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Two prominent conservative law professors have concluded that Donald J. Trump is ineligible to be president under a provision of the Constitution that bars people who have engaged in an insurrection from holding government offic

The professors — William Baude of the University of Chicago and Michael Stokes Paulsen of the University of St. Thomas — studied the question for more than a year and detailed their findings in a long article to be published next year in The University of Pennsylvania Law Review.

“When we started out, neither of us was sure what the answer was,” Professor Baude said. “People were talking about this provision of the Constitution. We thought: ‘We’re constitutional scholars, and this is an important constitutional question. We ought to figure out what’s really going on here.’ And the more we dug into it, the more we realized that we had something to add.”

he Gutenberg Parenthesis is a term coined by Danish scholar Lars Ole Sauerberg, who proposed that the history of literary culture as we had hitherto known it – the 500-plus years from the invention of Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press in the mid-15th century until around the turn of the millennium – would come to be regarded as a mere blip.

Digital technology would transform our cultural institutions by undermining their core foundation: the intellectual property and moral authority bound up in individual authorship. The future of knowledge production would be collective and collaborative – entailing, in essence, a return to the oral tradition of the world before print.

In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, US journalist Jeff Jarvis considers this thesis and its possible implications. He is anxious that we should retain what was good and useful about analog-era gatekeeping structures, which played an important role in “recommending quality, certifying fact, supporting creativity. What must we create to replace these functions?”

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same

Why wouldn’t you choose a girl? That such a statement should be so casually uttered by an old cowboy like Ericsson—or by anyone, for that matter—is monumental. For nearly as long as civilization has existed, patriarchy—enforced through the rights of the firstborn son—has been the organizing principle, with few exceptions

“You have to be concerned about the future of all women,” Roberta Steinbacher, a nun-turned-social-psychologist, said in a 1984 People profile of Ericsson. “There’s no question that there exists a universal preference for sons.”

What’s striking about AITA is the language in which it states its central question: you’re asked not whether I did the right thing but, rather, what sort of person I’m being.

We would have a different morality, and an impoverished one, if we judged actions only with those terms of pure evaluation, “right” or “wrong,” and judged people only “good” or “bad.”

, if Aristotle’s ethics is to be sold as a work of what we call self-help, we have to ask: How helpful is it?

Behind the strikes, inflation numbers and talk of all the difficult decisions politicians have to make are a multitude of trapped people, their choices shrinking. People in bad relationships who cannot leave because rents and mortgages have gone up so being single is no longer viable. People who would like to have a child, or another child, but cannot afford its care, or who would like to return to work after having a child but the sums just don’t work. People in bad jobs with no security or benefits who cannot quit and look for alternatives because they have no savings to buffer rising costs. The end result is a crisis not just of the economy, but of freedom.

With that crisis, an entire liberal ambition becomes thwarted. We talk of liberalism in grand abstract terms, as the noble heart of an ideal political order that promotes human rights, the rule of law, civil liberties and freedom from religious dogma and prejudice

But when economic arrangements themselves become coercive and abusive, then political liberalism can coexist with, and indeed mask, a state of illiberalism and bondage. In the throes of personal challenges, lofty political ideals feel remote and irrelevant. All that people like Jane and others have the time or energy to register is a set of invisible oppressive economic forces that simply must be weathered because they are facts of nature

The timing of this Japan obsession was impeccable: It came at almost the exact moment Japan’s remarkable rise turned into a sustained decline in economic power. Here’s the ratio of Japan’s gross domestic product to America’s, adjusted for differences in purchasing power:

China has seemed to be faltering lately, and some have been asking whether China’s future path might resemble that of Japan.

My answer is that it probably won’t — that China will do worse. But to understand why I say that, you need to know something about what happened to Japan, which wasn’t at all the catastrophe I think many people imagine.

Germany is more populous than ever — an additional 1.1 million people lived in the country, now of 84.3 million people, at the end of 2022 — thanks to migration

One in four Germans have had at least one of their grandparents born abroad. More than 18 percent of people living in Germany were not born there.

