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Millions tuned in every week to hear Trump say his signature line, “You’re fired,” and cement his image as a man who played up conflict for the cameras and who never met a self-promotional product placement he didn’t like. He was a quintessential reality star — and a senior Trump campaign adviser, Paul Manafort, said this past week that the mogul is still exactly that: “This is the ultimate reality show. It’s the presidency of the United States.”

Everyone may love to watch the villains and the insult-lobbing ringmasters on reality shows, but no one ever roots for them, which, technically, should not bode well for Trump’s chances. Technically.

The people who stick around longest on competition shows aren’t always the ones with the most “skill” at whatever it is the shows make contestants do. Often, they’re the ones who stir up the most hate-watch rage

what might die after Covid-19 is the myth that we are the best country on earth, a belief common even among the poor, the marginal, the precariat, who must believe in their own Americanness if

Is it too much to hope that the forced isolation of many Americans, and the forced labor of others, might compel radical acts of self-reflection, self-assessment and, eventually, solidarity?

we have a choice: Will we accept a world of division and scarcity, where we must fight over insufficient resources and opportunities, or imagine a future when our society is measured by how well it takes care of the ill, the poor, the aged and the different?

In the year of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, Copperhead presents us with a false depiction of the Copperheads as principled men of peace instead of what they were -- often violent and always racist defenders of slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Copperhead is propaganda for an old variation of the neo-Confederate Lost Cause myth, that the root of the Civil War was not slavery and the slave power, but an aggressive, power-mad North seeking to tyrannize, by unconstitutional means, a benign and chivalrous South. The Lost Cause myth was at its heart not a matter of a differing interpretation, but of the falsification and suppression of history in order to vindicate the Confederacy and later to justify Jim Crow.

Pontius Pilate is a man many Jews and Christians love to hate. For Christians, the Roman governor of Judaea played a central role in the execution of Jesus around A.D. 30, while for Jews he was a callous ruler who set the stage for the rebellion that led to the destruction of Jerusalem four decades later. But a new discovery suggests that Pilate also spent a good deal of time and money embellishing the famous city that drew Jewish pilgrims as well as visitors from around the Roman Empire.

The latest coins discovered beneath the paving stones date to around A.D. 31. The most common Jerusalem coins from the first century were minted after 40, “so not having them beneath the street means the street was built before their appearance, in other words only in the time of Pilate,” says Donald Ariel, a coin expert with the Israel Antiquities Authority.

During a ceremony last June inaugurating part of the tunnel, U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman dismissed these concerns. The project, he said, “confirms with evidence, with science, with archaeological studies that which many of us already knew, certainly in our heart: the centrality of Jerusalem to the Jewish people.” And, if the science proves correct, it was a despised Roman who helped make it a city renowned across the empire for its holy sites and monumental architecture.

A friend of mine recently ran a climate education session with a local university. The workshop guided the students through the science of the changing climate and the findings of the IPCC reports and, apparently, empowered them to take action.

Empowerment was not the reaction the students responded with.

Instead, they rebuffed with arguments blaming corporations for causing climate change, asking why they had to give up stuff when big businesses are allowed to freely fuck it all up; declaring their lives are hard enough already!

In “The Sleepwalkers,” Christopher Clark, a professor of modern European history at Cambridge, describes how within 10 days czarist Russia’s ministers had created a narrative to justify Russia taking up arms for its “little Serbian brothers” should Austria-Hungary try to punish them. The dead archduke was portrayed as a stooge of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany and a warmonger (which he wasn’t). The intent was to shift the moral onus from the perpetrator to the victim. France bought into that stratagem, and England more or less went along, the three bound by the Triple Entente of 1907. Austria-Hungary in turn had by July 4 sent an envoy on the night train to Berlin, where the Kaiser had just rebuked an official urging calm: “Stop this nonsense! It was high time a clean sweep was made of the Serbs.” So Austria-­Hungary got its famous “blank check,” and 37 days after Sarajevo the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire later in the year and eventually Bulgaria) were at war with the Entente powers

