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In early 2019, several months after President Donald Trump threatened to upend the North Atlantic Treaty Organization during a trip to Brussels for the alliance’s annual summit, House lawmakers passed the NATO Support Act amid overwhelming bipartisan support, with only 22 Republicans voting against the measure.

But this month, when a similar bill in support of NATO during the Russian invasion of Ukraine again faced a vote in the House, the support was far more polarized, with 63 Republicans — 30 percent of the party’s conference — voting against it.

The vote underscores the Republican Party’s remarkable drift away from NATO in recent years, as positions once considered part of a libertarian fringe have become doctrine for a growing portion of the party.

What is conservative? It is, above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigated from above, with neither democratic consent nor broad consensus.

As conservatives, you are philosophically bound to give considerable weight to judicial precedents, particularly when they have been ratified and refined — as Roe was by the 1992 Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — over a long period.

It’s also a matter of originalism. “To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the courts,” Alexander Hamilton wrote in Federalist No. 78, “it is indispensable that they” — the judges — “should be bound down by strict rules and precedents, which serve to define and point out their duty in every particular case that comes before them.”

Forty million Americans have stopped attending church in the past 25 years. That’s something like 12 percent of the population, and it represents the largest concentrated change in church attendance in American history

This change is also bad news for America as a whole: Participation in a religious community generally correlates with better health outcomes and longer life, higher financial generosity, and more stable families

A new book, written by Jim Davis, a pastor at an evangelical church in Orlando, and Michael Graham, a writer with the Gospel Coalition, draws on surveys of more than 7,000 Americans by the political scientists Ryan Burge and Paul Djupe, attempting to explain why people have left churches—or “dechurched,

The way I usually distinguish reactionary politics from conservatism is to say that the latter takes up elements in our world (traditions, habits, ideals, norms, laws) that are inherited from the past, seeks to conserve them in the present, and then hands them down to the future.

a conservative emphasizes and valorizes “forms and formality, order, modesty, nobility, moral rectitude, private and public honor, and steadfast adherence to standards of right conduct and traditional restraints.”

standing for a politics conducted in an elevated key, emphasizing virtue, honor, moral rectitude, earnestness, devotion to principle and integrity, deference toward received authorities and traditions—and speaking of these ideals without irony or shame.

regressive climate is where we find ourselves today, especially about the judiciary.

Critics call the good news of an independent judiciary the bad news of judicial autocracy. They call women and minorities seeking the right to be free from discrimination special interest groups seeking to jump the queue.

They call efforts to reverse discrimination “reverse discrimination.” They say courts should only interpret, not make, law, thereby ignoring the entire history of common law

China’s economy is in trouble because its authoritarian demons are catching up with it and paralyzing the private sector.

China’s economy is in trouble because its growth model exhausted itself and entrenched power structures make it hard to shift gear.

Both are very powerful explanations rooted in well-established social scientific models - institutional economics and Keynesian macro, respectively.

“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.

NATO’s purpose is primarily the defense of Europe.

But NATO, from its origins, was never primarily concerned with aggregating military power. Fielding 100 divisions at its Cold War height, a small fraction of Warsaw Pact manpower, the organization could not be counted on to repel a Soviet invasion and even the continent’s nuclear weapons were under Washington’s control.

Rather, it set out to bind Western Europe to a far vaster project of a U.S.-led world order, in which American protection served as a lever to obtain concessions on other issues, like trade and monetary policy.

the trend of rising emigration actually predates the pandemic—and coincides with the emergence of several other important economic trends since 2017, including higher youth unemployment, the state’s renewed grip on the financial sector and an apparently structural downtrend in Chinese growth.

Rebounding emigration is also striking in the context of a declining overall birthrate, and suggests that Beijing must do far more to convince talent, both domestic and foreign, that China is a good place to put down roots if it wants to avoid a steeper growth slowdown in the years ahead.

China, unlike the U.S., has always been a nation of emigrants—its diaspora is among the world’s largest and most influential.

We thus have the privilege of seeing a great civilization at its peak

How much greater would China’s peak have been if Deng Xiaoping had sided with the Tiananmen Square protesters, and liberalized China’s society in addition to its economy? How many great Chinese books, essays, video games, cartoons, TV shows, movies, and songs would we now enjoy if it weren’t for the pervasive censorship regime now in place? How much more would the people of the world have learned from Chinese culture if they could travel there freely and interact with Chinese people freely over the internet? Without a draconian autocrat like Xi Jinping at the helm, would so many Chinese people be looking to flee the country? Would the U.S. and China still be friends instead of at each other’s throats?

The key fact is that China’s meteoric rise seems like it’s drawing to a close

It’s not that I oppose affirmative action per se; boosting opportunities for members of a historically disadvantaged group as a means of reparation and social justice seems to me easily morally justifiable.

nothing so defensible has been playing out in the admissions offices of the most selective American universities.

