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Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop.

The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons.

arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too

we've allowed and encouraged economics to slip the bonds of politics. This has given successful entrepreneurs, corporate executives, bankers, and financiers an unprecedented degree of autonomy, with profit-seeking overriding political or cultural loyalties or restraints of any kind. Up until recently, most of us have hoped or assumed that everyone would benefit from this development — a rising tide raises all boats and so forth — but the reality has proven more problematic.

The world seen through an economic lens is a place where people are motivated entirely by instrumental concerns — above all by concerns for profit and loss, competitive advantage and disadvantage. When the government acts in a way to diminish profits, it is doing something (in economic terms) that is unambiguously bad.

something that is economically unjustifiable may be politically necessary and even salutary. Unlike economics, politics combines instrumental considerations with non-instrumental ideals such as community, loyalty, citizenship, and the common good. A world in which these ideals have been sacrificed on the altar of economic profit-seeking will be a world…well, it will be a world that looks a lot like our own.

The American Century, contends the historian Adam Tooze, began in 1916

In “The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931,” Mr. Tooze identifies those struggles as the crucial moment when the Allies ran out of funds. President Woodrow Wilson ordered the Federal Reserve to block additional loans by J.P. Morgan & Co. that would have kept the Allies going, because nothing, in his view, justified further slaughter.

Perceiving minimal differences in the two sides’ war aims, Wilson first offered mediation and then called for “peace without victory.”

When we've actually investigated monogamy in the animal kingdom, we've discovered that monogamy is close to non-existent. Almost no mammals mate for life

Even the reputedly monogamous world of birds - remember Nora Ephron's words "Want monogamy? Marry a swan!"? - what we thought we knew, we found out to be false:

Reports of extra-pair copulations -- henceforth, E.P.C.'s -- in animals previously thought to be monogamous have come hot and heavy during the last decade

What lies behind this trans-Atlantic policy paralysis? I’m increasingly convinced that it’s a response to interest-group pressure. Consciously or not, policy makers are catering almost exclusively to the interests of rentiers — those who derive lots of income from assets, who lent large sums of money in the past, often unwisely, but are now being protected from loss at everyone else’s expense.

the argument against helping the unemployed is framed in terms of economic risks: Do anything to create jobs and interest rates will soar, runaway inflation will break out, and so on. But these risks keep not materializing. Interest rates remain near historic lows, while inflation outside the price of oil — which is determined by world markets and events, not U.S. policy — remains low.

the only real beneficiaries of Pain Caucus policies (aside from the Chinese government) are the rentiers: bankers and wealthy individuals with lots of bonds in their portfolios.

What Lelyveld describes as Gandhi’s increasing inflexibility—owing to his allegiance “to the dictates of his ‘inner voice’”—is unquestionably one of the reasons that the eventual British departure from India was more violent and tragic than it had to be.

Gandhi’s political-spiritual program was entirely unrealistic and quickly became obsolete. “Not only did he reject birth control and recommend abstinence as a means of limiting population,” Lelyveld writes, “but he had no scheme that addressed glaring inequalities in land ownership and distribution beyond a wishful, wooly theory of ‘trusteeship’ that basically relied on the benevolence of the wealthy.” As the Indian scholar Sunil Khilnani once wrote, Gandhi] “assumed that the village could continue as a productive unit [in the absence of caste], a debatable judgment at the very least. It also led him to believe that caste could be dissolved through pressure of moral argument and example—in contrast to Nehru, for whom industrialization and the social relations it set in place were both essential practical solvents of the bonds of caste.” Gandhi’s romanticization of rural and village life will never be a solution to the problems of Indian society.

I’ve been working on a book that required talking to a lot of entrepreneurs and have been struck by how many told me some version of: “I used the recession to downsize and get really efficient. None of those jobs are coming back. I am doing a little hiring now, but for people with more skills.”

Thanks to a credit bubble over the last decade, we created a lot of jobs for people — in construction and retail — who did not have globally competitive skills or post-high school degrees. Those workers will need retooling.

