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It now seems likely that Trump will end U.S. compliance with the nuclear deal on May 12, when the next deadline for extending sanctions waivers comes up. It is of course still possible that Trump will take advantage of European gestures—like an agreement to sanction ballistic-missile activity, vigorously enforce inspections, and seek a follow-on agreement—to claim to have “improved” the deal thanks to his negotiating prowess, but that remains a long shot. It was always fanciful to imagine that the Europeans were going to agree to make fundamental changes to the nuclear deal (as if it were somehow in their power to unilaterally revise it without the support of the other parties to the agreement, namely Russia, China, and Iran), which is why that approach always seemed to me to be a ploy to kill the deal and blame others for its demise.

There are scenarios being discussed in which Washington abandons the deal in May but it somehow survives.  For example, Trump could refuse to sign the sanctions waivers up for renewal, but agree to go easy on implementation, or give exemptions to firms in European countries who have signaled a willingness to work on a new deal.  I suppose anything is possible, but it’s hard to see how that works. Whatever public or private pledges Trump makes, few European companies are going to invest in Iran or buy Iranian oil if U.S. law requires them to be sanctioned for doing so, and it is hard to see Iran abiding by the deal indefinitely if it accepts all of its constraints but gets none of the benefits.

There’s also the risk that countries like China or India—or even some in the EU—ignore the new sanctions and continue to buy Iranian oil, which would mean that we’d have to risk a major international trade clash to try to enforce them, at a time when potential trade wars are already looming. And even if Trump surprises us and extends sanctions for another few months and the deal survives on life support, we would soon be back in the same place we are today, faced with a binary choice between accepting an unchanged deal and blowing it up. If anyone thinks Iran will just come back to the table to accept a “better deal” after the United States, alone, walks away from the current one, they have more faith in Tehran’s political flexibility than I do.

One of the biggest sources of stress -- other than the very real fear of having someone we love get sick with Covid-19, or coming down with it ourselves -- is keeping our distance from friends and loved ones. It's becoming increasingly clear that the isolation we have all endured has taken a remarkable toll.

This was starting to sound like it was going to work, and that my parents should be able to safely visit, even though my kids or wife haven't been vaccinated. They meet the age requirements and would be considered low risk, both in terms of health and their very limited exposures.

Even after talking to the brightest epidemiologists, virologists, infectious disease experts all over the world, I wasn't 100% sure on where the line in the sand for acceptable level of risk was drawn. And so we held off -- but still, I daydreamed of the day.

In large part because our major tech platforms reduced the coefficient of friction (μ for my mechanics nerd posse) to basically zero. QAnons crept out of the dark corners of the web—obscure boards like 4chan and 8kun—and got into the mainstream platforms YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

Why did QAnon spread like wildfire in America?

These platforms not only made it easy for conspiracy nuts to share their crazy, but they used algorithms that actually boosted the spread of crazy, acting as a force multiplier.

Tuesday marks the beginning of Pride Month, and LGBTQ groups say they plan on drawing attention this year to the anti-transgender bills making their way through state legislatures across the country.

GOP-backed measures targeting transgender people have picked up steam in recent months, ranging from bills banning transgender girls from participating in girls’ sports to legislation prohibiting gender-affirming medical care for transgender minors.

By HRC's tally, 250 anti-LGBTQ bills have been introduced in state legislatures this year, including at least 35 blocking transgender youth from accessing gender-affirming care.

The NFL on Wednesday pledged to halt the use of "race-norming" — which assumed Black players started out with lower cognitive function — in the $1 billion settlement of brain injury claims and review past scores for any potential race bias.

Wednesday's announcement comes after a pair of Black players filed a civil rights lawsuit over the practice, medical experts raised concerns and a group of NFL families last month dropped 50,000 petitions at the federal courthouse in Philadelphia — where the lawsuit had been thrown out by the judge overseeing the settlement.

Neuropsychologists will propose a new way of testing

What kind of monster doesn’t support “anti-racism”? Who would put themselves on the other side of “social justice”? How could you be opposed to the notion of “racial equity”?

what began as a collective yen for racial equality—long overdue in our nation—has devolved into something dangerous that is actually undermining its own noble goals.

as high-minded as these ideas sound, they mark a shift away from the values they purport to represent—equality before the law; the consent of the governed; even democracy itself—and toward the opposite, with people ranked by immutable characteristics and ruled by a tiny elite.

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, the men – convinced that they had a duty to prevent the American government from ‘selling this country out’ – had stockpiled weapons and attempted to manufacture or buy explosives. And they had picked their target: an apartment complex in Garden City housing Somalian Muslim refugees.

The group’s ethos was anti-government, nationalist, and anti-Islamic. In a four-page manifesto scrawled in black, blue and green ink on a spiral-bound notepad they claimed they were ready to rescue the Constitution and prevent the government from ‘illegally bringing in Muslims by the thousands.’

they called themselves ‘The Crusaders’.

America’s failings — and, for that matter, Britain’s — were made all the more stark by successes elsewhere. “South Korea rolled out testing at ‘walk-in’ booths all over the country, then used credit card records and location data from mobile phones to trace the movements of infected people — a tactic Britain has failed to master after months of effort,” Pankaj Mishra wrote in an essay for the London Review of Books that excoriated the Anglo-American handling of the crisis. “Other East Asian countries such as Taiwan and Singapore are also faring much better. Vietnam swiftly routed the virus.”

