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Wrangham’s 2009 book, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, pursued a very different hypothesis. Based on archaeological evidence, he made the case that our ancestors mastered fire much earlier than most of us had believed—perhaps closer to 2 million rather than 800,000 years ago—which changed everything for them

In his 1996 book, Demonic Males, co-authored with Dale Peterson, Wrangham recapped this and other evidence to draw a dire portrait of humanity (the male version) as inherently violent by evolutionary legacy. Here was vivid support for a Hobbesian view of human nature, rooted in genetics.

his two previous books, which explore the opposing poles of behavior. Renowned for his meticulous fieldwork, especially with chimps in Uganda’s Kibale National Park, Wrangham showed just how common chimp brutality is.

He also applies his evolutionary logic to studies of a wider array of animals. He dwells in particular on some marvelous experiments that explore the taming of wild foxes, minks, and other species by human-directed artificial selection over many generations.

fire extended the day into the night. Given how important we know conversations and stories told around the fire are to human hunter-gatherers, it’s easy to see how this process could have accelerated the evolution of language—an essential ingredient for less physically aggressive interactions

evidence has steadily accumulated that humans, from early on in their development, are the most cooperative species in the primate world

classic work on chimps has been complemented by new studies of bonobos, our other close relative. No more removed from us genetically than chimps are, they are a radical contrast to them, often called the “make love, not war” species. Some of our nonhuman kin, such fieldwork has revealed, can live and evolve almost without violence.

he pursues yet another ambitious hypothesis: “Reduced reactive aggression must feature alongside intelligence, cooperation, and social learning as a key contributor to the emergence and success of our species.”

“I walked around Auschwitz. I could feel the chimera at its best and worst.” Violence and virtue, he recognizes, are not opposites but powerful, not always reliable allies. “So much cooperation,” he notes of the smoothly operating human machinery of mass murder—“it can be for good or bad.”

cooking made possible a much more diverse diet

Enter the bonobos, to whom Wrangham turns as he considers how diminished aggression may have been selected for in the evolution of humans

they separated from chimps 1 to 2 million years ago, and were isolated south of a bend in the Congo River. Female bonobos form strong coalitions—partly based on sex with each other—that keep a lid on male violence. The “trust hormone” oxytocin is released during female sex: You could say that the partners are high, in both senses of the word, on trust. Because females run things, males don’t attack them, and even male-on-male violence is extremely limited. Bonobos also display the other traits common to the domestication syndrome, which suggests—as in the case of the foxes—a broad genetic dynamic at work.

He has learned that over many generations, ecological realities create species-specific behavior. In the case of bonobos, he suggests, a lush habitat in which they were protected from competition with either chimps or gorillas gave them the luxury of decreasing their own reactive aggression

Central to his argument is the idea that cooperative killing of incurably violent individuals played a central role in our self-domestication

our ancestors killed men who were guilty of repeated acts of violence. Certainly all-male raiding parties have operated in some groups of humans, seeking out and killing victims in neighboring villages

They serve as a form of capital punishment. Wrangham cites a number of examples of anthropologists witnessing a group of men collaborating to kill a violent man in their midst.

My own two years with the !Kung point to a more robust possible selection process for winnowing out aggression: female choice. Women in most hunter-gatherer groups, as I learned in the course of my experience in the field, are closer to equality with men than are women in many other societies. Evolutionary logic suggests that young women and their parents, in choosing less violent mates through the generations, could provide steady selection pressure toward lower reactive aggression—steadier pressure than infrequent dramas of capital punishment could. (

Wrangham has nonetheless highlighted a puzzle at the core of human evolution, and delivered a reminder of the double-edged nature of our virtues and vices.

Such breeding efforts, Wrangham notes, have produced “the domestication syndrome”: a change in a suite of traits, not just the low reactive aggression that breeders have deliberately singled out

Half a century and thousands of fossil finds later, we have a far more complete—and also more puzzling—view of the human past

As data pile up, so do surprises

In 1965 a remarkable book—Irven DeVore’s collection Primate Behavior (which led me to study with DeVore)—made what then seemed a radical claim: We will never understand our origins without intensive study of the wild world of our nonhuman relatives. A handful of scientists, including Jane Goodall, set up tents in distant jungles and savannas. Following monkeys, apes, and other creatures in their habitats, these scientists turned their notes and observations into voluminous, quantitative data.

Once completed, the telescope will be an amalgamation of several complex pieces of hardware. Most of the assembly for Webb took place at NASA’s facility in Maryland, the Goddard Spaceflight Center, where it underwent a barrage of tests. In January 2016, scientists and engineers dunked the telescope’s sensitive instruments into a cylindrical chamber that simulates the extreme conditions of outer space. By November 2017, the delicate mirrors and instruments were joined together, and mission members put them through the ringer to make sure they could survive the vibrations and sounds of a powerful rocket launch. They bolted the telescope to metal plates and shook it violently, then wheeled it into an acoustic chamber and blasted it with noise through giant, vuvuzela-shaped speakers.

The GAO report starts out by praising the Webb mission for making “considerable progress” in the last few months in hardware integration, but things go downhill from there.The GAO places blame on Northrop Grumman for delays. “For several years, the prime contractor has overestimated workforce reductions, and technical challenges have prevented these planned reductions, necessitating the use of cost reserves,” the report said. Northrop Grumman did not respond to a request for comment about this assessment.

If the GAO report is any indication, there may be more troubling news for Webb to come. An independent review board for the Webb mission will conduct its own audit of the project early this year to determine whether it will make its new 2019 launch target.In the meantime, the Webb team has been reviewing and selecting research proposals for its first year of operations. The telescope, 100 more times powerful than Hubble, will be able to see deeper into the universe than ever before. Hundreds of astronomers, from many countries, want their time on it. In its first few months, Webb will focus on nearby targets—the planets in our solar system—and distant ones—glittering galaxies way out in the cosmos. It will return stunning images of it all in tremendous clarity and color. Perhaps then, when we lay eyes on these photographs, the long wait will have seemed worth

Dr Hörst is hopeful that her team's work will be helpful in ruling out erroneous organic signatures, yet she notes that the results do show exoplanets may be capable of creating the building blocks for life.

Paradoxically, these same disastrous circumstances may also inspire altruism, compassion, optimism, and foster a sense of meaning and personal growth (otherwise referred to as post-traumatic growth) as people band together to salvage, rebuild, and console amongst the chaos and loss of a changing climate [30, 31].