In Frankfurt and a few other major cities, residents with a migration history are the majority. People with non-German sounding names run cities, universities and hospitals. The German couple that invented the Pfizer Covid vaccine have Turkish roots. Cem Ozdemir, a German-born Green politician whose parents came from Turkey, is one of the current government’s most popular minsters. Two of the three governing parties are run by men born in Iran.

In an academic career that included more than two decades as a professor in the philosophy department of the University of Toronto, following appointments at Cambridge and Stanford, Professor Hacking’s intellectual scope seemed to know no bounds. Because of his ability to span multiple academic fields, he was often described as a bridge builder.

“Ian Hacking was a one-person interdisciplinary department all by himself,” Cheryl Misak, a philosophy professor at the University of Toronto, said in a phone interview. “Anthropologists, sociologists, historians and psychologists, as well as those working on probability theory and physics, took him to have important insights for their disciplines.”

Professor Hacking wrote several landmark works on the philosophy and history of probability, including “The Taming of Chance” (1990), which was named one of the best 100 nonfiction books of the 20th century by the Modern Library.

“Mitigating the risk of extinction from A.I. should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks, such as pandemics and nuclear war,” reads a one-sentence statement released by the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit organization.

The open letter has been signed by more than 350 executives, researchers and engineers working in A.I.

The signatories included top executives from three of the leading A.I. companies: Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI; Demis Hassabis, chief executive of Google DeepMind; and Dario Amodei, chief executive of Anthropic.

Nicolas de Villiers said the theme park – whose subject matter includes Clovis, king of the Franks, and a new €20m (£17m) show about the birth of modern cinema – was not about politics. He said: “What we want when an audience leaves our shows – which are works of art and were never history lessons – is to feel better and bigger, because the hero has brought some light into their hearts … Puy du Fou is more about legends than a history book.”

He said the park’s trademark high-drama historical extravaganzas worked because, at a time of global crisis, people had a hunger to understand their roots and traditions. “The artistic language we invented corresponds to the era we live in. People have a thirst for their roots, a thirst to understand what made them what they are today, which means their civilisation. They want to understand what went before them.” He called it a “profound desire to rediscover who we are”.

e added: “People who come here don’t have an ideology, they come here and say it’s beautiful, it’s good, I liked it.”

A.I. is coming for workers in every sector, no matter their academic pedigree or sartorial choices. Now the W.G.A. has delivered a gift to future union negotiators. It’s illuminated an approach to negotiating around technology, and demonstrated the ways in which a white-collar rank-and-file can leverage labor solidarity toward the shared benefit of both management and employees.

Union negotiators can point to this agreement when employers refuse to bargain over technology in good faith. Moreover, the language in this agreement can serve as a model for other workers and employers, union and nonunion, who agree that neither an outright ban nor unchecked use of A.I. would be a sensible way forward. Workers can pressure employers to use technology to augment rather than automate work, asserting that technology does more than just increase the size of labor’s slice. It enlarges the whole pie.

Hitchens’s style of left-wing radicalism is now out of fashion, but it has a long and venerable history: George Orwell’s unwavering opposition to totalitarianism and censorship, Bayard Rustin’s advocacy for universal civil rights without appealing to tribalism and identity politics, the post-communist anti-totalitarianism that emerged on the European left in the second half of the twentieth century.

Hitchens described himself as a “First Amendment absolutist,

Hitchens’ most fundamental political and moral conviction was universalism. He loathed nationalism and argued that the international system should be built around a “common standard for justice and ethics”

“People who are vaccinated and relatively healthy who are getting COVID are not getting that sick,” Lisa Lee, an epidemiologist at Virginia Tech, told me. “And so people are thinking, Wow, I’ve had COVID. It wasn’t that bad. I don’t really care anymore.”