Its struggles may come to mark a historic inflection point: the moment the world’s preeminent superpower had to relinquish a certain vision of its own primacy as other countries — especially some rising powers in Asia — led the way.

“Covid-19 has exposed the world’s greatest democracies as victims of prolonged self-harm,” wrote Mishra, pointing to both the United States’ punitively expensive health-care system and the hollowing out of Britain’s social services. “It has also demonstrated that countries with strong state capacity have been far more successful at stemming the virus’s spread and look better equipped to cope with the social and economic fallout.”

In almost every way, the young at this elite university seemed brighter, more mature, more reliable and infinitely more globally aware than I and my pals had been in our radically less diverse day.

Franciscan priest Richard Rohr points out, the only thing more dangerous than individual ego is group ego.

More deeply, I was impressed by how imaginatively a young person was addressing the central problem of the times: the fact we’re all united mostly by our divisiveness. Whether in the context of climate change or the right to life — let alone the ethics of trying to protect others from a killer virus by simply wearing a mask — more and more of us refuse ever to cross party lines. And in an age of social media, when we all imagine we can best capture the world’s attention by shouting as loudly as possible, there’s every incentive to take the most extreme — and polarizing — position around.

Yes, Trump can probably still expect a second acquittal in 2021. But Trump has three main post-presidential goals, and the forthcoming trial will do severe and possibly lethal damage to all three.

Trump’s maximal post-presidential goal is to position himself for a comeback run in 2024

Failing that, Trump would like to demonstrate that—president or not—he remains the dominant force within the Republican Party, a leader surpassing all others.

The philosopher Ronald Dworkin considered this type of parental conundrum in an essay called “What Is Equality?,” from 1981. The parents in such a family, he wrote, confront a trade-off between two worthy egalitarian goals. One goal, “equality of resources,” might be achieved by dividing the inheritance evenly, but it has the downside of failing to recognize important differences among the parties involved.

Another goal, “equality of welfare,” tries to take account of those differences by means of twisty calculations.

Take the first path, and you willfully ignore meaningful facts about your children. Take the second, and you risk dividing the inheritance both unevenly and incorrectly.

One of the things you know if you were brought up as a Catholic in a Protestant country, as I was, is how the attempted extirpation of England’s historic Catholic faith was enforced not just by executions, imprisonments, and public burnings but also by the destruction of monuments, statues, artifacts, paintings, buildings, and sacred sculptures. The shift in consciousness that the religious revolution required could not be sustained by words or terror alone. The new regime — an early pre-totalitarian revolution imposed from the top down — had to remove all signs of what had come before.

The impulse for wiping the slate clean is universal. Injustices mount; moderation seems inappropriate; radicalism wins and then tries to destroy the legacy of the past as a whole.

for true revolutionary potential, it’s helpful if these monuments are torn down by popular uprisings. That adds to the symbolism of a new era, even if it also adds to the chaos. That was the case in Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the younger generation, egged on by the regime, went to work on any public symbols or statues they deemed problematically counterrevolutionary, creating a reign of terror that even surpassed France’s.

Friston suggested that the truly susceptible portion of the population was certainly not 100 percent, as most modelers and conventional wisdom had it, but a much smaller share — surely below 50 percent, he said, and likely closer to about 20 percent. The analysis was ongoing, he said, but, “I suspect, once this has been done, it will look like the effective non-susceptible portion of the population will be about 80 percent. I think that’s what’s going to happen.”

one of the leading modelers, Gabriela Gomes, suggested the entire area of research was being effectively blackballed out of fear it might encourage a relaxation of pandemic vigilance. “This is the very sad reason for the absence of more optimistic projections on the development of this pandemic in the scientific literature,” she wrote on Twitter. “Our analysis suggests that herd-immunity thresholds are being achieved despite strict social-distancing measures.”

Gomes suggested, herd immunity could happen with as little as one quarter of the population of a community exposed — or perhaps just 20 percent. “We just keep running the models, and it keeps coming back at less than 20 percent,” she told Hamblin. “It’s very striking.” Such findings, if they held up, would be very instructive, as Hamblin writes: “It would mean, for instance, that at 25 percent antibody prevalence, New York City could continue its careful reopening without fear of another major surge in cases.”

the first lady. “There are two pronouns: he and she,” she declared. “Our language is beautiful. And two pronouns are appropriate.”

“This for me was very violent,” Mx. Delhomme said in an interview. “Coming from the first lady, from a woman, from a French teacher, from someone whose relationship went against many societal norms, it made me lose hope

“pronouns have not changed since the fourth century.” As for the masculine form, “it plays a generic role, that’s just the way it is, and has been since vulgate Latin.”

Implementation matters, but it’s harder to cover because it’s happening in all parts of the country simultaneously. There isn’t a huge Republican-Democratic fight over it, so there isn’t the conflict that draws the attention to it

we sort of implicitly treat policy like it’s this binary one-zero condition. One, you pass a bill, and the thing is going to happen. Zero, you didn’t, and it won’t.

ROBINSON MEYER: You can almost divide the law up into different kind of sectors, right? You have the renewable build-out. You have EVs. You have carbon capture. You have all these other decarbonizing technologies the law is trying to encourage