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Ukraine is also receiving vital private-sector assistance, notably the delivery of Starlink internet terminals, which are helping maintain communications

All I can do is to apply history, as there is no model from political science or economics that can really help us here.

1. Do the Russians manage to take Kyiv in a matter of two, three, four weeks or never?

At least one military analyst I respect said late last week that the Russian invasion force has around two weeks left before serious logistical and supply problems force Putin seriously to the negotiating table.

On the other hand, Western media seem over-eager to cover news of Russian reverses, and insufficiently attentive to the harsh fact that the invaders continue to advance on more than one front.

A better analogy than the Winter War with Finland may be the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began in December 1979.

Economic warfare between 1914 and 1918 was not a substitute for sending British armies to fight on the European continent, just as it had not been in the Napoleonic Wars against France.

What I cannot tell is whether or not these weapons and other equipment will suffice to sustain Ukrainian resistance over the coming weeks.

But the Ukrainians have no real answers to higher-altitude bombardment and missile attacks.

2. Do the sanctions precipitate such a severe economic contraction in Russia that Putin cannot achieve victory?

I have heard it said that the breadth and depth of the sanctions imposed on Russia make them unprecedented. I disagree

recalls but does not quite match the sanctions that Britain and its allies imposed on Germany at the outbreak of World War

It seems there are seven distinct historical processes at work and it’s not clear which is going fastest.

Then, as now, it was possible for an increasingly authoritarian government to impose economic controls and divert resources away from civilian consumption to the war effort, while blaming the resulting deprivation on the enemy

We should remember that those measures did not defeat Germany, however, because — like Russia today — it had the resources to be self-sufficient

no one should forget that self-sufficiency is possible for Russia, albeit at the price of severe austerity, whether it is a choice or a consequence of war.

China is able to help Russia in ways that could mitigate the economic shock, just as for years it has helped Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions by buying its oil.

Unlike Soviet citizens, who were accustomed to a state monopoly on communications, today’s Russians have come to rely as much as we do on Big Tech. Being cut off from the metaverse may prove a more psychologically painful deprivation than shortages of imported foods.

even a 35% quarterly decline in gross domestic product does not condemn a country to military defeat if its planes can still fly and its tanks still fire rounds.

3. Does the combination of military and economic crisis precipitate a palace coup against Putin?

4. Does the risk of downfall lead Putin to desperate measures (carrying out his nuclear threat)? 

The people with the power to arrest Putin are the people he counts on to execute his arrest orders: Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council and, like Putin, a long-serving KGB officer; Sergei Naryshkin, the head of foreign intelligence; and Alexander Bortnikov, who heads the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB.

6. Does the West’s attention deficit disorder kick in before any of this?

If Putin’s goal was to deter members of NATO from offering direct military assistance to Ukraine, it seemed to have some effect.

Russian casualties are being caused by Ukrainians using arms supplied by multiple NATO countries, including the U.S. and Turkey, but they are mostly crossing into Ukraine from Poland. Might Putin therefore strike a target in eastern Poland — Lublin, say, or Przemysl?

he is surely more likely to do so if believes the U.S. would not immediately retaliate in kind against a Russian target. A key lesson of this entire crisis has been that indications of weakness on the U.S. side, which I discussed here last week, have emboldened Putin.

5. Do the Chinese keep Putin afloat but on the condition that he agrees to a compromise peace that they offer to broker?

My guess is that the Chinese make no serious diplomatic move until they are convinced Putin’s invasion is thoroughly bogged down in Ukraine’s spring mud.

I would not bet the fate of Ukraine on Russian internal politics.

Remarkably, one U.S. legislator told me last week that he “couldn’t recall an issue more obsessively followed and more unifying among” his constituents.

The only real significance of Western public outrage at Putin’s actions is the political pressure it exerts on Biden and other leaders to take a tougher line with Russia.

7. What is the collateral damage?

History shows that wars (much more than pandemics) are the most common cause of jumps in inflation.

The best-known recent illustration is the way wars in 1973 (Yom Kippur) and 1979 (Iran-Iraq) contributed to the great inflation of the Seventies

these price spikes are not confined to oil and gas but involve a host of other commodities. The prospect of this year’s Ukrainian grain harvest being disrupted means a significant surge in food prices, with all kinds of consequences, especially in developing countries.

A tsunami of war has struck Ukraine. Whether the Russian tide flows or ebbs in the coming weeks will do much to determine the course of world history for the rest of our lives.

Nor can we ignore the risks that may be lurking within the international financial system.

This is the first big crisis of Cold War II, which is in many ways like a mirror image of Cold War I, with China the senior partner, Russia the junior, and a hot war in Eastern Europe rather than East Asia (it was Korea’s turn in 1950).

I do not know how the crisis will turn out, but I do know it will have profound consequences for the course of the superpower contest.

If the invasion of Ukraine ends in disaster for the heroic defenders of Kyiv and their comrades, another disaster may well follow — and it could occur as far away as Taiwan. Conversely, if there is justice in the world and the disaster befalls the architect of this war, that too will give birth to some fresh and unforeseeable event.

Add these seven imponderables together and you see how profoundly important the next few weeks will be.

The failure of the administration to signal that it would retaliate is of a piece with last year’s reports that Biden’s national security team was considering ruling out first use of nuclear weapons in its new national military strategy. Nuclear missiles cease to be a deterrent if one side is unwilling to use them.

Today, however, the boot is on the other foot. Not only is Putin intimidating NATO; he may have achieved something more, namely a tacit admission by the Biden administration that it would not necessarily retaliate with nuclear weapons if Russia used them.

It means scrapping rules about weapons exports, a huge boost in defence spending and an end to Russian energy imports. A Russian gas pipeline to Germany called Nord Stream 2 has already been suspended.

"For the foreseeable future, co-operation with Russia will not occur. It will be more about containment and deterrence and, if needed, defence against Russia," Mr Schmid tells me.

Unexpectedly hawkish words for a party that until seven weeks ago believed Germany's historical guilt and moral duty to make up for Nazi crimes meant peace with Russia at all costs.

Even Germany's view of its own history is changing.

Until the invasion mainstream opinion was that German reunification was thanks to dialogue with Moscow by another SPD chancellor, Willy Brandt. But now the debate has shifted, with reminders that Mr Brandt's diplomacy was backed up by strong deterrence, including a West German defence budget of 3% of GDP.

The issue of German historical war guilt has also become more nuanced. Before the invasion the government argued against weapon deliveries to Ukraine because of Nazi crimes against Russia.

"Under Putin, official Russian policy tried to monopolise the memory of the Second World War for the bilateral German-Russian relationship," explains Mr Schmid. This blinded parts of German society to the suffering of Ukrainians during he war, he adds.

Now there is a greater awareness of Ukraine's traumas under the Nazis.

Berlin's rhetoric has shifted dramatically. But some ask whether actions are following fast enough. Certainly warm words of support are not enough for Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky. He has criticised Germany's continued reliance on Russian oil and gas.

In a BBC interview last week, Mr Zelensky called payments for Russian energy "blood money". And a planned visit to Kyiv by President Steinmeier was cancelled at the last minute.

certainly German politicians and commentators interpret the failed visit as a sign of Ukraine's distrust in the German president, who as foreign minister under Angela Merkel spent years trying to achieve peace by engaging with Russia.