Still, there are many reasons to continue caring about COVID. About 300 people are still dying every day; COVID is on track to be the third-leading cause of death in the U.S. for the third year running. The prospect of developing long COVID is real and terrifying, as are mounting concerns about reinfections.

ow more than ever, we must remember that COVID is not just a personal threat but a community one.

Long dismissed as wacky and harmless gadflies, the group, called the Reichsbürger, or Citizens of the Reich, which does not recognize the modern German state, has seen its ranks grow by 2,000 to some 21,000 members since the first Covid-19 lockdowns, government estimates show.

Among those arrested this week were a judge, a doctor, a classical tenor and a former police officer, officials said, as a disturbing picture emerged on Thursday of a group that had expanded its appeal well beyond its roots on the political fringe.

At least 15 had strong links to the military, including several former or current soldiers and two reservists with access to weapons, putting the German authorities on high aler

Taiwan is now on pace to spend more than $19 billion on defense in 2023. But China spends more than $200 billion a year

Instead of building large, conventional hardware (airplanes, tanks, submarines), military experts have urged Taiwan to focus on so-called asymmetric capabilities (anti-ship weapons, surface-to-air missiles, stockpiles of small arms and ammunition), which have served Ukraine well in repelling a larger invader. That, combined with a bigger force of civilian reserves, could make the cost of an invasion too high for China. This approach has earned a nickname in global defense circles: “the porcupine strategy.”

China now has the world’s largest navy, with more than 350 ships and submarines. Its rocket force maintains the world’s largest arsenal of land-based missiles, which would feature in any war with Taiwan.

t feels like a gold rush,” says Timnit Gebru. “In fact, it is a gold rush. And a lot of the people who are making money are not the people actually in the midst of it. But it’s humans who decide whether all this should be done or not. We should remember that we have the agency to do that.”

something that the frenzied conversation about AI misses out: the fact that many of its systems may well be built on a huge mess of biases, inequalities and imbalances of power.

As the co-leader of Google’s small ethical AI team, Gebru was one of the authors of an academic paper that warned about the kind of AI that is increasingly built into our lives, taking internet searches and user recommendations to apparently new levels of sophistication and threatening to master such human talents as writing, composing music and analysing images

“We make a distinction between ‘open’ and ‘closed’ societies, but there is also a distinction between ‘openings’ and ‘closings,’” Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political scientist and one of the foremost chroniclers of the collapse of the Soviet empire, told me

“The generation of Soviet people in the 1970s and 1980s lived in a closed society that was opening, discovering that things that had been impossible were becoming possible. Putin’s is a period of radical closings. People are losing things they felt had finally been granted them. Openings led to hope; this system leads to hopelessness.”

Back then, non-Russian ethnic groups may have identified the Soviet yoke with Russia, but Communist ideology was universalist, and the Russians who opposed it saw themselves as allied with other oppressed nationalities, and with the West, in their struggle. Russians who arrived in New York or Tel Aviv or Berlin felt free of the taint of collusion; and since the ranks of dissidents included many writers, poets, musicians and artists, Russian culture shared in the glow of liberation.

“Jews scam, n----rs rape, and I mag dump.”Teixeira raised his weapon, aimed at an unseen target and fired 10 times in rapid succession, emptying the magazine of bullets.

Previously unpublished videos and chat logs reviewed by The Washington Post, as well as interviews with several of Teixeira’s close friends, suggest that he was readying for what he imagined would be a violent struggle against a legion of perceived adversaries — including Blacks, political liberals, Jews, gay and transgender people — who would make life intolerable for the kind of person Teixeira professed to be: an Orthodox Christian, politically conservative and ready to defend, if not the government of the United States, a set of ideals on which he imagined it was founded.

For Teixeira, firearms practice seemed to be more than a hobby. “He used the term ‘race war’ quite a few times,” said a close friend who spent time with Teixeira in an online community on Discord, a platform popular with video game players, and had lengthy private phone and video calls with him over the course of several years.“He did call himself racist, multiple times,” the friend said in an interview. “I would say he was proud of it.”