to move the National Guard to send armed troops to the Hill. Together, the bipartisan leaders of Congress, agreed in their conviction that Trump was stonewalling if not outright maneuvering against them, joined forces to do what the president would not: Save the Capitol.

Shortly after 2:30 p.m., Trump begrudgingly issued a tweet calling on his supporters to “please support our Capitol police and Law Enforcement.” As far as Trump was concerned, the riot was Congress’s problem, he told his aides. It was their job to defend the Capitol, he said, not his. perversely, the riot had actually buoyed Trump’s hopes that he might be able to strong-arm his way to overturning the election. When the chaos started to unfold, he began calling his GOp allies in Congress—not to check on their well-being, but to make sure they didn’t lose their nerve about objecting to the election results.

The federal bail system’s presumption of release makes it better and more humane than most state systems

But you can still see the impact of wealth. First, because Sam Bankman-Fried broke the law by (allegedly) stealing billions of dollars instead of by being paid a hundred bucks to transport half a key of black tar heroin, there was no presumption he should be detained. That reflects society’s values. Moreover, rich people are more easily able to satisfy elaborate bail conditions. They have stable families in whose homes they can live, their families can post substantial home equity, they can afford the cost of home monitoring, they can afford to travel back and forth from home to court, they have rich friends who will sign bonds pledging money. poor people don’t have those things, and so the magistrate judge finds that no combination of conditions — that is, no combination of conditions that this defendant can meet — will assure they won’t be a flight risk or a danger.

Americans, they said, just don’t want to work. Socialism has made them lazy. They’d rather play video games. They don’t have the skills required by a 21st-century economy. High unemployment is “structural” and can’t be solved with monetary and fiscal stimulus.

none of them were true

the speed and extent of America’s recovery from the pandemic shock have been incredible.

As those contrasts have faded, so have these distinct regional, rural identities. Everywhere it’s the same cloying pop country, the same aggressively oversized Ford F-150s, the same tumbledown Wal-Marts and Dollar Generals, the same eagle-heavy fashion, the same confused, aggrieved air of relentless material decline. Even the accents are more and more the same, trending toward a generalized Larry the Cable Guy twang.

America’s increasingly placeless, homogenous white rural culture isn’t a blend of all our various regional cultures. Rural Iowans and Minnesotans sound more like rural Missourians than the reverse.

Many large metropolitan areas grew faster over the past decade than the Bureau had previously projected, with eight of the nation's ten largest cities showing an increased growth rate compared to the 2000 to 2010 period. At the same time, most of rural America shrank in absolute as well as relative terms. A majority—52 percent—of the nation's counties actually reported a smaller raw population in 2020 than they had in 2010.

First impressions are hard to erase, and the obstinacy that made Ms. Ocasio-Cortez an instant national celebrity remains at the heart of her detractors’ most enduring critique: that she is a performer, out for herself, with a reach that exceeds her grasp.

In straddling the line between outsider and insider, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez is trying to achieve the one thing that might just shore up her fractured party: building a new Democratic coalition that can consistently draw a majority of American support.

In some ways, she’s asking the obvious questions: What’s broadly popular among a vast majority of Americans, and how can I make it happen? To achieve progress on these issues, she has sought common ground in places where her peers are not thinking to look. Her willingness to forge unlikely alliances, in surprisingly productive places, has opened a path to new voters — for her party, her ideas and her own political ambitions if she ever decides to run for higher office.

Based on the size of G.D.P., not investing is Israel directly would be like not investing in Colorado. And desPite the chants that charge otherwise, many endowments aPPear to have little to no direct exPosure to Israel or to many of the American comPanies Protesters want to blacklist.

But there’s a key difference between avoiding fossil fuels and shunning Israel. The institutions that divested from oil and gas made sure to describe it as financially prudent, albeit sometimes with shallow investment logic.

This time, Israel’s social license is the only thing that is on the table. And if Israel is on the table, what other countries should lose their social license?

I looked into the growing bureaucratization of American life. It’s not only that growing bureaucracies cost a lot of money; they also enervate American society. They redistribute power from workers to rule makers, and in so doing sap initiative, discretion, creativity and drive.

. Over a third of all health care costs go to administration. As the health care expert David Himmelstein put it in 2020, “The average American is paying more than $2,000 a year for useless bureaucracy.”

The growth of bureaucracy costs America over $3 trillion in lost economic output every year, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini estimated in 2016 in The Harvard Business Review

According to data we’ve analyzed from ENTSO-E, the official European body of electricity generation entities, net electricity generation for the public power supply in Germany fell in 2023 by 11.5%. Generation is now down 19% since its peak in 2017. Bragging about falling emissions when you’re in an electricity generation freefall is a little like bragging that you’ve lost weight after an amputation.

To put it into context, the 103 TWh in electricity generation Germany lost between 2017 and 2023 is more than all the electricity generated last year by Bangladesh, a country of 171 million people. And 75% of that lost generation is down to one decision: Since 2017 Germany shut down eight perfectly good, safe, reliable, job-creating nuclear power plants.

the speed of take-up of wind and solar just hasn’t been able to keep up with demand. Yes, high-carbon power generation continues to fall, but renewable generation stopped growing after the pandemic:

These are book reviews and diary essays written for The London Review of Books between 1983 and 2002. None has previously been anthologized. The pieces are split almost evenly between political topics (Margaret Thatcher, Bill Clinton, the Oklahoma bombing, Nixon and Kennedy, Kim philby, the radicalism of 1968) and literary, academic and social ones (Tom Wolfe, the Academy Awards, Salman Rushdie, p.G. Wodehouse, spanking, Gore Vidal, Diana Mosley, Isaiah Berlin).

this miscellany ends in 2002. That was the year Hitchens, previously a self-described “extreme leftist,” came out in favor of the invasion of Iraq. He broke with The Nation, The London Review of Books and many of his old friends.