“too few Americans who attend college and vocational schools choose fields of study that will give them specific skills that employers are seeking. Our interviews point to potential shortages in many occupations, such as nutritionists, welders, and nurse’s aides — in addition to the often-predicted shortfall in computer specialists and engineers.”

The newspaper interviewed 20 people who worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They described, and the newspaper verified, temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius, in the warehouse, causing several employees to faint and fall ill and the company to maintain ambulances outside. Employees were hounded to “make rate,” meaning to pick or pack 120, 125, 150 pieces an hour, the rates rising with tenure. Tenure, though, wasn’t long, because the work force was largely temps from an agency. Permanent jobs were a mirage that seldom came. And so workers toiled even when injured to avoid being fired. A woman who left to have breast cancer surgery returned a week later to find that her job had been “terminated.”

Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own.

The more I travel, the more I observe that Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.

To resolve a crisis in which the impossible becomes possible it is necessary to think about the unthinkable. To start with, it is imperative to prepare for the possibility of default and defection from the eurozone in the case of Greece, Portugal, and perhaps Ireland. To prevent a financial meltdown, four sets of measures would have to be taken.

First, bank deposits have to be protected. If a euro deposited in a Greek bank would be lost to the depositor, a euro deposited in an Italian bank would then be worth less than one in a German or Dutch bank and there would be a run on the banks of other deficit countries.

Second, some banks in the defaulting countries have to be kept functioning in order to keep the economy from breaking down.

In my view, civilizations don’t rise, fall, and then gently decline, as inevitably and predictably as the four seasons or the seven ages of man. History isn’t one smooth, parabolic curve after another. Its shape is more like an exponentially steepening slope that quite suddenly drops off like a cliff.

when you look back on the history of past civilizations, a striking feature is the speed with which most of them collapsed, regardless of the cause.

In the realm of power, as in the domain of the bond vigilantes, you’re fine until you’re not fine—and when you’re not fine, you’re suddenly in a terrifying death spiral.

In 2010, with Greece crippled by debt and threatening the survival of the euro, the European Union, the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank began imposing German-inspired austerity on the country. The aim was to slash the budget deficit and address fundamental problems like corruption and a failure to collect taxes. Such policies, they promised, would get Greece back on its feet, able to borrow again on financial markets.

Greeks grudgingly went along, assured that painful reform would return the country to growth by 2012. Instead, Greece lost 400,000 jobs that year and continued on a decline that would see a drop in the gross domestic product since 2008 not much different from the one experienced during the first five years of the United States’ Great Depression.

Greece’s unemployment rate was supposed to top out at 15 percent in 2012, according to International Monetary Fund calculations. But it roared to 25 percent that year, reached 27 percent in 2013 and has ticked downward only slightly since.

“The Internet was supposed to be the great equalizer,” said Gina Bianchini, the woman who had appeared on the cover of Fortune. “So why hasn’t our generation of women moved the needle?”

identity politics pushed many people into homogeneous groups; Scott Walker, one of the only African-Americans in the class to try founding a start-up, said in an interview that he regretted spending so much time at his all-black fraternity, which took him away from the white friends from freshman year who went on to found and then invest in technology companies.

But there were still many hoops women had greater trouble jumping through — components that had to be custom-built, capital that needed to be secured from a small number of mostly male-run venture firms.

a new history of the 20th century: the American century, which according to Tooze began not in 1945 but in 1916, the year U.S. output overtook that of the entire British empire.

The two books narrate the arc of American economic supremacy from its beginning to its apogee. It is both ominous and fitting that the second volume of the story was published in 2014, the year in which—at least by one economic measure—that supremacy came to an end.

“Britain has the earth, and Germany wants it.” Such was Woodrow Wilson’s analysis of the First World War in the summer of 1916,

The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds.

Just look at all the people who have overreacted to campus micro-aggressions. The University of Illinois fired a professor who taught the Roman Catholic view on homosexuality. The University of Kansas suspended a professor for writing a harsh tweet against the N.R.A. Vanderbilt University derecognized a Christian group that insisted that it be led by Christians.