The voluminous record in the cases brought against Harvard and U.N.C. suggest that in order to maintain a vaguely defined notion of “diversity,” the schools’ admissions officials bumped up the chances primarily of Black and Hispanic applicants by undermining opportunities of another historically disadvantaged racial group — Asian Americans.

the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet?

Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave

complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation.

The demise of affirmative action, in Carter’s view, was both necessary and inevitable. “We must reject the common claim that an end to preferences ‘would be a disastrous situation, amounting to a virtual nullification of the 1954 desegregation ruling,’” he wrote, quoting the activist and academic Robert Allen. “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and a chance.”

For Carter, affirmative action was a necessary stopgap measure to remedy historical discrimination. Like many people today — both proponents and opponents of affirmative action — he expressed reservations about relying on diversity as the constitutional basis for racial preferences.

the implication of recruiting for diversity, Carter explained, had less to do with admitting Black students to redress past discrimination and more to do with supporting and reinforcing essentialist notions about Black people.

“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.

Kennedy’s casket was transported by rail to Washington, and along the tracks nearly two million people lined up to pay their respects. To Ms. Didion, the contrast between these scenes and the Royal Hawaiian’s conspicuously deserted verandah felt appalling. With Robert Kennedy’s assassination, she said, “it was as if all the disturbances of the whole past couple of years came to a head that night. And here was a whole part of America that wasn’t having it.” As she and Mr. Dunne watched the news coverage, she told Ms. Stein, “it was like something snapping.”

Ms. Didion found herself confronted with a fractured version of America that’s not too different from the one we’ve come to recognize today. Millions are dead from the pandemic. Thousands take to the streets in protest while thousands more gather in the national capital to storm the seat of government.

“No matter what your political feelings are, if you’re attached to the idea of the nation as a community — if you feel yourself to be part of that community — then obviously something has happened to that community,” Ms. Didion told Ms. Stein of that night in 1968

in the wake of the Covid pandemic and the war in Ukraine, an important shift has taken place. Rather than mere electoral contenders or shapers of public opinion, Europe’s far-right parties now appear as plausible and normal forces of government. Long a purely oppositional force, they are moving into the halls of power.

Since the signing of the Maastricht treaty in 1991, which locked in low public spending and deflation, European politicians have increasingly become beholden to business interests at the expense of citizens. Through this process, which the political scientist Peter Mair termed “elite withdrawal,” representatives grew hesitant to make grand promises to voters, lest any threaten their pro-market policies.

By invoking the threat of impending right-wing extremism, mainstream politicians could present themselves as the lesser evil. As long as their power was untouched, politicians seemed relaxed about how political common sense — notably on immigration and welfare — slipped ever farther to the right.

Hyper Voisins, thanks both to its size and the sheer diversity of its activities, goes much further. About 5,000 people, he believes, is the maximum, but, with his group as a model, he has proposed to Paris authorities that they encourage 150 more to be set up. “That would be 750,000 people, a third of the population,” he said. “We would change the face of Paris and turn it into a convivial city.”

Among the 1,000 diners, there were also a few hundred from other parts of the city, who are welcome to sign up and come along.

Roberdeau now praises the scheme for having changed her life: a few years ago, after she was widowed, her daughter, worried about how long she could go on living alone, tried to persuade her to move into a retirement home nearer to her in Charente-Maritime, 300 miles to the south. “I didn’t want to leave the area or the apartment where I spent the last years with my husband,” said Roberdeau. Thanks to the support she gets from her neighbours, she has been able to remain.

In the effort to try to solve the crime of bike theft themselves, the group’s members have come close to a world of violence and despair that lurks barely below the surface of this beautiful place and, at times, bursts into the open

In some years, Burlington has gone without a single gunfire incident, according to the police. But in 2022 there have been 25 such incidents, including four murders — the most in at least 30 years, the police say.

The Progressives on the Council tend to be left leaning on many issues and often at odds with the city’s Democratic mayor. And in June 2020, the Progressive members of the Council successfully sponsored a measure that sought to reduce the size of the city’s police force by about 30 percent. The move, which the mayor opposed, came just weeks after the murder of George Floyd, and amid concerns about how the Burlington police had used force against Black people.

He built a revolutionary car company and sent reusable rockets into space, so yes, he can run a little social-media company. But the assumption that because he’s done the former, he’ll find it easy to do the latter rests on the common misconception that all management skills are transferable: If you’re good at being a boss, running one kind of company is much the same as running any other kind of company.

the majority of executives are simply better at dealing with certain kinds of problems, and running certain kinds of businesses, than others. When they encounter situations that do not match their skill sets, they typically struggle.

Although executives who went to companies that required a similar set of “strategic skills” as the divisions they had run at GE thrived, those who went to companies that required a different set floundered. Similarly, executives who took over companies in industries very different from the one in which they’d previously worked fared very poorly; their companies saw negative shareholder returns of, on average, 29 percent.

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”