"Our partners look at us, and say: OK, you do a Zeitenwende but what are you practically doing?" she says. "On sanctions we are timid and on weapons delivery, we are reluctant. So, rightly, they wonder what that Zeitenwende is about, and given that Germany is a big economic, military, political power in the middle of Europe, whatever we do makes a difference, in good ways and bad."

"This is a dilemma that Germany has created itself," argues political scientist Liana Fix, head of the Körber Foundation. "That's obviously difficult to accept for other countries, who are willing to go ahead with an embargo and have done their homework on energy diversification."

Ironically, it's a Green Party politician, Economy Minister Robert Habeck, from a party that for years has been calling for energy independence from Russia, who is having to solve this dilemma.

On military support for Ukraine, Berlin says it is prepared to send whatever weapons Kyiv needs. But there are allegations that some ministries are getting tied up in bureaucracy. Here, too, it is a Green politician, Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, who is pushing the governing coalition to go faster. She has called for heavy weaponry, such as tanks or fighter jets, for Ukraine.

Olaf Scholz has to keep his party onside, govern in a three-way coalition and overturn Germany's guilt-laden pacifist identity overnight.

But even his allies say the chancellor should at least communicate better what's going on

Meanwhile, it feels like many individual Germans are going through their own Zeitenwende. Ariane Bemmer, a columnist for the Tagesspiegel newspaper, has written about reassessing her own feelings towards Russia. "I definitely got it wrong, it's like losing a friend,"

Like many in the former West Germany in the 1980s, she was wary of US-style cutthroat capitalism. She bought a book called Ami Go Home - she never read it, but felt it would look good on her bookshelf - and was intrigued by the reforms in Russia.

"In America you had Ronald Reagan as a president, which was a shock for us. We thought: what will he do, this crazy actor with his cowboy boots? Will he set the world on fire? Russia was a place where all the good changes were, perestroika, freedom, wind of change," she says.

Few in Germany think that now. In one recent poll, 55% of Germans said Berlin should send heavy weapons, such as tanks and fighter jets, to Ukraine to fight against Russia.

For Ariane, and many other Germans, any lingering Russophile romanticism vanished for good the day Putin's tanks rolled over Ukraine's border.

the core purpose of the courts isn’t to engage in (unavoidably selective) textual exegetics to arrive at preferred conclusions. It’s to avoid an arbitrary discretion — to resist the temptation to seek to reshape the entire moral landscape of a vast society based on the preferences of two or three people at a single moment.

Beware of unintended consequences. Those include the return of the old, often unsafe, illegal abortion (or abortions in Mexico), the entrenchment of pro-choice majorities in blue states and the likely consolidation of pro-choice majorities in many purple states, driven by voters newly anxious over their reproductive rights.

In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on.

And what will the effect be on the court itself? Here, again, you may be tempted to think that overturning Roe is an act of judicial modesty that puts abortion disputes in the hands of legislatures. Maybe — after 30 years of division and mayhem.

Yet the decision will also discredit the court as a steward of whatever is left of American steadiness and sanity, and as a bulwark against our fast-depleting respect for institutions and tradition.

A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well.

The word “conservative” encompasses many ideas and habits, none more important than prudence. Justices: Be prudent.

DeSantis, whose “anti-woke” agenda has put Florida at the forefront of revising how Black history is taught, has come under fire for supporting a set of standards for middle school instruction that include teaching “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

It all portends hopeless bifurcation, Zimmerman said, suggesting that America is becoming a place where what students learn about the country’s past will depend whether they live in a conservative or liberal state.

Conservatives contend that instruction on race and history has shifted since then to reflect liberal ideologies and values in ways inappropriate to the schoolhouse. They have advocated returning to a more traditional way of teaching American history, one less critical of the nation’s past flaws and less explicit about linking current inequalities to past injustices.

The dueling American histories “are about not just what has happened, but what we do about it going forward,” he said. “If you can tell a story that removes the harm that has been done, if you can tell a story that removes the violence, that removes the disenfranchisement, that removes the targeting of certain communities — then what you do is you change the way we believe we have to deal with it.”

Events during Trump’s presidency — including a deadly white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, the murder of George Floyd and the publication of the New York Times’s 1619 Project reexamining the role of slavery in America’s founding — propelled the country toward a cultural conflagration over the idea that America’s history of systemic racism was still affecting minorities today.

Various institutions embraced the Black Lives Matter movement and sought to take actions aimed at acknowledging and curing past injustices. The movement was especially potent among liberals, and then-candidate Biden reoriented much of his campaign in the summer of 2020 to focus on “equity.”

A string of recent activity — from Supreme Court decision striking down college affirmative action programs to mass shootings by white supremacists to book bans by some Republican officials — has propelled the issue back to the forefront of Democratic agenda.

After the 2020 protests over Floyd’s murder, more than 160 Confederate memorials were removed, relocated or renamed, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. Still, a January 2022 report found that there were still 723 monuments and 741 roadways dedicated to Confederates, as well as hundreds of schools, counties, parks, buildings and holidays.

“There are states that can remove history from a textbook, but they can never destroy the physical places where history happened,” Leggs said. “Historic preservation is all the more important at this moment in our history, and through our work, we can ignite both a cultural reckoning and cultural renaissance.”

traditionally “masculine” virtues are not exclusively male. Women who successfully model these attributes are all around us

Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem “If—” is one of the purest distillations of restraint as a traditional manly virtue. It begins with the words “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.” The entire work speaks of the necessity of calmness and courage.

Stoicism carried to excess can become a dangerous form of emotional repression, a stifling of necessary feelings. But the fact that the kind of patience and perseverance that marks stoicism can be taken too far is not to say that we should shun it. In times of conflict and crisis, it is the calm man or woman who can see clearly.

Hysteria plus cruelty is a recipe for violence. And that brings us back to Mr. Hawley. For all of its faults when taken to excess, the traditional masculinity of which he claims to be a champion would demand that he stand firm against a howling mob. Rather, he saluted it with a raised fist — and then ran from it when it got too close and too unruly.

Catastrophic rhetoric is omnipresent on the right. Let’s go back to the “groomer” smear. It’s a hallmark of right-wing rhetoric that if you disagree with the new right on any matter relating to sex or sexuality, you’re not just wrong; you’re a “groomer” or “soft on pedos.

If you spend much time at all on right-wing social media — especially Twitter these days — or listening to right-wing news outlets, you’ll be struck by the sheer hysteria of the rhetoric, the hair-on-fire sense of emergency that seems to dominate all discourse.

Traditional masculinity says that people should meet a challenge with a level head and firm convictions. Right-wing culture says that everything is an emergency, and is to be combated with relentless trolling and hyperbolic insults.

Jonah Goldberg wrote an important piece cataloging the sheer pettiness of the young online right. “Everywhere I look these days,” he wrote, “I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks.” As Jonah noted, there are those who now believe it shows “courage and strength to be coarse or bigoted.”

But conservative catastrophism is only one part of the equation. The other is meanspirited pettiness

American men are in desperate need of virtuous purpose.

I reject the idea that traditional masculinity, properly understood, is, “on the whole, harmful.” I recognize that it can be abused, but it is good to confront life with a sense of proportion, with calm courage and conviction.

One of the best pieces of advice I’ve ever received reflects that wisdom. Early in my legal career, a retired federal judge read a brief that I’d drafted and admonished me to “write with regret, not outrage.”

