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Isn't there quite enough to learn about the world today? Why add to the burden by looking at the past

Historical knowledge is no more and no less than carefully and critically constructed collective memory. As such it can both make us wiser in our public choices and more richly human in our private lives.

Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsider

Why do children dress in costume and knock on strangers' doors to ask for treats on Halloween? The practice can be traced to the ancient Celts, early Roman Catholics and 17th-century British politics.

During some Celtic celebrations of Samhain, villagers disguised themselves in costumes made of animal skins to drive away phantom visitors; banquet tables were prepared and food was left out to placate unwelcome spirits. 

In later centuries, people began dressing as ghosts, demons and other malevolent creatures, performing antics in exchange for food and drink.

there’s one immense difference between “The Irishman” and so much else in American culture.

Whatever else a viewer might think about “The Irishman,” it can be commended for being curious about the exact opposite — about what things look like as they end.

This is a film that can imagine what it’s like to look back on your life and see a version of the world that has expired, and to reckon with how that era was spent, and with whom, and what ruins were made of it, and why.

or nearly a century, a wooden tower has loomed over the prairie town of Andrew in western Canada, rising from the rolling landscape land like a lone sentinel. Built during the agricultural boom of the early 20th century, the grain elevator – and six others that stood nearby – once bore testament to the town’s prosperity.

Andrew is no stranger to loss: over the years, jobs and residents have slowly dwindled. But when its last remaining grain elevator was slated for demolition, the community battled hard to win a stay of execution. “Trying to save this thing was like praying to God,” said Dave Cuthbert, a resident. “You were never certain if your voice was being heard.”

In the 1930s there were nearly 6,000 towers; now fewer than a thousand remain. The destruction, in many ways, mirrors the broader decline of rural communities in western Canada.

Tech companies capable of releasing such a tool have refrained from doing so; in 2011, Google’s chairman at the time said it was the one technology the company had held back because it could be used “in a very bad way.” Some large cities, including San Francisco, have barred police from using facial recognition technology.

without public scrutiny, more than 600 law enforcement agencies have started using Clearview in the past year

The computer code underlying its app, analyzed by The New York Times, includes programming language to pair it with augmented-reality glasses; users would potentially be able to identify every person they saw. The tool could identify activists at a protest or an attractive stranger on the subway, revealing not just their names but where they lived, what they did and whom they knew.

Lind’s originating interest seems to be this

American democracy worked in a certain way in the three decades after World War II, it stopped working that way, and oligarchy ensued. At the heart of the old way was what Lind calls “war-inspired class peace treaties.” In various sectors of the economy and polity, the working class benefited from power-sharing arrangements with business and government, often the result of wartime mobilization. Strong unions helped keep wages high, local political power brokers and party bosses made sure that working-class needs were represented in the marble corridors, and mass-membership organizations put a check on runaway greed by elites.

starting in the 1970s, Lind says, what he calls the neoliberal “managerial elite” challenged this power-sharing and began turning the country into a casino where it always won

The reason I’m flagging the strength of New Zealand’s “comeback” (to borrow a word currently on high rotation in this country) is to highlight a basic fact. The simple point to make is there is no durable economic recovery from the coronavirus unless people are confident that the risks of Covid-19 are contained.

Bloomberg put the dynamic succinctly in its news report of the growth rebound this week: “New Zealanders have gone on a spending spree since the nation eliminated community transmission of Covid-19 in May and then successfully contained sporadic outbreaks.”

But tracking back to the fundamentally fraught nature of this exercise, the risk of flogging the “comeback” too hard is people think the pandemic is over, and a sanctioned complacency creeps in.

On the day after a mob rampaged through the halls of Congress, the mayor of Washington, D.C., Muriel E. Bowser, heaped praise on the Metropolitan Police Department officers who had rushed to restore order after the Capitol’s police force was overwhelmed.

“I’m upset that 706,000 residents of the District of Columbia did not have a single vote in that Congress yesterday despite the fact their officers were putting their lives on the line to defend democracy.”

But Wednesday’s riot, in which 56 city police officers were injured, has become Example One in a renewed and decidedly uphill effort to change the legislators’ minds.

In Britain, Covid now “exceeds the worst-case scenario.” In America, a thousand people die a day, and cases are skyrocketing. In Europe, the numbers are exploding. Covid is ripping savagely across the West. But in the East, meanwhile, life is slowly returning to some semblance of normality.

That’s a remarkable development — the West, after all, is made up of the world’s richest, most powerful societies. And yet it seems they couldn’t defeat something as tiny as a virus. The East is far poorer, less developed — and yet, it was able to defeat Covid, while the West is in the grip of the pandemic, all over again, worse than before.

So how did the West get Covid so wrong?

But Americans’ disgust should be aimed at governments and institutions, not at one another. Individuals are being asked to decide for themselves what chances they should take, but a century of research on human cognition shows that people are bad at assessing risk in complex situations. During a disease outbreak, vague guidance and ambivalent behavioral norms will lead to thoroughly flawed thinking. If a business is open but you would be foolish to visit it, that is a failure of leadership.

uddenly the burden is on individuals to engage in some of the most frustrating and confounding cost-benefit analyses of their life. Pandemic decision making implicates at least two complex cognitive tasks: moral reasoning and risk evaluation.

The cognitive-science canon is replete with uncanny predictions relevant to the coronavirus era.

"Holding a half-million-person rally in the midst of a pandemic is emblematic of a nation as a whole that maybe isn’t taking [the novel coronavirus] as seriously as we should.”

It’s not just that Sturgis went on after the pandemic sidelined most everything else. It also drew people from across the country, all of them converging on one region, packing the small city’s Main Street and the bars and restaurants along it.