Marginalized groups who tend to be the most affected by the mental and physical health implications of climate change are: Indigenous peoples, children, seniors, women, people with low-socioeconomic status, outdoor labourers, racialized people, immigrants, and people with pre-existing health conditions

The influential sociologist Anthony Giddens refers to this space and time distancing of the climate change problem as the Giddens Paradox [70]. The Giddens Paradox states that: “since the dangers posed by global warming aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in the course of day-to-day life, many will sit on their hands and do nothing of a concrete nature about them. Yet waiting until such dangers become visible and acute—in the shape of catastrophes that are irrefutably the result of climate change—before being stirred to serious action will be too late” (p. 2).

Marshall contends that part of the time and space distancing of the climate change problem, and thus the reluctance to act, is reinforced by the Western political discourse on climate change as a future-facing problem that intentionally overlooks the centuries of industrialization, fossil fuel consumption, and land degradation that contribute to anthropogenic climate change [71]

Marshall calls for a reckoning with this discourse by noting:“Climate change is a future problem. But it is also a past problem and a present problem. It is better thought of as a developing process of long-term deterioration, called, by some psychologists, a “creeping problem.” The lack of a definite beginning, end, or deadline requires that we create our own timeline. Not surprisingly, we do so in ways that remove the compulsion to act. We allow just enough history to make it seem familiar but not enough to create a responsibility for our past emissions. We make it just current enough to accept that we need to do something about it but put it just too far in the future to require immediate action” [71].

It requires coping strategies to manage the feelings and thoughts that arise so that people can face up to, and come to terms with, these threats and consequences rather than avoiding the creeping problem of climate change.

Since early 2007, environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht and colleagues have taken note of emotional distress related to the awareness of the overarching problem humans face as a result of global climate change [96]

Albrecht et al. suggest that this awareness contributes to ‘psychoterratic syndromes’. Psychoterratic syndromes include phenomena such as ‘ecoanxiety’, ‘ecoparalysis’, and ‘solastalgia’. ‘Ecoanxiety’ refers to the anxiety people face from constantly being surrounded by the wicked and threatening problems associated with a changing climate [96]

Exploring the complexity of psychological responses in the book, Climate change and human well-being, Weissbecker et al., discuss the full spectrum of psychosocial consequences of climate change-related events ranging from mental illness to more positive experiences like ‘Post Traumatic Growth’ (PTG), empathy, compassion, altruism, and emotional resilience [25].

For many people, climate change is experienced by way of vicarious threats or as an existential threat to civilisation [37]. People may experience vicarious threats when they receive weather warnings related to future disaster seasons or when they hear about environmental stressors experienced by people in other places.

For many people, this is largely how climate change is experienced—not as a direct threat, but as a global threat, often distant in time and place, or as a threat to our very way of life. Qualitative research finds evidence of some people being deeply affected by feelings of loss, helplessness, and frustration as they engage with the problems of global climate change [97].

Psychological adaptation requires a set of responses, it requires an acknowledgement of the grave threats posed by climate change and the profoundly consequential global crisis.

‘Ecoparalysis’ refers to the complex feelings of not being able to take effective action to significantly mitigate climate change risks. ‘Solastalgia’ refers to “the distress and isolation caused by the gradual removal of solace from the present state of one’s home environment” [29].

It also requires behavioural and psychological engagement, in which people change and adjust their behaviour and lifestyle in order to reduce the threat and protect themselves.

Active hope—something Macy and Johnstone champion—supports psychological adaptation. Active hope is required to move hopeful intentions from a passive state where waiting for someone else to take-on the task of addressing the climate change problem is replaced with an active process of climate change mitigation and adaptation behaviours [106]

This active process occurs when the reality of the problem is acknowledged as is the magnitude of the problem, intentions to address the problem are set, and engaged actions take place.

While these three steps may oversimplify the complexity of acting in the face of bureaucracy, climate denialism, or downright avoidance and ignorance of the magnitude of the problem area, these three steps are indeed the pivot points of transformation. These pivot points, however, need to be upheld by global political will and policy commitments that tackle the problem at the appropriate scale and speed. To do so, public awareness of the severity, magnitude and range of health impacts—current and projected—is required to pressure governments and communities to act now.

Also, discernible interventions are needed to demonstrate a tangible path forward to respond to the risks and impacts we face in a changing climate. Examples of these types of interventions are explored below.

Other innovative approaches to addressing mental health and wellbeing in a changing climate writ large include experiencing and preserving nature. Koger et al. suggest that environmental preservation provides people with a sense of stewardship and personal investment that can help people overcome feelings of hopelessness, anxiety, and ecoparalysis [109]. Koger et al. suggest: “if people feel a deep connection to places, wilderness, and other species, then threats to these others are much more likely to be viewed as personal issues” [109]. Other research on the restorative benefits of natural environments and settings has found that biodiversity in natural environments is important for human health and wellbeing and has a particularly positive effect on mood, attention and cognition [110].

William F. Buckley Jr. famously said, “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the 2,000 faculty members of Harvard University.” More recently, George W. Bush joked at a Yale commencement: “To those of you who received honors, awards and distinctions, I say, well done. And to the C students I say, you, too, can be president of the United States.”

The Republican embrace of anti-intellectualism was, to a large extent, a put-on.

Eisenhower may have played the part of an amiable duffer, but he may have been the best prepared president we have ever had — a five-star general with an unparalleled knowledge of national security affairs. When he resorted to gobbledygook in public, it was in order to preserve his political room to maneuver. Reagan may have come across as a dumb thespian, but he spent decades honing his views on public policy and writing his own speeches. Nixon may have burned with resentment of “Harvard men,” but he turned over foreign policy and domestic policy to two Harvard professors, Henry A. Kissinger and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, while his own knowledge of foreign affairs was second only to Ike’s.

There is no evidence that Republican leaders have been demonstrably dumber than their Democratic counterparts. During the Reagan years, the G.O.P. briefly became known as the “party of ideas,”

In recent years, however, the Republicans’ relationship to the realm of ideas has become more and more attenuated as talk-radio hosts and television personalities have taken over the role of defining the conservative movement that once belonged to thinkers like Irving Kristol, Norman Podhoretz and George F. Will. The Tea Party represented a populist revolt against what its activists saw as out-of-touch Republican elites in Washington.

the primary vibe from the G.O.P. has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.

