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Every era has a figure who strips away its pleasant illusions about where the world is headed. This is what makes Vladimir Putin the most important person of the still-young 21st century.

Putin has done more than any other person to remind us that the world order we have taken for granted is remarkably fragile. In doing so, one hopes, he may have persuaded the chief beneficiaries of that order to get serious about saving it.

In the early 19th century, a decade of Napoleonic aggression upended a widespread belief that commerce and Enlightenment ideas were ushering in a new age of peace.

On Monday, Ukraine published a video of a captured soldier in his unit, apologizing for taking part in the invasion.

Everyone is in a state of shock.

While casualty figures in wartime are notoriously unreliable — and Ukraine has put the total of Russian dead in the thousands — the 498 Moscow acknowledged in the seven days of fighting is the largest in any of its military operations since the war in Chechnya, which marked the beginning of President Vladimir V. Putin’s tenure in 1999.

(CNN)At the top of Dawn Staley's stacked trophy case is an orange and white basketball. The University of South Carolina women's basketball head coach said the ball was signed by every Olympic coach, and she finally added her own signature last month. It also serves as a reminder of just how much the game has given her.

On Friday at 7 p.m. ET, Staley will try to get one step closer to another national championship when she coaches her No. 1 seeded South Carolina team through their Sweet Sixteen game against No. 5 North Carolina. The Gamecocks dominated in the first two rounds of the tournament, beating Howard 79-21 and Miami 49-33. However, once again, Staley recognizes this tournament is about more than just winning.

"Those young ladies -- I saw on social media in their press conference -- they're like: 'You know, we're happy to be here. This is where Dawn Staley coaches. This is where they play their actual games.'

We discuss what lessons banking regulators missed from the Great Recession; the need to panic-proof the entire financial system, as opposed to developing regulations around a systemic risk that he finds hard to define

why it’s important now to revisit the basics of banking, its relationship to creating money and the tendencies that get banks in trouble

the government’s role in insuring or backstopping deposits

if the point is simply pure destruction — building a chaos machine by removing a source of valuable information from our connected world, where groups of all stripes could communicate and organize, and replacing that with a place of parody that rewards insincerity, time-wasting and the worst forms of communication in order to degrade the better half — then he’s done a remarkable job in very short order. Truly it’s an amazing act of demolition. But, well, $44 billion can buy you a lot of wrecking balls.

That our system allows wealth to be turned into a weapon to nuke things of broad societal value is one hard lesson we should take away from the wreckage of downed turquoise feathers.

We should also consider how the ‘rules based order’ we’ve devised seems unable to stand up to a bully intent on replacing free access to information with paid disinformation — and how our democratic systems seem so incapable and frozen in the face of confident vandals running around spray-painting ‘freedom’ all over the walls as they burn the library down.

after seeing the political turmoil that engulfed Nicola Sturgeon’s final days as Scottish first minister, Starmer is keen to clarify both his personal and his party’s position on the subject.

Speaking about Sturgeon’s gender recognition bill, which proposed self-identification for those wishing to change their legal gender, Starmer says: “The lesson from Scotland is that if you can’t take the public with you on a journey of reform, then you’re probably not on the right journey. And that’s why I think that collectively there ought to be a reset in Scotland.”

It sounds like a marked change of tone from the Labour leader, whose party prevaricated over the issue only weeks ago by first whipping its MSPs to vote for the gender bill in Holyrood, then asking MPs in Westminster to abstain when the government exercised its veto over the legislation.

Cynicism—the belief that people are generally morally bankrupt and behave treacherously in order to maximize self-interest—dominates American culture.

Since 1964, the percentage of Americans who say they trust the government to do what is right “just about always” or “most of the time” has fallen 53 points, from 77 to 24 percent. Sentiments about other institutions in society follow similar patterns.

the modern cynical outlook on life is terrible for your well-being. It makes you less healthy, less happy, less successful, and less respected by others.

There’s an important lesson here, applicable to pyramid schemes, politics, and a host of cultural challenges where people find hope and purpose in all the wrong places. You can’t fact-check a person out of hope and purpose. They’ll resent you even if you’re right.

Instead, it’s always preferable, if at all possible, to replace something bad with something better. That’s a key reason Trump is losing altitude now.