Husband your anger, he told me. Have patience. Gain perspective. So then, when something truly is terrible, your outrage will mean something. It was the legal admonition against crying wolf.

By presenting Musk’s mindset as fully formed and his behavior as unalterable, Isaacson’s book doesn’t give us many tools for the future—besides, perhaps, being able to rank the next Musk blowup against a now well-documented history of such incidents.

Instead of narrowing our critical lens to Musk’s brain, we need to widen it, in order to understand the consequences of his influence. Only then can we challenge him to do right by his power.

With respect to crime, poverty and homelessness, Brown argued,One thing that may occur is that disinvestment in city downtowns will alter the spatial distribution of these elements in cities — i.e. in which neighborhoods or areas of a city is crime more likely, and homelessness more visible. Urban downtowns are often policed such that these visible elements of poverty are pushed to other parts of the city where they will not interfere with commercial activities. But absent these activities, there may be less political pressure to maintain these areas. This is not to say that the overall crime rate or homelessness levels will necessarily increase, but their spatial redistribution may further alter the trajectory of commercial downtowns — and the perception of city crime in the broader public.

“The more dramatic effects on urban geography,” Brown continued,may be how this changes cities in terms of economic and racial segregation. One urban trend from the last couple of decades is young white middle- and upper-class people living in cities at higher rates than previous generations. But if these groups become less likely to live in cities, leaving a poorer, more disproportionately minority population, this will make metropolitan regions more polarized by race/class.

the damage that even the perception of rising crime can inflict on Democrats in a Nov. 27 article, “Meet the Voters Who Fueled New York’s Seismic Tilt Toward the G.O.P.”: “From Long Island to the Lower Hudson Valley, Republicans running predominantly on crime swept five of six suburban congressional seats, including three that President Biden won handily that encompass some of the nation’s most affluent, well-educated commuter towns.

In big cities like New York and San Francisco we estimate large drops in retail spending because office workers are now coming into city centers typically 2.5 rather than 5 days a week. This is reducing business activity by billions of dollars — less lunches, drinks, dinners and shopping by office workers. This will reduce city hall tax revenues.

Public transit systems are facing massive permanent shortfalls as the surge in working from home cuts their revenues but has little impact on costs (as subway systems are mostly a fixed cost. This is leading to a permanent 30 percent drop in transit revenues on the New York Subway, San Francisco Bart, etc.

These difficulties for cities will not go away anytime soon. Bloom provided data showing strong economic incentives for both corporations and their employees to continue the work-from-home revolution if their jobs allow it:

First, “Saved commute time working from home averages about 70 minutes a day, of which about 40 percent (30 minutes) goes into extra work.” Second, “Research finds hybrid working from home increases average productivity around 5 percent and this is growing.” And third, “Employees also really value hybrid working from home, at about the same as an 8 percent pay increase on average.

three other experts in real estate economics, Arpit Gupta, of N.Y.U.’s Stern School of Business, Vrinda Mittal, both of the Columbia Business School, and Van Nieuwerburgh. They anticipate disaster in their September 2022 paper, “Work From Home and the Office Real Estate Apocalypse.”

“Our research,” Gupta wrote by email,emphasizes the possibility of an ‘urban doom loop’ by which decline of work in the center business district results in less foot traffic and consumption, which adversely affects the urban core in a variety of ways (less eyes on the street, so more crime; less consumption; less commuting) thereby lowering municipal revenues, and also making it more challenging to provide public goods and services absent tax increases. These challenges will predominantly hit blue cities in the coming years.

the three authors “revalue the stock of New York City commercial office buildings taking into account pandemic-induced cash flow and discount rate effects. We find a 45 percent decline in office values in 2020 and 39 percent in the longer run, the latter representing a $453 billion value destruction.”

Extrapolating to all properties in the United States, Gupta, Mittal and Van Nieuwerburgh write, the “total decline in commercial office valuation might be around $518.71 billion in the short-run and $453.64 billion in the long-run.”

the share of real estate taxes in N.Y.C.’s budget was 53 percent in 2020, 24 percent of which comes from office and retail property taxes. Given budget balance requirements, the fiscal hole left by declining central business district office and retail tax revenues would need to be plugged by raising tax rates or cutting government spending.

Since March 2020, Manhattan has lost 200,000 households, the most of any county in the U.S. Brooklyn (-88,000) and Queens (-51,000) also appear in the bottom 10. The cities of Chicago (-75,000), San Francisco (-67,000), Los Angeles (-64,000 for the city and -136,000 for the county), Washington DC (-33,000), Seattle (-31,500), Houston (-31,000), and Boston (-25,000) make up the rest of the bottom 10.

Prior to the pandemic, these ecosystems were designed to function based on huge surges in their daytime population from commuters and tourists. The shock of the sudden loss of a big chunk of this population caused a big disruption in the ecosystem.

Just as the pandemic has caused a surge in telework, Loh wrote, “it also caused a huge surge in unsheltered homelessness because of existing flaws in America’s housing system, the end of federally-funded relief measures, a mental health care crisis, and the failure of policies of isolation and confinement to solve the pre-existing homelessness crisis.”

The upshot, Loh continued,is that both the visibility and ratio of people in crisis relative to those engaged in commerce (whether working or shopping) has changed in a lot of U.S. downtowns, which has a big impact on how being downtown ‘feels’ and thus perceptions of downtown.

The nation, Glaeser continued, isat an unusual confluence of trends which poses dangers for cities similar to those experienced in the 1970s. Event#1 is the rise of Zoom, which makes relocation easier even if it doesn’t mean that face-to-face is going away. Event#2 is a hunger to deal with past injustices, including police brutality, mass incarceration, high housing costs and limited upward mobility for the children of the poor.

Progressive mayors, according to Glaeser,have a natural hunger to deal with these problems at the local level, but if they try to right injustices by imposing costs on businesses and the rich, then those taxpayers will just leave. I certainly remember New York and Detroit in the 1960s and 1970s, where the dreams of progressive mayors like John Lindsay and Jerome Patrick Cavanagh ran into fiscal realities.

Richard Florida, a professor of economic analysis and policy at the University of Toronto, stands out as one of the most resolutely optimistic urban scholars. In his August 2022 Bloomberg column, “Why Downtown Won’t Die,”

His answer:

Great downtowns are not reducible to offices. Even if the office were to go the way of the horse-drawn carriage, the neighborhoods we refer to today as downtowns would endure. Downtowns and the cities they anchor are the most adaptive and resilient of human creations; they have survived far worse. Continual works in progress, they have been rebuilt and remade in the aftermaths of all manner of crises and catastrophes — epidemics and plagues; great fires, floods and natural disasters; wars and terrorist attacks. They’ve also adapted to great economic transformations like deindustrialization a half century ago.

Florida wrote that many urban central business districts are “relics of the past, the last gasp of the industrial age organization of knowledge work the veritable packing and stacking of knowledge workers in giant office towers, made obsolete and unnecessary by new technologies.”

“Downtowns are evolving away from centers for work to actual neighborhoods. Jane Jacobs titled her seminal 1957 essay, which led in fact to ‘The Death and Life of Great American Cities,’ ‘Downtown Is for People’ — sounds about right to me.”