State health officials, who linked 125 cases to Sturgis, have not tied the surge to the rally, however. They note it overlapped with school openings and end-of-summer restlessness.

She also harked back to her first speech to the public ever, when she was only 14 and still a princess.“It reminds me of the very first broadcast I made, in 1940, helped by my sister,” she said, as an archive photo of the girls appeared on-screen. “We as children spoke from here at Windsor [Castle] to children who had been evacuated from their homes and sent away for their own safety.”

The wave of child evacuations had begun the year before, on Sept. 1, 1939 — the same day Nazi Germany invaded Poland and only two days before Britain’s prime minister declared war. Fearing civilian casualties if British cities were bombed, officials urged parents to send their children to the countryside to live with strangers who volunteered to provide space for them.

Evacuation of children was voluntary, according to the Imperial War Museum, but since urban schools had been shut down, the decision was made easier.

ENTERING the Worcester Art Museum, the first thing a visitor sees is a sixth-century late Roman mosaic, more than 20 feet square, set into the floor of the entrance hall.

This spectacular and brutal scene paved the floor of a private house in Antioch, founded in 300 B.C. and one of the great cities of the classical world. Today ancient Antioch lies beneath the modern Turkish city of Antakya, near the Syrian border at the northeast elbow of the Mediterranean. The mosaic, along with other equally stunning and tantalizing glimmers of an almost mythical place, arrived in Worcester nearly 60 years ago.

Four silver-gilt tyches on display -- female deities personifying the good fortune of a particular city -- representing Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria and Antioch attest to Antioch's status. Sculptures, mosaics, jewelry and intriguing inscriptions, most of them from the second to the sixth centuries A.D., bring to life a complex metropolis that thrived in an era whose economic, political and spiritual circumstances were in many ways similar to our own.

Much more than for boys, adolescence typically heightens girls’ self-consciousness about their changing body and amplifies insecurities about where they fit in their social network. Social media—particularly Instagram, which displaces other forms of interaction among teens, puts the size of their friend group on public display, and subjects their physical appearance to the hard metrics of likes and comment counts—takes the worst parts of middle school and glossy women’s magazines and intensifies them.

The preponderance of the evidence now available is disturbing enough to warrant action.

The toxicity comes from the very nature of a platform that girls use to post photographs of themselves and await the public judgments of others.

Then, after Kabul fell to the Taliban last August, Khyal Mohammad Ghayoor received a call from a stranger who identified himself only by the dual honorifics, Hajji Sahib, which roughly translates to a distinguished man who has made a pilgrimage to Mecca. The man told Mr. Ghayoor he was needed back in Afghanistan, not as a baker but as a police chief.

“I am very excited to be back in a free and liberated Afghanistan,” he said.

A similar mass exodus of Afghanistan’s professional class occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, when the Soviets withdrew and the Taliban wrested control from the warlords who filled the leadership vacuum.

Hurston, a known figure of the Harlem Renaissance who would later write the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, conducted interviews with Oluale Kossola (renamed Cudjo Lewis), but struggled to publish them as a book in the early 1930s. In fact, they were only released to the public in a book called Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” that came out in May of 2018.

Hurston’s book tells the story of Lewis, who was born Oluale Kossola in what is now the West African country of Benin. A member of the Yoruba people, he was only 19 years old when members of the neighboring Dahomian tribe invaded his village, captured him along with others, and marched them to the coast. There, he and about 120 others were sold into slavery and crammed onto the Clotilda, the last slave ship to reach the continental United States.

in 1807, but Lewis’ journey is an example of how slave traders went around the law to continue bringing over human cargo.

“Through much of history, there was no clear distinction between philosophical ethics and ‘self-help,’”

Ancient philosophers were interested in what makes a good life and a just society, and in the virtues it takes to pursue both — but these central questions of human thriving now occupy the margins of the modern academic discipline

in this book, he searches for “a philosophy that can speak more intimately to life,” one that will address the struggles just about all people face.

ChatGPT is built atop a so-called large language model—powerful software trained on swaths of text scraped from across the internet to learn the patterns of human language. The vast data supercharges its capabilities, allowing it to act like an autocompletion engine on steroids. The training also creates a hazard. Given the right prompts, a large language model can generate reams of toxic content inspired by the darkest parts of the internet.

ChatGPT’s parent, AI research company OpenAI, has been grappling with these issues for years. Even before it created ChatGPT, it hired workers in Kenya to review and categorize thousands of graphic text passages obtained online and generated by AI itself. Many of the passages contained descriptions of violence, harassment, self-harm, rape, child sexual abuse and bestiality, documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal show.

The company used the categorized passages to build an AI safety filter that it would ultimately deploy to constrain ChatGPT from exposing its tens of millions of users to similar content.

Some voters, we should admit, enthused about Johnson because he made them laugh. I am haunted by the memory of a woman who told a BBC radio interviewer back in 2018: “I want Boris to become Tory leader because he will make politics fun!” But politics, and especially government, is not meant to be fun.

He is perhaps the most selfish human being I have ever met, indifferent to the welfare of anyone save himself. It is striking that he has few, if any, personal friends. He demands loyalty, but is incapable of giving it to others. He has neither principles nor personal convictions, save about his own ambitions and desires. Far from being the genial Mr Nice Guy he seeks to project, Tony Soprano would find him a tad ruthless.

He is a stranger to truth, a lifelong liar about big things and small.

White men are six times as likely to die by suicide as other Americans. Black men are 17 times as likely to be killed with a gun fired by someone else.

Two different demographic groups bear the brunt of escalating gun violence and are most likely to die of a gunshot wound in America: young Black men and older White men.

The vast majority of gun deaths in America are either suicides or homicides, according to federal data, with accidental or undetermined gun deaths representing a small fraction of the overall share.