It’s one thing to appeal to voters by pretending to be an average guy. It’s another to be an average guy who doesn’t know the first thing about governing or public policy.

The Trump acolytes claim it doesn’t matter; he can hire experts to advise him. But experts always disagree with one another and it is the president alone who must make the most difficult decisions in the world. That’s not something he can do since he lacks the most basic grounding in the issues and is prey to fundamental misconceptions.

In a way, the joke’s on the Republican Party: After decades of masquerading as the “stupid party,” that’s what it has become

the G.O.P. still has a lot of soul-searching to do. Mr. Trump is as much a symptom as a cause of the party’s anti-intellectual drift. The party needs to rethink its growing anti-intellectual bias and its reflexive aversion to elites.

Liberalism claims to be neutral but it’s really anti-culture. It detaches people from nature, community, tradition and place. It detaches people from time.

Deneen argues that liberal democracy has betrayed its promises. It was supposed to foster equality, but it has led to great inequality and a new aristocracy. It was supposed to give average people control over government, but average people feel alienated from government. It was supposed to foster liberty, but it creates a degraded popular culture in which consumers become slave to their appetites.

The problem, Deneen argues, started at the beginning. Greek and medieval philosophies valued liberty, but they understood that before a person could help govern society, he had to be able to govern himself.

People had to be habituated in virtue by institutions they didn’t choose — family, religion, community, social norms.

But under the influence of Machiavelli and Locke, the men who founded our system made two fateful errors. First, they came to reject the classical and religious idea that people are political and relational creatures. Instead, they placed the autonomous, choosing individual at the center of their view of human nature.

Furthermore, they decided you couldn’t base a system of government on something as unreliable as virtue. But you could base it on something low and steady like selfishness.

You could pit interest against interest and create a stable machine. You didn’t have to worry about creating noble citizens; you could get by with rationally self-interested ones.

When communism and fascism failed in the 20th century, this version of liberalism seemed triumphant. But it was a Pyrrhic victory

His new book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” is a challenge to those of us who want to revive the liberal democratic order.

Once family and local community erode and social norms dissolve, individuals are left naked and unprotected.

They seek solace in the state. They toggle between impersonal systems: globalized capitalism and the distant state. As the social order decays, people grasp for the security of authoritarianism.

He urges people to dedicate themselves instead to local community — a sort of Wendell Berry agrarianism.

Deneen’s book is valuable because it focuses on today’s central issue. The important debates now are not about policy. They are about the basic values and structures of our social order

Nonetheless, he is wrong. Liberal democracy has had a pretty good run for 300 years. If the problem were really in the roots, wouldn’t it have shown up before now?

The difficulties stem not from anything inherent in liberalism but from the fact that we have neglected the moral order and the vision of human dignity embedded within liberalism itself.

, liberal democracy contains a rich and soul-filling version of human flourishing and solidarity, which Deneen airbrushes from history.

the liberal democratic moral order stands for the idea that souls are formed in freedom and not in servility, in expansiveness, not in stagnation.

It stands for the idea that our covenantal institutions — like family, faith, tradition and community — orient us toward higher loves and common dreams that we then pursue in the great gymnasium of liberty.

Yes, liberalism sometimes sits in tension with faith, tradition, family and community, which Deneen rightly cherishes. But liberalism is not their murderer.

there are community healers in towns and cities concretely living out the liberal democratic vision of the good life — deeply embedded in their communities, surrendered to their ideals, reaching out to other communities, growing in their freedom.

The United States currently has the lowest minimum wage, as a proportion of its average wage, of any advanced economy,

On the other hand, two recent meta-studies (which pool together the results of multiple analyses) have found that increasing the minimum wage does not have a significant impact on employment.

The minimum wage has been a hobgoblin of economism since its origins

Think tanks including Cato, Heritage, and the Manhattan Institute have reliably attacked the minimum wage for decades, all the while emphasizing the key lesson from Economics 101: Higher wages cause employers to cut jobs.

In today’s environment of increasing economic inequality, the minimum wage is a centerpiece of political debate

The real impact of the minimum wage, however, is much less clear than these talking points might indicate.

In 1994, David Card and Alan Krueger evaluated an increase in New Jersey’s minimum wage by comparing fast-food restaurants on both sides of the New Jersey-Pennsylvania border. They concluded, “Contrary to the central prediction of the textbook model ... we find no evidence that the rise in New Jersey’s minimum wage reduced employment at fast-food restaurants in the state.”

Card and Krueger’s findings have been vigorously contested across dozens of empirical studies. Today, people on both sides of the debate can cite papers supporting their position, and reviews of the academic research disagree on what conclusions to draw.

economists who have long argued against the minimum wage, reviewed more than one hundred empirical papers in 2006. Although the studies had a wide range of results, they concluded that the “preponderance of the evidence” indicated that a higher minimum wage does increase unemployment.

The argument against increasing the minimum wage often relies on what I call “economism”—the misleading application of basic lessons from Economics 101 to real-world problems, creating the illusion of consensus and reducing a complex topic to a simple, open-and-shut case.

The profession as a whole is divided on the topic: When the University of Chicago Booth School of Business asked a panel of prominent economists in 2013 whether increasing the minimum wage to $9 would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment,” the responses were split down the middle.

The idea that a higher minimum wage might not increase unemployment runs directly counter to the lessons of Economics 101

there are several reasons why the real world does not behave so predictably.

In short, whether the minimum wage should be increased (or eliminated) is a complicated question. The economic research is difficult to parse, and arguments often turn on sophisticated econometric details. Any change in the minimum wage would have different effects on different groups of peop

At the other extreme, very large employers may have enough market power that the usual supply-and-demand model doesn’t apply to them. They can reduce the wage level by hiring fewer workers

In the above examples, a higher minimum wage will raise labor costs. But many companies can recoup cost increases in the form of higher prices; because most of their customers are not poor, the net effect is to transfer money from higher-income to lower-income families.

In addition, companies that pay more often benefit from higher employee productivity, offsetting the growth in labor costs.

why higher wages boost productivity: They motivate people to work harder, they attract higher-skilled workers, and they reduce employee turnover, lowering hiring and training costs, among other things

If fewer people quit their jobs, that also reduces the number of people who are out of work at any one time because they’re looking for something better. A higher minimum wage motivates more people to enter the labor force, raising both employment and output

Finally, higher pay increases workers’ buying power. Because poor people spend a relatively large proportion of their income, a higher minimum wage can boost overall economic activity and stimulate economic growth

Even if a higher minimum wage does cause some people to lose their jobs, that cost has to be balanced against the benefit of greater earnings for other low-income workers.