Despite his optimism, Florida acknowledged in his email thatAmerican cities are uniquely vulnerable to social disorder — a consequence of our policies toward guns and lack of a social safety net. Compounding this is our longstanding educational dilemma, where urban schools generally lack the quality of suburban schools. American cities are simply much less family-friendly than cities in most other parts of the advanced world. So when people have kids they are more or less forced to move out of America’s cities.

What worries me in all of this, in addition to the impact on cities, is the impact on the American economy — on innovation. and competitiveness. Our great cities are home to the great clusters of talent and innovation that power our economy. Remote work has many advantages and even leads to improvements in some kinds of knowledge work productivity. But America’s huge lead in innovation, finances, entertainment and culture industries comes largely from its great cities. Innovation and advance in. these industries come from the clustering of talent, ideas and knowledge. If that gives out, I worry about our longer-run economic future and living standards.

The risk that comes with fiscal distress is clear: If city governments face budget shortfalls and begin to cut back on funding for public transit, policing, and street outreach, for the maintenance of parks, playgrounds, community centers, and schools, and for services for homelessness, addiction, and mental illness, then conditions in central cities will begin to deteriorate.

There is reason for both apprehension and hope. Cities across time have proven remarkably resilient and have survived infectious diseases from bubonic plague to cholera to smallpox to polio. The world population, which stands today at eight billion people, is 57 percent urban, and because of the productivity, innovation and inventiveness that stems from the creativity of human beings in groups, the urbanization process is quite likely to continue into the foreseeable future. There appears to be no alternative, so we will have to make it work.

This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” He later added: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill’s victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history. Churchill believed the highlands, the most fertile land in Kenya, should be the sole preserve of the white settlers, and approved of the clearing out of the local “kaffirs.” When the Kikuyu rebelled under Churchill’s postwar premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps, later called “Britain’s gulag” by the historian Caroline Elkins. Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proven, by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died.

This is the great, enduring paradox of Churchill’s life. In leading the charge against Nazism, he produced some of the richest prose poetry in defense of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a check he didn’t want black or Asian people to cash, but as the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote, “all the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.”

n Germany, the Rhine — the country’s most important water transport route — was so low that some ships have been forced to reduce their cargo loads. Uniper, a German power utility, even announced Thursday that it would reduce output from its largest coal-firing power plants because insufficient coal could be shipped to the plant via the Rhine.

And in France, which gets about 70 percent of its electricity from nuclear energy, heat waves have hampered power plants because they use water to cool their reactors. Several have been forced to reduce production over the past month, or to exceed normal temperature limits for the water that they release back into natural waterways.

“Because of climate change,” he said, “we are going to have to get used to these kinds of episodes.”

A conventional war response is the least bad of the three because it avoids the higher risks of either the weaker or the stronger options.

Today, with the balance of forces reversed since the Cold War, the current Russian doctrine of “escalate to deescalate” mimics NATO’s Cold War “flexible response” concept.

NATO promoted the policy of flexible response rhetorically, but the idea was always shaky strategically. The actual contingency plans it generated never commanded consensus simply because initiating the use of nuclear weapons risked tit-for-tat exchanges that could culminate in an apocalyptic unlimited war.

the group could not reach agreement on specific follow-on options beyond an initial symbolic “demonstration shot” for psychological effect, for fear that Moscow could always match them or up the ante.

NATO policymakers should not bank on Moscow’s restraint. Putin has more at stake in the war than Ukraine’s nuclear-armed supporters outside the country do, and he could bet that in a pinch, Washington would be less willing to play Russian roulette than he is

As NATO confronts the possibility of Russia using nuclear weapons, the first question it needs to answer is whether that eventuality should constitute a real redline for the West

As dishonorable as submission sounds to hawks in advance, if the time actually comes, it will have the strong appeal to Americans, because it would avoid the ultimate risk of national suicide.

That immediate appeal has to be balanced by the longer-term risks that would balloon from setting the epochal precedent that initiating a nuclear attack pays off

This dilemma underlines the obvious imperative of maximizing Moscow’s disincentives to go nuclear in the first place.

if it wants to deter Putin from the nuclear gambit in the first place—governments need to indicate as credibly as possible that Russian nuclear use would provoke NATO, not cow it.

If NATO decides it would strike back on Ukraine’s behalf, then more questions arise: whether to also fire nuclear weapons and, if so, how. The most prevalent notion is an eye-for-an-eye nuclear counterattack destroying Russian targets comparable to the ones the original Russian attack had hit.

it invites slow-motion exchanges in which neither side gives up and both ultimately end up devastated.

both the tit-for-tat and the disproportionate retaliatory options pose dauntingly high risks.

A less dangerous option would be to respond to a nuclear attack by launching an air campaign with conventional munitions alone against Russian military targets and mobilizing ground forces for potential deployment into the battle in Ukraine. This would be coupled with two strong public declarations. First, to dampen views of this low-level option as weak, NATO policymakers would emphasize that modern precision technology makes tactical nuclear weapons unnecessary for effectively striking targets that used to be considered vulnerable only to undiscriminating weapons of mass destruction

That would frame Russia’s resort to nuclear strikes as further evidence not only of its barbarism but of its military backwardness.

The second important message to emphasize would be that any subsequent Russian nuclear use would trigger American nuclear retaliation.

Such a strategy would appear weaker than retaliation in kind and would worsen the Russians’ desperation about losing rather than relieve it, thus leaving their original motive for escalation in place along with the possibility that they would double down and use even more nuclear weapons.

The main virtue of the conventional option is simply that it would not be as risky as either the weaker do-nothing or the stronger nuclear options.

If the challenge that is now only hypothetical actually arrives, entering a nuclearized war could easily strike Americans as an experiment they do not want to run. For that reason, there is a very real possibility that policymakers would wind up with the weakest option: rant about the unthinkable barbarity of the Russian action and implement whatever unused economic sanctions are still available but do nothing militarily.

So far, Moscow has been buoyed by the refusal of China, India, and other countries to fully join the economic sanctions campaign imposed by the West. These fence sitters, however, have a stake in maintaining the nuclear taboo. They might be persuaded to declare that their continued economic collaboration with Russia is contingent on it refraining from the use of nuclear weapons.

The result, Fred T. March noted in his 1934 review in The Times, “is addressed to the German people, who will not be allowed to read it, urging them to open their eyes. And it is addressed to the world outside bearing the message, ‘Wake up! The barbarians are upon us.’

“How do you know when to sound the alarm?” asked Cohen, who also wrote an introduction to the new edition, when I reached him by phone on book tour in Italy. It’s easy to slam someone for overreacting, he explained. But we would do well to remember the instances in which a strong reaction is justified: “There’s an enormous bravery that comes with writing about the present, an enormous risk and an enormous thrill. You have to ask yourself: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ And also: ‘What if I’m right?’”

the story follows the declining fortunes and trials of a family, the German Jewish Oppermanns, prosperous merchants and professionals, as they scramble to hold on while fascism takes hold of their country. It’s a book that fairly trembles with foreboding and almost aches with sorrow.

Populist ignorance cannot prevail in an enlightened world. Just as New Yorkers scoffed at the idea that Donald Trump, lead buffoon of the tabloid ’80s, could be taken seriously as a presidential candidate, so do the bourgeois intelligentsia of “The Oppermanns” chortle over “Mein Kampf,” a work they find impossible to reckon with in the land of Goethe: “A nation that had concerned itself for centuries so intensively with books, such as those they saw around them, could never allow itself to be deceived by the nonsense in the ‘Protocols’ and in ‘Mein Kampf.’”