Russia’s ­mobilization, he says, was “one of the most momentous decisions of the July crisis. This was the first of the general mobilizations.” McMeekin says that Russia’s crime was first in escalating a local quarrel by encouraging Serbia to stand up to Austria-Hungary and then accelerating the rush to war. He faults Barbara Tuchman in her classic “Guns of August” for misdating Russia’s mobilization two days later than it was ordered. He is no apologist for Germany. In “The Berlin-­Baghdad Express” (2010), he nailed the Kaiser as a half-crazy jihadist inciting Muslims against Anglo-French interests in the faltering Ottoman Empire, but his 2011 book “The Russian Origins of the First World War” lived up to its title. Clark lends authority by citing Russian-French falsifications of documents. The Russians backdated and reworded papers in the records. The French were even more inventive, fabricating a telegram reporting six days of war preparations by Germany that weren’t happening. In Clark’s phrase, both Russia and France were at pains, then and later, to make Berlin appear “the moral fulcrum of the crisis.”

By a stringent line-by-line analysis of the terms of Austria’s 48-hour ultimatum to Serbia and the Serbian reply, Clark demolishes the standard view that Austria was too harsh and that Serbia humbly complied. Austria demanded action against irredentist networks in Serbia. It would have been an infringement of sovereignty, yes, but Serbian tolerance of the terrorist networks, and its laid-back response to the Sarajevo murders, inhibit one’s sympathy with its position. Clark describes Austria’s ultimatum as “a great deal milder” than the ultimatum presented by NATO to Serbia-Yugoslavia in the March 1999 Rambouillet Agreement for unimpeded access to its land. As for Serbia’s reply, so long regarded as conciliatory, Clark shows that on most policy points it was a highly perfumed rejection offering Austria amazingly little — a “masterpiece of diplomatic equivocation.”

"No one seems to care about the upcoming attack on the World Trade Center site," wrote Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert in a provocatively titled 2006 Los Angeles Times op-ed. "Why? Because it won't involve villains with box cutters. Instead, it will involve melting ice sheets that swell the oceans and turn that particular block of lower Manhattan into an aquarium."

There is, in other words, a new day dawning, and we’re sure as hell not going to use any of that sunlight for energy. Instead, it’s clear that we’re about to witness the steady demolition, or attempted demolition, of the environmental protections that have been put in place over the past five decades.

There’s not the slightest evidence that Americans want laxer environmental laws. A poll released last week showed that nearly two-thirds of Americans would prefer that the E.P.A.’s powers be preserved or strengthened. Solar power, meanwhile, polls somewhere in the neighborhood of ice cream among Democrats, Independents, and Republicans alike.

But the survey that counts in the Trump Administration is of plutocrats, and, as Jane Mayer demonstrated in her book “Dark Money,” the moguls of the right-wing funding network, whose disciples are now in place across the Cabinet, hate environmental regulation with a passion. We know some of them—the Koch brothers, for instance. But there is a whole league of cartoonish villains, including John Menard, Jr., the richest man in Wisconsin, whose company was once charged with labelling arsenic-tainted mulch as “ideal for playgrounds.” Having paid hundreds of millions in fines, these people paid tens of millions in campaign contributions, and now their bill has come due.

NOT NORMALA-List’s Trump Snub Hits Him Where It Hurts

Rockettes and now even a member of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, who are refusing to raise their microphones, kick up their bare-legged heels or otherwise perform for Donald Trump at his inaugural

America is, in many ways, as much an idea as it is a country. And Americans have long marketed that idea around the world through our popular culture

What is the psychological mechanism underpinning this resentment?

Democratic politicians and the media have struggled to enter the minds of Trump voters, who are evidently enraged by the imposition of norms of political correctness that they see as enforced by “Stalinist orthodoxy.”

Trump has capitalized on the visceral belief of many white voters that government-enforced diversity and other related regulations are designed “to bring Americans to submission” by silencing their opposition to immigration — legal and illegal — to judicial orders putting low-income housing in the suburbs, and to government-mandated school integration, to name just a few of their least favorite things.