Although the standard model predicts that employers will replace workers with machines if wages increase, additional labor-saving technologies are not available to every company at a reasonable cost

Nevertheless, when the topic reaches the national stage, it is economism’s facile punch line that gets delivered, along with its all-purpose dismissal: people who want a higher minimum wage just don’t understand economics (although, by that standard, several Nobel Prize winners don’t understand economics

This conviction that the minimum wage hurts the poor is an example of economism in action

one particular result of one particular model is presented as an unassailable economic theorem.

A recent study by researchers at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, however, found that higher minimum wages have not affected either the number of restaurants or the number of people that they employ, contrary to the industry’s dire predictions, while they have modestly increased workers’ pay.

The fact that this is the debate already demonstrates the historical influence of economism

Low- and middle-income workers’ reduced bargaining power is a major reason why their wages have not kept pace with the overall growth of the economy. According to an analysis by the sociologists Bruce Western and Jake Rosenfeld, one-fifth to one-third of the increase in inequality between 1973 and 2007 results from the decline of unions.

With unions only a distant memory for many people, federal minimum-wage legislation has become the best hope for propping up wages for low-income workers. And again, the worldview of economism comes to the aid of employers by abstracting away from the reality of low-wage work to a pristine world ruled by the “law” of supply and demand.

Philip promulgated the entire body of decrees in Spain in July 1564

The Spanish Church at the time of Philip's accession was in dire need of reform

Its limited budget and resources (a mere 45 inquisitors were responsible for 8 million Spaniards) meant that it could not possibly carry out this broad range of duties

His long conflict against the Turks was motivated as much by a sense of Spain's strategic needs in the Mediterranean as by any desire to join the Pope on a religious crusade against the 'Infidel'

May festivals were banned, and plays, public meetings, business and games were prohibited inside churches, but the attempt to ban bullfighting on holy days was a miserable

The government, fearing that the revolt might spread or that it might attract Turkish support, dispatched 20,000 Spanish troops, commanded by Philip's half-brother Don Juan, to restore order

the Spanish Church as a whole was unenthusiastic about the monarchy's reforming efforts, only gradually and reluctantly adopting Tridentine standards of education, behaviour and dress

After the victory at Lepanto in October 1571, at which 117 Ottoman ships were captured and dozens more sunk for the loss of only 20 Christian ships, Philip's propagandists trumpeted both Philip's faith and the blessings of God upon Spain

After intervening in France in the 1590s, he was outraged to discover that the Pope recognised Henry IV as the rightful ruler of France and was working to obtain his conversion to Catholicism

Yet while religion may not have been dominant in Philip's considerations during the 1570s, it appears to have become more influential towards the end of his reign

In the 1580s and 1590s Philip allowed himself to be drawn into the French Civil Wars, intervening militarily between 1590 and 1598

Overall, it seems that, as the reign progressed, Philip allowed religious considerations to loom ever larger in his shaping of foreign policy

the Pope, as ruler of the Papal States, felt threatened by the power of Spain, which controlled the Italian states of Naples, Sicily, Sardinia and Milan

The Papacy traditionally sought room for diplomatic manoeuvre by playing Spain off against the other great Catholic power, France, but the weakness of late sixteenth-century France made this impossible, and the Pope's consequent reliance upon Spanish arms against Ottoman and Protestant threats only made him more resentful.

The Pope constantly hectored Philip to embark upon crusades against the Turks, against Elizabeth of England, against heresy in the Netherlands, but Philip, knowing full well the costs of such an aggressive policy, resisted until the 1580s. Thereafter Philip, at war with England, France and the Netherlands,

But when Pius V sought to follow up the victory at Lepanto with a crusade against the Turks in the Eastern Mediterranean, Philip demurred, preferring 'to gain some benefit for my own subjects and states from this league and all its expenses rather than employ them in so risky an undertaking as a distant expedition in the Levant

Philip is often portrayed as a 'champion of Catholicism' and the evidence of his religious policy at home and abroad largely bears out this judgement

The fear of its introduction froze the … heretics of Italy, France and Germany into orthodoxy… It condemned not deeds but thoughts … it arrested on suspicion, tortured till confession, and then punished by fire

They paint a more positive picture of a regime striving, certainly, to purify the nation, but also to educate and reform its morals and worship

On the one hand, the power of the State and the Inquisition appears less all-pervasive than we once believed; and on the other, the Spanish people themselves appear as both the agents of the Inquisition and its principal 'victims'

It was during the reign of Charles IX (1559-74), while Henry was still duc d’Anjou

Anjou’s election to the Polish throne, which gave him a credible excuse for lifting the siege, also provided his companions with another opportunity of gaining his friendship

This called for considerable courage, for Poland was a distant country full of unknown dangers. Duly grateful to his companions, Henry rewarded them following his accession to the French throne in 1574

The mignons were rewarded with posts of secondary importance, close to the king’s person but not crucial to the realm’s administration

Unlike his predecessors, he was a private man, who disliked crowds and believed that his authority would be enhanced by distancing himself from the general mass of courtiers

The nature of Henry’s relations with his mignons has aroused much speculation

If I could have made him my son I would have done so, but I am making him my brother … I love him so much that I cannot love myself more

In the summer of 1587 the religious wars entered a new phase as German troops invaded western France. The king decided to deploy three armies. He sent Joyeuse at the head of his best troops to fight Henry of Navarre in Guyenne, the duc de Guise with inadequate troops to harass the Germans

He hoped to destroy both Guise and Navarre, but fate dictated otherwise

nothing could appease the Parisians, who soon rebelled. As they erected barricades, he fled from the capital, never to return. He sealed his fate by ordering the assassination of the duc de Guise, who had become their hero

Hatred of the king was fuelled by an avalanche of pamphlets: 237 were printed in Paris in the first six months of 1589

Henry, meanwhile, allied with the Huguenot leader, Henry of Navarre. Jointly, they laid siege to Paris.