Consider the misbegotten assumptions Feuchtwanger took on then that continue to threaten today:

Direct engagement confers legitimacy. When Edgar Oppermann, a doctor, faces antisemitic attacks in the newspapers, his boss advises silence. “The whole of politics is nothing but a pigsty. Unless one cannot help doing otherwise, one should simply ignore them. That’s what annoys the pigsty crowd most.” To confront the forces of illiberalism is only to sully oneself, Edgar believes. Those in the press who propagate such lies “ought to be put into an asylum, not brought before a court of law.”

Technology will out disinformation. At each turn, the Oppermanns and their milieu have trouble believing that propaganda will take hold. “How could they expect to get away with such a monstrous, clumsy lie?” Gustav Oppermann, the central figure in the novel, asks himself after the Nazis blame the burning of the Reichstag on communists. “Nero might have put over such cheap stuff in burning Rome. But things like that were impossible today, in the era of the telephone and printing press.” Of course, the era of Twitter and TikTok has shown that advances in technology still amplify falsehoods

If you ignore it, it will go away. In the novel, two bourgeois Germans foresee a grim future but fall back on complacency. One describes the first world war as “only a curtain-raiser” with “a century of destruction” to follow, predicting, as he puts it, “a military power beyond conception, a judiciary power with severe, restrictive laws and a school system to educate senseless brutes in the ecstasy of self-sacrifice.” His companion merely replies: “All right, if that’s your opinion. But perhaps you’ll have another cognac and a cigar before it happens.”

It’s up to the next generation. The novel’s most tragic figure is the teenage Berthold Oppermann, a student guilty only by ethnicity and familial association. Berated by a Nazi schoolteacher for delivering an allegedly anti-German paper, Berthold says he is “a good German” and refuses to apologize. “You are a good German, are you?” his Nazi teacher sneers. “Well, will you be so good as to leave it to others to decide who is a good German and who is not?”

While classrooms today are a far cry from those in Nazi-era Germany, one needn’t reach far for contemporary parallels, with students increasingly operating in an atmosphere of fear and conformity — of their peers, depending on location, on the right or the left — while the adults too often abdicate responsibility, whether out of complicity or fear.

The situation was inevitable. In the Oppermanns’ world, escalating problems are viewed as uniquely German, unique to their time and to a particular regime. “Our opponents have one tremendous advantage over us; their absolute lack of fairness,” explains a lawyer at one point. “That is the very reason why they are in power today. They have always employed such primitive methods that the rest of us simply did not believe them possible, for they would not have been possible in any other country.”

he continued to follow key elements of the game plan outlined in “Transformative Politics.” When Mr. Obama scolded pundits for slicing America into red states and blue states, it wasn’t a dopey celebration of national harmony. It was a strategic attempt to drain the venom out of the culture wars, allowing Democrats to win back working-class voters who had been polarized into the G.O.P. And it elected him president, twice.

he warned against retreating in the battle for civil rights. Moderates scrambling for the middle ground were just as misguided, he argued, as anti-racists implicitly pinning their hopes on a collective racial epiphany.

bringing the conversation back to economics was the best way to beat the right. Instead of trimming their ambitions to court affluent suburbanites, Democrats had to embrace “long-term, structural change, change that might break the zero-sum equation that pits powerless blacks [against] only slightly less powerless whites.”

All the pieces of Mr. Obama’s plan fit together: an electoral strategy designed to make Democrats the party of working people; a policy agenda oriented around comprehensive economic reform; and a faith that American democracy could deliver real change. By mixing political calculation with moral vision, Democrats could resurrect the March on Washington coalition and — finally — transform politics.

Economics were a safer bet. Blue-collar workers of all races, Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher wrote, “understood in concrete ways the fact that America’s individualist mythology covers up a game that is fixed against them.

Rebuilding the March on Washington coalition requires an all-out war against polarization. That larger project begins with a simple message: Democrats exist because the country belongs to all of us, not just the 1 percent. With this guiding principle in mind, everything else becomes easier — picking fights that focus the media spotlight on a game that’s rigged in favor of the rich; calling the bluff of right-wing populists who can’t stomach a capital-gains-tax hike; corralling activists in support of the needs of working people; and, ultimately, putting power back in the hands of ordinary Americans.

The party’s record in the midterms has been even shakier. Democrats held unified control of Congress for all of Mr. Roosevelt’s presidency. In the Obama era, divided government has been the norm. And no, that’s not just because of gerrymandering. House Republicans won the national popular vote three times in the past 12 years — 2010, 2014 and 2016 — and there’s a good chance they’ll do it again this November.

the party is facing the same basic problem that has bedeviled Democrats since the breakdown of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s. An electorate divided by culture isn’t going to deliver the votes that Democrats need to build a lasting majority.

The crisis of democracy, then, is really a problem of the Democratic coalition. So long as elections keep being decided by wafer-thin margins, the odds of a divergence between the popular vote and the Electoral College will stay high, voters in small rural states will continue to hold the balance of power in the Senate, and Republican election deniers will get new grist for conspiracy theorizing. Even if Democrats manage to take office, they won’t have the numbers to push through reforms that might break this electoral stalemate.

What’s missing from all this is a vision for transcending the divide between the party’s rival sects, a plan for both winning elections and securing lasting change — in short, a program for transforming politics.

Mr. Rustin’s vision — the same vision that once upon a time drew a young Barack Obama into politics — remains the best starting point for coming up with a truly democratic solution to the crisis of democracy. Only 27 percent of registered voters identify as liberal. But 62 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on millionaires. An even greater number — 71 percent — approve of labor unions. And 83 percent support raising the federal minimum wage.

Today we are living in the world the Obama coalition has made. Yes, Democrats have won the popular vote in each of the past four presidential elections. But thanks to continued losses among blue-collar voters — including Latinos and a smaller but significant number of African Americans — the Obama coalition has remained a pipsqueak by historical standards. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the average Democratic margin of victory was 14.9 percentage points. Since 2008, it’s been 4.4 percentage points.

the road to freedom that Bayard Rustin dreamed of still goes through a majority movement — a coalition rooted in the working class, bound together by shared economic interests and committed to drawing out the best in the American political tradition.

What’s happening now is entirely new: the very real prospect that the markets will force a change of prime minister before an election. They have already forced a change in policy.

Those considering this drastic course are doing so, in large part, to restore calm and confidence to the markets, not simply to voters. This has not happened before and would surely act like a knife to the body politic, leaving a permanent scar on the country’s reputation.

We are now almost 15 years past the seismic financial crisis of 2008 and on to our fifth prime minister. Britain was once a rich country, seemingly well governed with institutions that sat like sedimentary rock on its surface, solid and everlasting. Today it is very obviously not a rich country or well governed, but a poor country, badly governed, with weak institutions. In trying to reverse this reality, Truss has made it visible for all to see.

the money markets were not waiting for an act of faith in Laffer Curve fundamentalism after all. This was “Reaganism without the dollar.” Without the confidence afforded to the global reserve currency, the pound went into free fall.

Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng seemed to have believed that by patching together all of the most radical policies of Thatcherism (while conveniently dropping the need for spending cuts), they would be incanting a kind of magic spell, an “Open sesame” for “global Britain.” This was their Reagan moment, their moment when, as their favorite metaphors put it, a primordial repressed force would be “unchained,” “unleashed” or “unshackled.”But as a leap of faith, it broke the diver’s neck.

As Thatcher herself put it, “Economics are the method; the object is to change the heart and soul.” Britain needed a leap of faith to restore itself.

While the Gen X Thatcherites didn’t scrimp on data, they also saw something ineffable at the root of British malaise. “Beyond the statistics and economic theories,” they wrote, “there remains a sense in which many of Britain’s problems lie in the sphere of cultural values and mind-set.”

“Britannia Unchained” expressed a desire to go back to the future by restoring Victorian values of hard work, self-improvement and bootstrapping.

They followed their idol not only in her antagonism to organized labor but also in her less-known fascination with Asian capitalism. In 2012’s “Britannia Unchained,” a book co-written by the group that remains a Rosetta Stone for the policy surprises of the last month, they slammed the Britons for their eroded work ethic and “culture of excuses” and the “cosseted” public sector unions. They praised China, South Korea, Singapore and Hong Kon

Thatcherites, known collectively as the ultras, gained fresh blood in the 2010s as a group of Gen Xers too young to experience Thatcherism in its insurgent early years — including the former home secretary Priti Patel, the former foreign secretary Dominic Raab, the former minister of state for universities Chris Skidmore, Mr. Kwarteng and Ms. Truss — attempted to reboot her ideology for the new millennium.

Over the subsequent four decades, Thatcherites at think tanks like the Institute of Economic Affairs and the Centre for Policy Studies (which Margaret Thatcher helped set up) described the struggle against both the Labour Party and the broader persistence of Socialism in the Communist and non-Communist world as a “war of ideas.”

Thatcherism began in the 1970s. Defined early as the belief in “the free economy and the strong state,” Thatcherism condemned the postwar British welfare economy and sought to replace it with virtues of individual enterprise and religious morality.

There’s something tragicomic, if not tragic, about capitalist revolutionaries Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng laid low by the mechanisms of capitalism itself. Ms. Truss and Mr. Kwarteng may be the last of the Thatcherites, defeated by the very system they believed they were acting in fidelity to.

The world has just witnessed one of the most extraordinary political immolations of recent times. Animated by faith in a fantasy version of the free market, Prime Minister Liz Truss of Britain set off a sequence of events that has forced her to fire her chancellor of the Exchequer, Kwasi Kwarteng, and led her to the brink of being ousted by her own party.

Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, who was chief of Taiwan’s General Staff from 2017 to 2019, has championed the shift to asymmetric capabilities and has emerged as a Cassandra-like figure in his warnings that Taiwan is not preparing fast enough

You may not be able to stop an invasion, Lee says, but you can stop China from subjugating Taiwan. This entails denying China the ability to control the battle space. The Chinese haven’t fought a war in several decades, and Taiwan has geographic advantages—including ample mountains and few beaches suitable for amphibious operations

the first three section headings: “I. Taiwan Is Part of China—This Is an Indisputable Fact,” “II. Resolute Efforts of the CPC to Realize China’s Complete Reunification,” and “III. 2fChina’s Complete Reunification Is a Process That Cannot Be Halted.”

Lee points to two possible scenarios. The first is a coercive approach in which China encircles and pressures Taiwan—perhaps even seizing outlying islands and engaging in missile strikes. The second is a full-scale invasion.

Politically, Lee said, the message from China to the U.S. and Taiwan is simple: “I can do whatever I want in Taiwan, and there’s nothing the U.S. can do about it.” This message came across unequivocally in a white paper that Beijing released in August.

Anti-ship missiles, anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, drones, long-range artillery, and small arms could wreak havoc on an invading force, and disrupt the supply chains necessary to sustain an occupation.

Lee also argues that Taiwan’s civilian population should be organized into a trained Territorial Defense Force, so that any attempted occupation would be met by the broadest possible resistance. “As long as China fails, Taiwan wins the war,”

“The purpose is to make China believe that if you want to invade Taiwan, you will suffer huge losses,” Lee said. “And if you still invade Taiwan, you will not be able to succeed.

as Lee sees it, the pace must quicken. “Taiwan needs a strategic paradigm shift,”

When Chiang fled to Taiwan—with roughly 2 million Chinese from the mainland—there were some 6 million people already living on an island that was just emerging from 50 years of Japanese rule. Most of the people living on the island when Chiang arrived could claim roots in Taiwan going back hundreds of years. They had their own languages and culture. So too did the island’s many Indigenous groups, such as the Amis, the Atayal, and the Paiwan.

To subjugate the island, Chiang killed and imprisoned tens of thousands over decades—a period known as the White Terror. He set up a military dictatorship under the leadership of his Chinese nationalist Kuomintang Party (KMT) and, from this offshore platform, vowed to reclaim mainland China.

After the election of President Ma Ying-jeou, in 2008, links of trade, investment, and travel helped reduce tensions with China. Ma was from the KMT, and the party’s Chinese heritage and its ties to Taiwan’s business elite eased the way to détente with Beijing.

But many Taiwanese, particularly the young, feared that forging too close a connection could ultimately give Beijing leverage over Taiwan. In 2014, in what became known as “the Sunflower Movement,” named for the flower that served as a symbol of hope, students occupied the Taiwan legislature to oppose a free-trade agreement with China. After a tense standoff, they succeeded in stopping the deal.

tus quo is really interesting, because in the American context that is what it mean

But the idea of it here is: There is no need to declare independence, because we are already independent. This country functions like an independent nation, but someone else says it is not.” Recent polling suggests that fewer than 5 percent of people in Taiwan identify as “only Chinese.”

n Chinese and KMT officials 30 years ago, an outcome

at represents anything but consensus. To the Chinese Communist Party, the consensus is that there is one China, and the government in Beijing is the sole legitimate authority. To the KMT, the consensus is that there is one China, but the Republic of China in Taiwan is the legitimate government. To the DPP, there is no consensus, only a fraught political reality to be managed

China proposes a “one country, two systems” regime, in which Taiwan becomes a formal part of China but maintains an autonomous political system. There is one big problem with this proposal: Hong Kong

in 2020, several “national-security laws” were passed giving the authorities broad powers to crush dissent. Activists were rounded up. Independent media were shut down. One country, two systems was dead. The fate of Hong Kong has had a profound impact on Taiwan.

Ukraine inspired the Taiwanese society a lot, including how Zelensky told their story,” Chiang said. He was almost matter-of-fact when he told me, “I would say war between China and Taiwan will definitely happen. We want to win.”

In our conversation, Tsai talked about what she had learned from Ukraine. One lesson is simply the need for international support—to defend itself or, better, to avoid a war in the first place

Another lesson of Ukraine is the importance of national character. Outside support, Tsai emphasized, depends on qualities only Taiwan can provide. “You need to have good leadership,” she said, “but more important is the people’s determination to defend themselves, and the Ukrainian people showed that.

Hanging over all of this is the role of the United States. As one Taiwanese ex

ert pointedly asked me: “We can make ourselves a porcupine, but what are you going to do?”