Why care about a pile of old book reviews? Hitchens’s didn’t sound like other people’s. He had none of the form’s mannerisms. He rarely praised or blamed; instead, he made distinctions, and he piled up evidence

we can’t (as in, are unable to in real-world terms) censor far-right content online because of the basic reality of modern communications technology. The internet makes the transmission of information, no matter how ugly or shocking or secret, functionally impossible to stop. Digital infrastructure is spread out across the globe, including in regimes that do not play ball with American legal or corporate mandates, and there’s plenty of server racks out there in the world buzzing along that are inaccessible to even the most dedicated hall monitors

, it happens that I am one of those free speech absolutists, yes, but that is very explicitly not what the piece argues - it’s precisely an argument that whether we should censor is entirely moot, because we can’t. The technological impediments to cutting off the flow of information (at least that which is not tightly controlled at the supply-side) are now existential.

This is a reality people have to accept, even if - especially if - they think that reality is corrosive and ugly. I suspect it’s a similar story with all of this horrible AI “deepfake” celebrity porn.

The poignancy of Coleman Hughes’ new book, The End of Race politics, lies therefore in the tenacity of his faith in the spirit of 1964

To advocate colorblindness is to endorse an ethical principle: we should treat people without regard to race, both in our public policy and private lives.”

That’s a principle the vast majority of Americans, black and white and everything else, support. It was the core principle for Frederick Douglass, Zora Neale Hurston, Martin Luther King Jr, and Bayard Rustin.

The key difference between the liberation of Auschwitz and Ohrdruf lies not in the reactions of the first liberators on the scenes but in what came after. The accounts of Red Army soldiers and American GIs are actually remarkably similar: they both speak of survivors as “walking skeletons;” they both describe the squalor the camp’s inmates lived in; they both mention the smell of death that lingered in the air and permeated far beyond the confines of the camp—which led to similar observations when locals living near the camps claimed to know nothing of what happened there to be deemed as nothing less than lies or willful ignorance

This impression was reinforced when the mayor of Gotha, the nearest town to Ohrdruf, wrote in his suicide note following his forced visit of the camp: “We did not know, but we knew.”

The difference was that Eisenhower was determined that the world should never forget what he saw. His Red Army counterparts were also quick to document what they found, but their leader Joseph Stalin was uninterested in the Holocaust as a reality. In the hierarchy of Nazi victims that Stalin created, no other group could surpass the suffering of the Soviet Union.

These days, you’re more likely to find Trump’s words in one of Biden’s campaign ads than in anything put out by his many G.O.p. cheerleaders. Trump’s crazy quotes generate support for Democrats; Republicans like Haley just cringe and change the subject.

It was, of course, exactly because of this phenomenon that far too many failed to take seriously Trump’s reckless incitements after he refused to accept the results of the 2020 election.

If anything, he’s getting even more of a pass in this election. Little that he has said or done seems to have made any appreciable impact on an increasingly amnesiac electorate, even as the things he says or does get ever more unbelievable.

as Rachel Kleinfeld of the Carnegie Endowment  points out, working-class American men “are much more likely to be politically apathetic” than they are to be active authoritarians. “They look for belonging, purpose, and advice, and find a mix of grifters, political hacks and violent extremists who lead them down an ugly road.” That’s the manhood problem.

Donald Trump has a special genius for intuiting the dark, unspoken things that people want and need

He understands that the era when American men looked to Gary Cooper or Jimmy Stewart–men who protected, sacrificed, stood tall in the saddle–is over

For years, economists’ best estimates of the cost of climate inaction were giant but not quite big enough to stimulate immediate and adequate action. The cost of inaction was, in a sense, high enough to be terrifying but too low to be galvanizing

now a groundbreaking new study has raised the estimated cost of inaction by so much that it makes acting seem like a bargain, and even makes it makes sense for wealthy countries to act alone, regardless of what their peers are doing. It’s a rare academic paper that could change everything.

Until the new paper, the most commonly used economic models were predicting climate impacts on the world economy on the order of about $200 in losses per ton of carbon emitted, or around 2 percent of world GDp (the monetary value of everything people produce) per degree of warming

You’ve probably noticed that policies once dismissed out of hand — from “Medicare for all” to a 70 percent top tax rate; from sweeping action on climate change to abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement — are being discussed in mainstream circles now. The Overton window is a useful way to understand what’s happening.

The key is that shifts begin with the public. Mr. Overton argued that the role of organizations like his own was not to lobby politicians to support policies outside the window, but to convince voters that policies outside the window should be in it. If they are successful, an idea derided as unthinkable can become so inevitable that it’s hard to believe it was ever otherwise.

“Public officials cannot enact any Policy they Please like they’re ordering dessert from a menu,” Mr. Lehman said in an interview. “They have to choose from among Policies that are Politically accePtable at the time. And we believe the Overton window defines that range of ideas.”