On August 1st, 1589 a Jacobin friar, Jacques Clément, who had claimed to be the bearer of an important message for the king, was admitted to his presence, even though Henry was sitting on his close-stool

The king ordered his attendants to withdraw as the friar drew closer to whisper in his ear. As he did so, he drew a knife from his sleeve and plunged it into the king’s abdomen. Henry died a few days later

Ten years later, he was sitting next to Henry IV in his carriage when he, too, was assassinated. Two regicides in one lifetime must be a record, even for an archimignon

As complaisant royal consort and then as Regent of France, Marie de Médicis was called upon to play a role resembling that of her distant cousin

Ferdinando, who renounced his cardinalate to assume the ducal dignity, reversed his brother’s policies, and invested his ducats in the struggle of Henry IV, the Bourbon King of France, against the Spanish-supported Catholic League

Negotiations for marriage with a number of Italian and German suitors of princely rank were inconclusive, and, as the financial obligations of the French monarchy to Florentine creditors increased, so, too, did the probability of a French husband for Marie de Médicis

A more promising expedient to recover or reduce a bad debt seemed to be the marriage of his niece with the French King

Papal authority was needed to annul Henry IV’s marriage with Marguerite de Valois, the wayward daughter of Catherine de Médicis

the marriage contract was signed in Tuscany

The kingdom that received Marie de Médicis as its Queen had been torn by four decades of civil war.

The imposition of peace in itself had created the conditions for economic recovery, but the monarchy appreciated that it had a positive task to heal and to restore.

Sully had served his master when he had been no more than a petty King of Navarre, had fought beside him in a score of engagements, and, though a Huguenot

Some of the weaknesses shown by Marie de Médicis may be condoned in the light of her husband’s conduct. The King treated her with courtesy and, intermittently, with a familiar affection

Henry IV’s domestic life was likened to that of the Grand Turk. He expected his Queen and his mistresses to live in harmony

Her half-brother, Charles d’Auvergne, the natural son of the Valois King, Charles IX, and her father, Francois de Balzac d’Entragues

Her marriage with Henry IV, the prelude to the massacre of St. Bartholomew in 1572, had been as farcical in later years as it had been tragic in its origin

Henry IV allied himself with Savoy against Spain, and proposed to intervene against the Catholic Emperor

Regency by declaring the tearful Queen-Mother sole Regent in the minority of Louis XIII

France turned towards alliance with Henry IV’s Spanish enemies

Marie de Médicis, lacking the authority of Henry IV, had now to contend with the ambitions he had held in check. She could no longer afford the peevish indolence she had affected as Queen: she had to devote all her energy to conciliating and balancing the forces that threatened to curtail her power

A proposal to affirm the Spanish alliance by the dual marriage of the King and his sister, Elizabeth, with the Spanish Haps-burgs provoked this response

Conflicts between the three orders enabled Marie de Médicis and her Ministers to survive these challenges

In the following year a desultory campaign against Nevers was complicated by a war between Spain and Savoy, in which, despite the insistence of the government upon the sincerity of the Spanish alliance, a French army under the command of Henry IV’s old general, Lesdiguieres, marched into Italy against the Hapsburgs

The Queen Mother was placed under arrest and exiled to Blois. Her confidante, Leonora Galigaï, was put on trial for peculation and sorcery, and condemned to death on both counts

the princess Elizabeth crossed the Bidassoa and, in exchange, Anne of Austria became the bride of Louis XIII

If her roles as Queen and Regent had resembled those of Catherine de Médicis, her actions after her fall seemed bent upon the destruction of all that her predecessor had represented

It was her tragedy that she failed to identify her personal ambitions with the symbolic meaning of the crown she wore

In a manner similar to the Viking raids, the Swedes made themselves masters of the Baltic like their distant ancestors, and struck at the heart of Polish  trade, by attacking the sea port of Gdansk.

Gustav III and Stanislaus Augustus. Both were keen patrons of the arts and sciences and in the latter half of the eighteenth century the Warsaw Royal Castle became a centre for artistic activity

The hereditary monarchy was re-established, removing the threat of foreign interference.

Yet the fate of the country was sealed. Stanislaus Augustus, the last Polish king, was an unrealistic ruler who angered the gentry by trying to appease the Russian Empress Catherine the Great.

the country was divided up and the name of Poland, wiped from the map for over a hundred years. Neither the Polish kings nor the Swedish kings could do anything to reverse the situation

the revolving door between public service and private-sector employment, think-tank fellowships, fees on the lecture circuit, and so on.

3. Campaign contributions

4. Defining the agenda:

the 0.1 percent has an extraordinary ability to set the agenda for policy discussion, in ways that can be sharply at odds with both a reasonable assessment of priorities and public opinion more generally.

The example I have in mind was the extraordinary shift in conventional wisdom and policy priorities that took place in 2010-2011, away from placing priority on reducing the huge suffering still taking place in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, and toward action to avert the supposed risk of a debt crisis

The bursting of the housing bubble, and the subsequent attempts of households to reduce their debt, had let to a severe shortfall of aggregate demand. Despite very low interest rates by historical standards, businesses weren’t willing to invest enough to take up the slack created by this household pullback.

the obvious, Economics 101 move would have been to implement another significant round of stimulus. After all, the federal government was still able to borrow long-term at near-zero real interest rates.

Somehow, however, over the course of 2010 a consensus emerged in the political and media worlds that in the face of 9 percent unemployment the two most important issues were … deficit reduction and “entitlement reform,” i.e. cuts in Social Security and Medicare.

voters tend to place a relatively low priority on deficits as compared with jobs and the economy. And they overwhelmingly favor spending more on health care and Social Security.

Benjamin Page, Larry Bartels, and Jason Seawright managed to survey a group of wealthy individuals in the Chicago area. They found striking differences between this group’s policy priorities and those of the public at large. Budget deficits topped the list of problems they considered “very important,” with a third considering them the “most important” pro

While the respondents also expressed concern about unemployment and education, “they ranked a distant second and third among the concerns of wealthy Americans.”

And when it came to entitlements, the policy preferences of the wealthy were clearly at odds with those of the general public. By large margins, voters at large wanted to expand spending on health care and Social Security. By almost equally large margins, the wealthy wanted to reduce spending on those same programs

What happened, essentially, was that the political and media establishment internalized the preferences of the extremely wealthy.

Lacombe point out the enduring effects of plutocratic political influence on the Social Security debate: “Despite the strong support among most Americans for protecting and expanding Social Security benefits, for example, the intense, decades-long campaign to cut or privatize Social Security that was led by billionaire Pete Peterson and his wealthy allies appears to have played a part in thwarting any possibility of expanding Social Security benefits. Instead, the United States has repeatedly come close (even under Democratic Presidents Clinton and Obama) to actually cutting benefits as part of a bipartisan ‘grand bargain’ concerning the federal budget.”