Two hundred years on, the French still cannot agree on whether Napoleon was a hero or a villain.“The divide is generally down political party lines,” says professor Peter Hicks, a British historian with the Napoléon Foundation in Paris. “On the left, there’s the ’black legend’ of Bonaparte as an ogre. On the right, there is the ’golden legend’ of a strong leader who created durable institutions.”

While the 200th anniversary of the French Revolution that toppled the monarchy and delivered thousands to death by guillotine was officially celebrated in 1989, Napoleonic anniversaries are neither officially marked nor celebrated. For example, a decade ago, the president and prime minister—at the time, Jacques Chirac and Dominque de Villepin—boycotted a ceremony marking the 200th anniversary of the battle of Austerlitz, Napoleon’s greatest military victory. More from the May 16 Issue Political First Responders Flights of Fancy Flower Power “It’s almost as if Napoleon Bonaparte is not part of the national story,” Hicks tells Newsweek

In 2010 an opinion poll in France asked who was the most important man in French history. Napoleon came second, behind General Charles de Gaulle,

For people like me, who have got their flags and wars mixed up, I think it should be pointed out that there may have been only one War of 1812, but there are four distinct versions of it—the American, the British, the Canadian and the Native American.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, American commentators painted the battles of 1812-15 as part of a glorious “second war for independence.”

As the 19th century progressed, this view changed into a more general story about the “birth of American freedom” and the founding of the Union.

It is undeniably enjoyable to watch Trump. He's red-faced, discursive, funny, angry, strange, unpredictable, and real. He speaks without filter and tweets with reckless abandon. The Donald Trump phenomenon is a riotous union of candidate ego and voter id. America's most skilled political entertainer is putting on the greatest show we've ever seen.

Trump is the most dangerous major candidate for president in memory. He pairs terrible ideas with an alarming temperament; he's a racist, a sexist, and a demagogue, but he's also a narcissist, a bully, and a dilettante.

He lies so constantly and so fluently that it's hard to know if he even realizes he's lying.

Artist Carter Goodrich painted Trump as a “dangerous clown” for the magazine’s Oct. 30th issue because he was “still just as stunned now” about the election results as he was last November. The image is called “October Surprise.” “I have been asked to work on movies about him. I can’t do it; most satire seems to lighten what feels to me like a dire situation. He’s already a cartoon villain, infantile and strange,” Goodrich said.

As history is raided, indeed raped, by identitarians and populists, glib judgments on the past become fodder for every tribal grievance.

I have come away from working on a history of Europe convinced that it is senseless to pass moral judgment on men and women of past times and past cultures.

Fake history may be a clever way to engage the empathy of the young with otherwise difficult material. But if the purpose of history is to offer lessons for the future, distorting it is fraught with danger.

Why was Felicity Huffman’s husband, an equally famous actor, not also charged with trying to bribe and fraud his kids’ way into college?

“Oh, I bet I know why,” sighed one friend, currently mired in her own kids’ school applications. “It’s because the moms have to do everything, including organize the crime.”

Macy, for what it’s worth, actually appeared to be a very involved parent. In the recorded phone calls, it was SPOUSE who brought up that his kid needed high enough scores for Georgetown. It was SPOUSE who declared the kid would perform better if the family could finagle an extended two-day SAT testing period, usually reserved for students with learning disabilities.

UNDER GOD Religion and American Politics By Garry Wills.

an outstanding account of the Scopes "monkey" trial in Tennessee in 1925, an account in which Clarence Darrow emerges as the fool and the villain.

For until Darrow, defending the teacher on trial for teaching evolution, drove his opponent, William Jennings Bryan, into a corner, Bryan was not so much against evolution as against social Darwinism

“Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”

Ignore for a moment any objections you might have to the simulation hypothesis, and everything impractical about the idea that we could somehow break out of reality, and think about what these people are trying to do.

The two billionaires (Elon Musk is a prime suspect) are convinced that they’ll emerge out of this drab illusion into a more shining reality, lit by a brighter and more beautiful star. But for the rest of us the experience would be very different—you lose your home, you lose your family, you lose your life and your body and everything around you