Would the U.S. risk the biggest naval battle since World War II to break a Chinese blockade? Would the U.S. attack an invading Chinese force knowing that U.S. military personnel in Japan, Guam, and possibly Hawaii are within range of Chinese rockets? Would the American people really support a war with the world’s most populous country in order to defend Taiwan?

how the U.S. can help prepare Taiwan than on what the U.S. would do in a conflict.

small victories only point up the scale of the challenge. Wu himself has used the term cognitive warfare to describe the comprehensive nature of China’s pressure on Taiwan. “They use missiles, air, ships, disinformation, cyberattacks, and economic coercion,” he told me. As a warning sign, China has banned hundreds of exported products from Taiwan. “They claimed that our mangoes tested positive for COVID,”

. If China takes Taiwan, Wu suggested that the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions could extend to the East China Sea, threatening Japan; to the South China Sea, where China has built militarized islands and claims an entire body of water bordering several nations; to the Indian Ocean, where China is expanding influence and could establish military bases; and to the Pacific Ocean, where China is working to establish security pacts with island nations

I sat there reading message after message, all posted in closed chat rooms, meant to bend Taiwanese minds to Beijing’s worldview. The meanings of buzzwords like cognitive warfare and resilience came into sharper focus. Facing the seemingly bottomless resources of a massive totalitarian state, here were two young people working for free on a Wednesday night, quietly insisting on the notion that there is indeed such a thing as objective reality.

to preserve this, Taiwan has to find some mix of the approaches that I’d heard about: preparing for a war while avoiding it; talking to China without being coerced by it; drawing closer to the U.S. without being reduced to a chess piece on the board of a great game; tending to a young democracy without letting divisions weaken it; asserting a unique identity without becoming an independent country.

In July 2018, Dean published an essay with Simon G. Talbot, a plastic and reconstructive surgeon, that argued that many physicians were suffering from a condition known as moral injury. Military psychiatrists use the term to describe an emotional wound sustained when, in the course of fulfilling their duties, soldiers witnessed or committed acts — raiding a home, killing a noncombatant — that transgressed their core values.

By the time we met, the distress among medical professionals had reached alarming levels: One survey found that nearly one in five health care workers had quit their job since the start of the pandemic and that an additional 31 percent had considered leaving

the physicians I contacted were afraid to talk openly. “I have since reconsidered this and do not feel this is something I can do right now,” one doctor wrote to me. Another texted, “Will need to be anon.” Some sources I tried to reach had signed nondisclosure agreements that prohibited them from speaking to the media without permission. Others worried they could be disciplined or fired if they angered their employers, a concern that seems particularly well founded in the growing swath of the health care system that has been taken over by private-equity firms

Mona Masood, a psychiatrist who established a support line for doctors shortly after the pandemic began, recalls being struck by how clinicians reacted when she mentioned the term. “I remember all these physicians were like, Wow, that is what I was looking for,” she says. “This is it.”

I spent much of the previous few years reporting on moral injury, interviewing workers in menial occupations whose jobs were ethically compromising. I spoke to prison guards who patrolled the wards of violent

in recent years, despite the esteem associated with their profession, many physicians have found themselves subjected to practices more commonly associated with manual laborers in auto plants and Amazon warehouses, like having their productivity tracked on an hourly basis and being pressured by management to work faster.

it quickly went viral. Doctors and nurses started reaching out to Dean to tell her how much the article spoke to them. “It went everywhere,” Dean told me when I visited her last March in Carlisle, Pa., where she now lives

“I think a lot of doctors are feeling like something is troubling them, something deep in their core that they committed themselves to,” Dean says. She notes that the term moral injury was originally coined by the psychiatrist Jonathan Shay to describe the wound that forms when a person’s sense of what is right is betrayed by leaders in high-stakes situations. “Not only are clinicians feeling betrayed by their leadership,” she says, “but when they allow these barriers to get in the way, they are part of the betrayal. They’re the instruments of betrayal.”

Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency.

They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.

Like other conservatives, Mr. Clark adheres to the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president of the United States has the power to directly control the entire federal bureaucracy and Congress cannot fracture that control by giving some officials independent decision-making authority.

Mr. Trump often exploited gaps between what the rules technically allow and the norms of self-restraint that guided past presidents of both parties. In 2021, House Democrats passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a legislative package intended to codify numerous previous norms as law, including requiring the Justice Department to give Congress logs of its contacts with White House officials. But Republicans portrayed the bill as an attack on Mr. Trump and it died in the Senate.

The modern era for the Justice Department traces back to the Watergate scandal and the period of government reforms that followed President Richard M. Nixon’s abuses. The norm took root that the president can set broad policies for the Justice Department — directing it to put greater resources and emphasis on particular types of crimes or adopting certain positions before the Supreme Court — but should not get involved in specific criminal case decisions absent extraordinary circumstances, such as if a case has foreign policy implications.

Since then, it has become routine at confirmation hearings for attorney general nominees to have senators elicit promises that they will resist any effort by the president to politicize law enforcement by intruding on matters of prosecutorial judgment and discretion.

Mr. Trump’s top rival for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent.

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are — quote — ‘independent,’” Mr. DeSantis said in May on Fox News. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”

The most powerful conservative think tanks are working on plans that would go far beyond “reforming” the F.B.I., even though its Senate-confirmed directors in the modern era have all been Republicans. They want to rip it up and start again.

“The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of the conservative movement since the Reagan years. He added, “Small-ball reforms that increase accountability within the F.B.I. fail to meet the moment. The F.B.I. must be rebuilt from the ground up — reforming it in its current state is impossible.”

Conservative media channels and social media influencers have been hammering the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for months since the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, following a playbook they honed while defending Mr. Trump during the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

On its most-watched nighttime programs, Fox News has been all-in on attacks against the Justice Department, including the accusation, presented without evidence, that Mr. Biden had directed the prosecution of Mr. Trump. As the former president addressed his supporters on Tuesday night at his Bedminster club, Fox News displayed a split screen — Mr. Trump on the right and Mr. Biden on the left. The chyron on the bottom of the screen read: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”

As president, Mr. Trump saw his attorney general as simply another one of his personal lawyers. He was infuriated when his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation — and then refused to reverse that decision to shut down the case.

After firing Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump believed he had found someone who would do his bidding in William P. Barr, who had been in the role during George H.W. Bush’s presidency

Under Mr. Barr, the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors’ recommendations on the length of a sentence for Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., and sought to shut down a case against Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty. Both cases stemmed from the Russia investigation.

But when Mr. Trump wanted to use the Justice Department to stay in power after he lost the election, he grew enraged when Mr. Barr refused to comply. Mr. Barr ultimately resigned in late 2020.

. In May, David Banks, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, for many years a stronghold of “whole language” instruction, announced a sharp pivot toward phonics, a major victory for the “science of reading” movement and a blow to devotees of entrenched “balanced literacy” methods

As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?

While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.

There is so much to worry about. A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.

the fact that the present situation has a history doesn’t mean that it isn’t rea

the reading crisis isn’t simply another culture-war combat zone. It reflects a deep ambivalence about reading itself, a crack in the foundations of modern consciousness.

Just what is reading, anyway? What is it for? Why is it something to argue and worry about? Reading isn’t synonymous with literacy, which is one of the necessary skills of contemporary existence. Nor is it identical with literature, which designates a body of written work endowed with a special if sometimes elusive prestige.

Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends.

Fun and fundamental: Together, those words express a familiar utilitarian, utopian promise — the faith that what we enjoy doing will turn out to be what we need to do, that our pleasures and our responsibilities will turn out to be one and the same. It’s not only good; it’s good for you.

Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment.

It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented

Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages.

His despair mirrors his earlier exhilaration and arises from the same source. “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

Reading is a relatively novel addition to the human repertoire — less than 6,000 years old — and the idea that it might be available to everybody is a very recent innovation

Written language, associated with the rise of states and the spread of commerce, was useful for trade, helpful in the administration of government and integral to some religious practices. Writing was a medium for lawmaking, record-keeping and scripture, and reading was the province of priests, bureaucrats and functionaries.

For most of history, that is, universal literacy was a contradiction in terms. The Latin word literatus designated a member of the learned elite

Anyone could learn to do it, but the mechanisms of learning were denied to most people on the grounds of caste, occupation or gender.

According to Steven Roger Fischer’s lively and informative “A History of Reading” (2003), “Western Europe began the transition from an oral to a literate society in the early Middle Ages, starting with society’s top rungs — aristocracy and clergy — and finally including everyone else around 1,200 years later.”

. The print revolution catalyzed a global market that flourishes to this day: Books became commodities, and readers became consumers.

For Fischer, as for many authors of long-range synthetic macrohistories, the story of reading is a chronicle of progress, the almost mythic tale of a latent superpower unlocked for the benefit of mankind.

“If extraordinary human faculties and powers do lie dormant until a social innovation calls them into life,” he writes, “perhaps this might help to explain humanity’s constant advancement.” “Reading,” he concludes, “had become our union card to humanity.”

For one thing, the older, restrictive model of literacy as an elite prerogative proved to be tenacious

The novel, more than any other genre, catered to this market. Like every other development in modern popular culture, it provoked a measure of social unease. Novels, at best a source of harmless amusement and mild moral instruction, were at worst — from the pens of the wrong writers, or in the hands of the wrong readers — both invitations to vice and a vice unto themselves

More consequential — and more revealing of the destabilizing power of reading — was the fear of literacy among the laboring classes in Europe and America. “Reading, writing and arithmetic,” the Enlightenment political theorist Bernard Mandeville asserted, were “very pernicious to the poor” because education would breed restlessness and disconte

“It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Frederick Douglass writes in his “Narrative of the Life” recalling the admonitions of one of his masters, whose wife had started teaching young Frederick his letters. If she persisted, the master explained, their chattel would “become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”

“As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.”

The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it.

Douglass’s literary genius resides in the way he uses close attention to his own situation to arrive at the essence of things — to crack the moral nut of slavery and, in this case, to peel back the epistemological husk of freedom.

He has freed his mind, but the rest has not followed. In time it would, but freedom itself brings him uncertainty and terror, an understanding of his own humanity that is embattled and incomplete.

Here, the autobiographical touches on the mythic, specifically on the myth of Prometheus, whose theft of fire — a curse as well as a blessing bestowed on a bumbling, desperate species — is a primal metaphor for reading.

A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards

Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.

Apostles of reading like to quote Franz Kafka’s aphorism that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” By itself, the violence of the metaphor is tempered by its therapeutic implication.

Kafka’s previous sentence: “What we need are books that hit us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide.”

Are those the books you want in your child’s classroom? To read in this way is to go against the grain, to feel oneself at odds, alienated, alone. Schools exist to suppress those feelings, to blunt the ax and gently thaw the sea

That is important work, but it’s equally critical for that work to be subverted, for the full destructive potential of reading to lie in reach of innocent hands.

Roland Barthes distinguished between two kinds of literary work:

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

he is really describing modalities of reading. To a member of the slaveholding Southern gentry, “The Columbian Orator” is a text of pleasure, a book that may challenge and surprise him in places, but that does not undermine his sense of the world or his place in it. For Frederick Douglass, it is a text of bliss, “bringing to crisis” (as Barthes would put it) his relation not only to language but to himself.

If you’ll forgive a Dungeons and Dragons reference, it might help to think of these types of reading as lawful and chaotic.

Lawful reading rests on the certainty that reading is good for us, and that it will make us better people. We read to see ourselves represented, to learn about others, to find comfort and enjoyment and instruction. Reading is fun! It’s good and good for you.

Chaotic reading is something else. It isn’t bad so much as unjustified, useless, unreasonable, ungoverned. Defenses of this kind of reading, which are sometimes the memoirs of a certain kind of reader, favor words like promiscuous, voracious, indiscriminate and compulsive.

Bibliophilia is lawful. Bibliomania is chaotic.

The point is not to choose between them: This is a lawful publication staffed by chaotic readers. In that way, it resembles a great many English departments, bookstores, households and classrooms. Here, the crisis never ends. Or rather, it will end when we stop reading. Which is why we can’t.

Aldi’s progression highlights the trend. Its first UK store in 1990 was in a working-class area of Birmingham. Now it has identified Oxford, Harrogate and Tunbridge Wells as its next targets, and claims to have attracted an extra 1.3 million shoppers over the past year, two thirds of whom are ABC1

my resistance has been twofold. First, I’ve wrongly valued being given a choice. I’ve wanted to choose between five different types of plain yoghurt

It’s a fallacy, of course. All that choice really provides is a greater opportunity for the marketeers to manipulate you. The supermarkets have been perfecting the art of upselling you for decades. You don’t stand a chance. The lack of choice on the discounters’ shelves is liberating and means you can get the shop done in a fraction of the time.

The other thing that has put me off the discounters is that the stores are a bit crap.

The video app, which is used by more than 150 million Americans, has become hugely popular for memes and entertainment. But lawmakers and U.S. officials are concerned that the app is passing sensitive information about Americans to Beijing.

In his complaint, Mr. Yu, 36, said that as TikTok sought to attract users in its early days, ByteDance engineers copied videos and posts from Snapchat and Instagram without permission and then posted them to the app. He also claimed that ByteDance “systematically created fabricated users” — essentially an army of bots — to boost engagement numbers, a practice that Mr. Yu said he flagged to his superiors.

Mr. Yu says he raised these concerns with Zhu Wenjia, who was in charge of the TikTok algorithm, but that Mr. Zhu was “dismissive” and remarked that it was “not a big deal.”

he also witnessed engineers for Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, tweak the algorithm to elevate content that expressed hatred for Japan.

he said that the promotion of anti-Japanese sentiments, which would make it more prominent for users, was done without hesitation.

“There was no debate,” he said. “They just did it.”

The lawsuit also accused ByteDance engineers working on Chinese apps of demoting content that expressed support for pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, while making more prominent criticisms of the protests.

the lawsuit says the founder of ByteDance, Zhang Yiming, facilitated bribes to Lu Wei, a senior government official charged with internet regulation. Chinese media at the time covered the trial of Lu Wei, who was charged in 2018 and subsequently convicted of bribery, but there was no mention of who had paid the bribes.

Mr. Yu, who was born and raised in China and now lives in San Francisco, said in the interview that during his time with the company, American user data on TikTok was stored in the United States. But engineers in China had access to it, he said.

The geographic location of servers is “irrelevant,” he said, because engineers could be a continent away but still have access. During his tenure at the company, he said, certain engineers had “backdoor” access to user data.