Where do the preferences of the wealthy come from? You don’t have to be a vulgar Marxist to recognize a strong element of class interest. The push for austerity was clearly linked to a desire to shrink the tax-and-transfer state, which in all advanced countries, even America, is a significant force for redistribution away from the wealthy toward citizens with lower incomes

The fact remains that the wealthy, on average, push for policies that benefit themselves even when they often hurt the economy as a whole. And the sheer wealth of the wealthy is what empowers them to get a lot of what they want.

in the end big money will find a way — unless there’s less big money to begin with. So reducing the extreme concentration of income and wealth isn’t just a desirable thing on social and economic grounds. It’s also a necessary step toward a healthier political system

“So the notion that no deal somehow means that we can turn our backs on the EU and break all our ties is just nonsensical.”

He gave a speech on Monday warning that politicians should be thinking carefully about how to protect the union with Scotland and Northern Ireland after Brexit – deal or no deal.

“In those circumstances it’s very different to be lifting their eyes to a more distant horizon. How do we manage as a country, if and when we come out of the EU?

Overall, the 2019 European elections were a disappointment for the leaders of the populist right

the far right collectively recorded a net gain of only 13 members in the 751-seat European Parliament.

Young Europeans may worry about the environment, but for four out of five under-25s, it is not their No. 1 or even their No. 2 priority.

a rising proportion of Millennials and Gen Zers identify themselves as left-leaning or centrist.

Millennials and Gen Zers value public services; they worry about racial and other forms of discrimination, as well as about climate change. They are more pro-European than previous generations and more willing to hand over new governing powers to Brussels.

A third of Millennial and Gen Z voters in Europe consider themselves centrists, compared with about a fifth who are on the center left and fewer than a 10th who are far left

Recent national elections point to the same leftward trend among younger voters.

As in urban areas of the United States, rising costs for housing further squeeze the young’s spending power

In Europe, by contrast, the under-30s are more disposed than their parents to view poverty as a result of an individual’s choice. Even as they still support the social contract typical for Europe, whereby the welfare state limits inequality and provides generous public services, they are also less in favor than older generations of fiscal redistribution to reduce inequality

All of this has contributed to a growing generational economic divide

Before the crisis, the under-25s were not much more at risk of poverty than the over-64s. Now they are more than a third as likely to be poor.

The short-run trend is therefore that the old will dominate in European politics. In 2017, for the first time, more than half of the voters in the elections for the German Bundestag were over 50

most of them believe that the private sector is better at creating jobs than the state is, that work contracts should become more flexible, and that competition is good. Indeed, under-25s have a more positive view of globalization than do older cohorts.

in Europe, Millennials and Gen Zers are not fundamentally different from the population as a whole when it comes to immigration. Survey data show that they have a more positive view of immigration (from inside and outside the EU) than do older generations. Almost as much as their parents, however, they want national governments and the EU to take additional measures to fight illegal immigration.

it is worth taking a closer look at the Danish parliamentary elections held in June. The anti-immigration Danish People’s Party plummeted to 8.7 percent from 21.1 percent in 2015. But that was not because voters were frightened by anti-immigration policies. It was because the big center-left and center-right parties co-opted the far right’s agenda

In the 1990s, it was Denmark’s Social Democrats who adopted “Third Way” social and economic policies, sometime before Britain’s Tony Blair and Germany’s Gerhard Schröder. The Danes may once again be taking the lead. Sweden’s governing center-left party has already followed the Danish example by toughening its migration stance.

Postelection surveys show that the CDU is now losing nearly four times as many voters to the Greens as to the AfD. Significantly, the Greens take pride in being the only party to have consistently defended Angela Merkel’s 2015 refugee policy without ifs or buts.

generalizations about European politics are hard to mak

In the U.S., the GDP per capita of the highest-income state (Massachusetts) is roughly twice that of the poorest (Mississippi). In the EU, by contrast, citizens of Luxembourg are more than nine times as rich as Romanians.

There is also much less common history. Growing up in the Soviet Union has left older Estonians, for example, with very different views from older Spaniards, who grew up under Francisco Franco

For many Central and eastern Europeans, the collapse of the Soviet Union was as much about restoring national independence as it was about restoring liberty and democracy. They have little appetite for ceding sovereignty to Brussels

the younger groups on both sides of the former Iron Curtain seem to be converging on some issues, such as their support for democracy and EU integration. Yet this convergence is not visible on all issues.

For younger voters in the EU’s original member states, ethnic and religious variables are much less important in defining citizenship than for their parents. For Central and eastern Europeans, however, where your forebears came from still matters. Indeed, young Hungarians and Croatians tend to associate ancestry with nationality even more than older generations do.

A reverse dynamic is visible in Austria. In 2017, 30 percent of those ages 29 and under voted for the nationalist-right Freedom Party in the parliamentary elections. In May, having been hit by a scandal, the party came in third with the same age group (17 percent), far behind the Greens (28 percent) and the Social Democrats (22 percent).

So why aren’t European young people as receptive to tax-and-redistribute ideas as their American counterparts? Perhaps because they know, from experience, that those policies can’t immediately fix what ails their countries.

he politics of the future in Europe seems unlikely to resemble the politics of generational division in America. The continent is divided in many respects, but it does not face a “generation war.” The gap between the generations seems narrower, the political opportunity to mobilize younger voters less enticing.

The German Greens started out in the 1980s as part of the antinuclear and pacifist movements. They were clearly to the left of the SPD. But in recent years they have moved decidedly to the center ground. Last year Winfried Kretschmann, the Green prime minister of Baden-Württemberg, and conceivably a future German chancellor, published a book with the surprising subtitle For a New Definition of Conservatism. Kretschmann cites Edmund Burke as an inspiration, arguing that the father of conservative thought favored gradual change over revolution.

Participants in the Climate Strike were predominantly female. The median age of the crowd was 22 years old.

Three-quarters, or 76 percent, of the participants will be eligible to vote in the U.S. 2020 election. And their current levels of civic engagement strongly suggests they will vote.

Forty-one percent supported Elizabeth Warren, with by far the largest share. Bernie Sanders came in second with 20 percent of the support. Joe Biden was a distant third with 12 percent.