Moreover, provocateurs and ridiculers expose the stupidity of the fundamentalists. Fundamentalists are people who take everything literally. They are incapable of multiple viewpoints.

Poland’s central bank slashed its main interest rate by 50 basis points to 1.50%, the lowest on record, in response to persistent declines in consumer prices.

The Polish rate cut is the latest in a series of easing measures by central banks across Europe, following the European Central Bank’s decision in late January to launch a program of quantitative easing, under which it will buy more than €1 trillion ($1.12 trillion) of mostly government bonds by September 2016.

. The central bank’s target is an inflation rate of 2.5%.

the French dislike modernity. They mistrust modernity. That is the nub of the problem. They dislike and mistrust it for two reasons. Modernity has redefined space and relegated the state.

“Boeing shortens distances; new technologies annul them.”This is troubling in France because nowhere else is the particularity of place and the singularity of a person’s attachment to it more important. That bond is expressed in the word “terroir,” at once the land, its special characteristics, the nature of its soil, its climate, and the unique human relationship to it. A great Burgundy and an indifferent one may come from properties a hundred yards apart. The soil is not the same, nor the slope of the land. Distance matters. Yet modernity has contempt for it

Humanity has also changed its relationship to the state. The French place deep faith in the state. It is the righter of wrongs, the mediator of human affairs, the source of social justice, the object of duty, and the repository of power. The very word deregulation is odious to the French.

Is income inequality holding back the United States economy? A new report argues that it is, that an unequal distribution in incomes is making it harder for the nation to recover from the recession

The fact that S.&P., an apolitical organization that aims to produce reliable research for bond investors and others, is raising alarms about the risks that emerge from income inequality is a small but important sign of how a debate that has been largely confined to the academic world and left-of-center political circles is becoming more mainstream.

“Our review of the data, as well as a wealth of research on this matter, leads us to conclude that the current level of income inequality in the U.S. is dampening G.D.P. growth,” the S.&P. researchers write

f you are a bank in Paris or Jakarta or São Paulo, you can’t really serve your clients unless you are able to connect them to the global market for dollars. And you can’t do that unless you are in good standing with United States regulators. And you will very much not be in good standing with them if there is evidence you facilitated financing of terrorism or governments that the United States considers global threats.

That’s one of the important reasons that United States-led economic sanctions against Sudan or Iran carry weight. Those countries cannot easily gain access to the global financial system by going to a bank in a more sympathetic country.

the potential rivals for this position have problems of their own. The euro is only a couple of years removed from an existential crisis.China is pushing to internationalize the renminbi, and while its currency is being used more for trade within Asia, it has a long way to go to become a truly global currency. (Among other things, China would need to develop a much deeper market for bonds denominated in its currency than now exists, and start allowing the freer transfer of capital into and out of the country.)

Brazil and Russia, by contrast, are in really bad shape. The largest emerging economies after China, together they have the heft of Germany.

In both countries the currency is sliding. The real hit new lows in November after data revealed the budget deficit reached a record in September.

But Brazil and Russia’s problems have domestic roots too. Since the 1990s Brazil has tended to aim for a primary surplus (before interest payments) of close to 3% of GDP—enough to begin reducing its debts. But Dilma Rousseff, the newly re-elected president, has played havoc with Brazil’s public finances. In 2014 spending has expanded at twice the rate of revenues despite one-off gains from the sale of Libra, an oilfield, and the 4G telecoms spectrum. Brazil’s debt-to-GDP ratio is rising fast.

The slain president’s two personal secretaries battled mudslingers for a quarter-century to shape his image

it is easy to forget how widely underrated Lincoln the president and Lincoln the man were at the time of his death and how successful Hay and Nicolay were in elevating his place in the nation’s collective historical memory.

While Lincoln prided himself on his deep connection to “the people,” he never succeeded in translating his immense popularity with the Northern public into similar regard among the nation’s political and intellectual elites.