These activists are significantly more engaged in a range of political activities than the general American population: 46 percent reported contacting an elected official in the past year; 46 percent attended a public, town, or school meeting; and 44 percent engaged in consumer activism by boycotting or deliberately buying a certain product for political, ethical, or environmental reasons (“buycotting”).

About a third of Climate Strikers, or 32 percent, reported participating in confrontational direct action in the past year.

Given these levels of civic engagement and political experience, expect these new voices to make themselves heard in the upcoming elections. If the election’s outcome is not what they hoped for, don’t be surprised if there's more climate action in the streets

Speaking from his home in Delaware, where aides built a basement television studio, Biden took pains not to overtly politicize the coronavirus spread. He even said he would welcome a strong approval rating for Trump, if it pushed the White House to provide needed assistance to cities and states.

His aides have rushed to adapt to the rapidly-changing environment, installing the television studio, launching a podcast and increasing his visibility -- all from his Delaware basement as he, like much of America, is working from home.

"People see 2016 as this crazy fluke, which it was in many ways," Mook said. "But that's missing the bigger point that Trump has a way of owning what we're talking about and grinding in a set of doubts about his opponent. He projects his greatest weaknesses on his opponent -- and I see that happening again."

The events of the coming weeks could shape the race for months to come, several Democratic strategists say, arguing the party cannot afford to cede this moment to Trump or allow Republicans to derisively define Biden while he is striving to put the crisis above politics.

"This is why it's so difficult to beat an incumbent president. Never underestimate the reach, the power and the strength of a Rose Garden strategy," said Rhoades, who also worked on President George W. Bush's reelection campaign in 2004. "I'd rather own the problem and be in charge and take action to fix it than be the person on the sidelines screaming fire."

A campaign once thought to be waged over the future of health care, economic fairness and America's place in the world is now revolving around something else: The administration's response to coronavirus and the economic collapse. How the nation recovers by November will be a key metric for voters.

While presidential campaigns often do not end on the same issues in which they began -- in 2008, for example, a campaign driven by opposition to the Iraq war ended on the economic crash -- it's almost certain the coronavirus outbreak will be a central issue in the 2020 race.

One of the biggest unknown factors, he said, is whether traditional campaigning will resume by summer or fall or if the candidates will turn to alternatives. A century ago, a handful of presidents relied on "front-porch campaigns," where they declined to do big rallies and won by simply staying close to the White House.

For now, the campaign is not playing out in critical battleground states across the country, but rather with Trump at his post in the White House briefing room and Biden settling into his television studio in the basement of his home, about 120 miles away in Delaware.

The couple's relationship was "astonishing" for its era, she says, crossing boundaries of race, class, religion and social expectation.

"But Matilda's story is particularly remarkable because she resisted what was expected of a black woman in the US South in the years after emancipation," Dr Durkin says. "She didn't get married. "Instead, she had a decades-long common-law marriage with a white German-born man, with whom she had 14 children."

In her 70s, Matilda set out on another journey, travelling for 15 miles on dirt roads to a county courthouse to make a claim for compensation for her enslavement.By then, she was one of a small number of surviving slaves from Africa who seem to have made contact with each other.

He praised Republican Gov. Mike DeWine for taking bold steps early, including declaring a state of emergency when there were only three reported cases on March 9, four days before the federal government followed suit. Thirty states had declared a state of emergency by the time Trump declared a national emergency on March 13.

“They didn’t move fast enough,” said Crossley, of the federal government. “And what you’ve seen is more local and state officials sounding the alarm. “We needed a national response to this event.”

With seven reported infections in the United States by the end of the day, Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar declared a public health emergency on Jan. 31, and Trump announced strict travel restrictions, barring most foreign visitors coming from China. He also imposed the nation’s first mandatory quarantine in 50 years.

Officials spent three hours war-gaming how they would respond. The drill prompted the state to send 300 employees home early to test their remote work capability. That unmasked a serious problem: A quarter of the team could not perform their jobs at home because they needed access to secure computer systems.

Then he heard the news: The United States had identified its first case of person-to-person transmission involving someone who had not traveled overseas. Also, the World Health Organization classified the coronavirus as a public health emergency of international concern.

Chicago Jan. 31: 9,927 cases worldwide, seven cases in the United States

Tallahassee Jan. 30: 8,234 cases worldwide, five cases in the United States

“We are concerned about our public health system’s capacity to implement these measures, recognizing they may inadvertently distract us from our ongoing tried-and-true efforts to isolate confirmed cases and closely monitor their contacts,” according to a previously unreported Feb. 6 letter. “We also worry about the potential to again overwhelm laboratory capacity, recognizing that national capacity has not been adequate to quickly test our highest-risk individuals.”

“In the first few sets of conversations, we were not hearing answers to those questions,” Lightfoot, a Democrat, said of her talks with federal officials. “It was kind of like, either silence, or ‘Do the best you can,’ which was obviously not acceptable.”

she drafted a letter to Trump on behalf of the mayors from Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle. They insisted on clear, written directions from the federal government, according to the letter, and worried about diverting health-care resources during flu season, when hospitals were already stretched.

Americans who had visited China’s Hubei province would be forced to quarantine for 14 days, and those who visited other parts of China would be screened for symptoms and asked to isolate themselves for two weeks. Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot was caught off guard. The directive came with little guidance. Where were local governments supposed to quarantine the travelers? What would they do if someone refused to quarantine? Who was going to pay for the resources needed to quarantine people?

Mount Kisco, N.Y. Feb. 9: 40,150 cases worldwide, 11 cases in the United States

Weeks earlier, Amler had started fitting employees for personal protective equipment and training them on how to use the gear. In January, she watched what was happening in Wuhan with growing concern: “It seemed impossible that it wouldn’t eventually spill out of China into the rest of the world.”

San Francisco Feb. 24: 79,561 cases worldwide, 51 cases in the United States

Trump continued to reassure the public that there was little to worry about. On Feb. 24, he tweeted, “The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA.”

But Colfax and his public health staff in San Francisco were seeing something else when they studied the “curves” of the pandemic — graphs showing how many cases were reported in other regions over time.

Wuhan’s curve was climbing exponentially, and other countries, such as Italy, were seeing soaring infection rates as well. Colfax noticed that in every infected region, officials were more and more aggressive about restricting their populations

“It became apparent that no jurisdiction that was where the virus was being introduced, was sort of, in retrospect, thinking, ‘Oh, we overreacted,’ ” Colfax said.

On Feb. 24, Colfax and other health officials assembled their research and met with Mayor London Breed. They made an urgent request: Declare a state of emergency

by the end of the meeting, Breed was convinced. They needed to declare a state of emergency so that they could tap into state and federal funds and supplies, and redeploy city employees. The next day, San Francisco became one of the first major cities in the United States to do so, after Santa Clara and San Diego counties did earlier in the month.

It would take another 17 days, as the virus infected people in nearly every state, before Trump declared a national emergency.

In New Orleans, officials moved ahead with Mardi Gras festivities in late February that packed people into the streets. It was a decision the mayor would later defend as coronavirus cases traced to the celebration piled up.

On Feb. 27, at a White House reception, Trump predicted that the coronavirus would disappear. “Like a miracle,” he said.

“No red flags were given,” by the federal government, New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell, a Democrat, later said in a CNN interview. “If we were given clear direction, we would not have had Mardi Gras, and I would’ve been the leader to cancel it.

San Antonio Feb. 29: 86,011 cases worldwide, 68 cases in the United States

The last day of February marked a major turning point for the coronavirus in the United States: The first American who had been diagnosed with the illness died

In a Saturday news conference, Trump described the patient from the Seattle area as a “medically high-risk” person who had died overnight. A CDC official said that the man, who was in his 50s, had not traveled recently — another sign that the virus was snaking through local communities.

During the announcement, Trump asked the media to avoid inciting panic as there was “no reason to panic at all.”

“We’re doing really well,” he said. “Our country is prepared for any circumstance. We hope it’s not going to be a major circumstance, it’ll be a smaller circumstance. But whatever the circumstance is, we’re prepared.”

That same afternoon in San Antonio, the CDC mistakenly released a woman from quarantine who was infected. The woman was one of dozens of evacuees from Wuhan whom the federal government had brought to a nearby military base and then isolated at the Texas Center for Infectious Disease.

the woman had been dropped off at a Holiday Inn near the San Antonio airport and headed to a mall where she shopped at Dillard’s, Talbots and Swarovski and ate in the food court.

As local officials learned details about the infected woman’s movements and how she had been transported at 2 a.m. back to the Texas Center for Infectious Disease, they waited for the CDC to issue a statement. Hours passed, but they heard nothing. “They were like quiet little mouses,” Wolff said. “They were all scared to talk because I think they felt they were going to get in trouble with the president of the United States because he was saying there was not a problem.”

The next day, San Antonio officials declared a public health emergency and filed a lawsuit to prevent the CDC from releasing the 120 people in quarantine until they were confirmed negative for the virus or completed a 28-day quarantine. A judge denied the motion, but the CDC agreed that evacuees must have two consecutive negative tests that are 24 hours apart and that no one with a pending test can be released.

In Oklahoma City, the coronavirus became a reality for Mayor David Holt, a Republican, when the NBA abruptly canceled a Thunder basketball game after a Utah Jazz player tested positive on March 11. Until then, Holt said, the coronavirus felt “distant on many levels.”

Mount Kisco, N.Y. March 3: 92,840 cases worldwide, 118 cases in the United States

Within days, state authorities set up an emergency operations center in New Rochelle and created a one-mile containment zone. Inside the perimeter, schools and community centers shuttered and large gatherings were prohibited.

Through it all, local officials faced backlash from some community leaders who thought they were overreacting.

San Francisco March 5: 97,886 cases worldwide, 217 cases in the United States

Days after San Francisco’s emergency declaration, Breed stood in front of news cameras to announce the city’s first two cases of the coronavirus.

They were not related, had not traveled to any coronavirus-affected areas and had no contact with known coronavirus patients: It was spreading in the community.

By then, Miami Mayor Francis X. Suarez, a Republican, had announced the cancellation of the Ultra Music festival, a three-day celebration that draws about 50,000 people. Miami was the first city to call off a major music festival, and Suarez faced tremendous backlash

When he tried to order more masks, none were immediately available. By then the entire country was scrambling for protective gear.

Days later, Holt huddled on the phone with other leaders from the United States Conference of Mayors. For about 20 minutes, Seattle Mayor Jenny Durkan, a Democrat, detailed the crisis seizing her city

“She sounded like the main character in a Stephen King novel,” Holt recalled. “She had hundreds of cases, she had dozens of deaths.”

“Any struggles that we’re having, whether it be testing or other issues, or even just convincing our public of the seriousness of the matter, there are some roots back to the time period in January and February, when not all national leadership was expressing how serious this was,” Holt said.

While the mayors held their conference call on March 13, Trump declared a national emergency to combat the coronavirus.

By then, Suarez had tested positive for the coronavirus and was in quarantine. As of Sunday, he remained in isolation, leading the city by phone calls and video chats. He wanted to stop flights into Miami and the governor to order residents to shelter in place as California and other states had already done.

When I graduated from college there was a finite number of career ladders in front of me: teacher, lawyer, doctor, business. Now college graduates enter a world with four million footstools. There are many more places to perch (a start-up, an NGO, a coffee shop, a consultancy) but few of the footstools pay a sustaining wage, seem connected with the others or lead to a clear ladder of rungs to climb upward.

People in their 20s seem to be compelled to bounce around more, popping up here and there, quantumlike, with different jobs, living arrangements and partners while hoping that all these diverse experiences magically add up to something.

Naturally enough, their descriptions of their lives are rife with uncertainty and anxiety

All the while social media makes the comparison game more intrusive than ever, and nearly everybody feels as if he or she is falling behind.

And how do we as a society prepare young people for this uncertain phase? We pump them full of vapid but haunting praise about how talented they are and how their future is limitless

we preach a gospel of autonomy that says all the answers to the deeper questions in life are found by getting in touch with your “true self,” whatever the heck that is.

Now I think that laissez-faire attitude trivializes the experiences of young adulthood and condescends to the people going through them.

telling people “30 is the new 20” is completely counterproductive.

colleges have to do much more to put certain questions on the table, to help students grapple with the coming decade of uncertainty: What does it mean to be an adult today? What are seven or 10 ways people have found purpose in life? How big should I dream or how realistic should I be? What are the criteria we should think about before shacking up? What is the cure for sadness? What do I want and what is truly worth wanting?

Before, there were social structures that could guide young adults as they gradually figured out the big questions of life. Now, those structures are gone. Young people are confronted by the existential questions right away. They’re going to feel lost if they have no sense of what they’re pointing toward, if they have no vision of the holy grails on the distant shore.