In 1997, Prime Minister Tony Blair began relaxing immigration laws in hopes of creating an England imbued with the best traditions of a range of cultures, an England that was no longer fortified against the world but wide open to it, an oasis of people eating fusion cuisine and voting Labour.

To watch contestants from every racial, ethnic, and religious background tell the hosts the secret ingredient in “me gran’s sponge” from inside a giant white tent pitched on the green lawns of a country house in Berkshire is to see “England” smacked down to a set of consumer preferences: Emma Bridgewater, strings of fluttering Union Jacks, cake.

the old lessons of empire were not lost on the newcomers, a few of whom brought to England the same thing that England had once brought them: contemptuous disregard of the religion, customs, habits, traditions, and shared beliefs of the native population. And that’s how you get Sharia councils in modern England.

The decline is accelerating: Teen births fell 20 percent in the 1990s, 28 percent in the 2000s and 55 percent in the 2010s. Three decades ago, a quarter of 15-year-old girls became mothers before turning 20, according to Child Trends estimates, including nearly half of those who were Black or Hispanic. Today, just 6 percent of 15-year-old girls become teen mothers.

The reasons teen births have fallen are only partly understood. Contraceptive use has grown and shifted to more reliable methods, and adolescent sex has declined. Civic campaigns, welfare restrictions and messaging from popular culture may have played roles.

But with progress so broad and sustained, many researchers argue the change reflects something more fundamental: a growing sense of possibility among disadvantaged young women, whose earnings and education have grown faster than their male counterparts.

The two nations share several historical parallels. The last time they traded places in population, in the 18th century or earlier, the Mughals ruled India and the Qing dynasty was expanding the borders of China; between them they were perhaps the richest empires that had ever existed

But as European powers went on to colonize most of the planet and then industrialized at home, the people of India and China became among the world’s poorest.

As recently as 1990, the two countries were still on essentially the same footing, with a roughly equal economic output per capita. Since then, China has shaken the world by creating more wealth than any other country in history. While India, too, has picked itself back up in the three decades since it liberalized its economy, it remains well behind in many of the most basic scales.

What exactly are they afraid of? How do you draw a line from a chatbot to global destruction

This tribe feels we have made three crucial errors: giving the AI the capability to write code, connecting it to the internet and teaching it about human psychology. In those steps we have created a self-improving, potentially manipulative entity that can use the network to achieve its ends — which may not align with ours

This is a technology that learns from our every interaction with it. In an eerie glimpse of AI’s single-mindedness, OpenAI revealed in a paper that GPT-4 was willing to lie, telling a human online it was a blind person, to get a task done.

ouis Menand’s big new book on art, literature, music, and thought from 1945 to 1965 instills the conviction that the 20th century is well and truly over

For those of us who lived through any portion of this period and its immediate aftermath, the book is a rather amazing compendium of the scholarly research, revision, and demythologizing that have been accomplished in recent decades.

Interweaving post-1945 art history, literary history, and intellectual history, Menand provides a familiar outline; the picture he presents is one of cultural triumph backed by American wealth and aggressive foreign policy.

Securities and Exchange Commission Chair Gary Gensler, who took office in April of 2021 with a deep background in Wall Street, regulatory policy, and crypto, which he had taught at MIT years before joining the SEC. Gensler came in with the goal of implementing the rule of law in the crypto space, which he knew was full of scams and based on unproven technology. Yesterday, on CNBC, he was again confronted with Andrew Ross Sorkin essentially asking, “Why were you going after minor players when this Ponzi scheme was so flagrant?”

Cryptocurrencies are securities, and should fit under securities law, which would have imposed rules that would foster a de facto ban of the entire space. But since regulators had not actually treated them as securities for the last ten years, a whole new gray area of fake law had emerged

Almost as soon as he took office, Gensler sought to fix this situation, and treat them as securities. He began investigating important players

the important question for Harvard was never whether Gay should step down. It was why she was brought on in the first place, after one of the shortest presidential searches in Harvard’s recent history.

How did someone with a scholarly record as thin as hers — she has not written a single book, has published only 11 journal articles in the past 26 years and made no seminal contributions to her field — reach the pinnacle of American academia?

The answer, I think, is this: Where there used to be a pinnacle, there’s now a crater. It was created when the social-justice model of higher education, currently centered on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts — and heavily invested in the administrative side of the university — blew up the excellence model, centered on the ideal of intellectual merit and chiefly concerned with knowledge, discovery and the free and vigorous contest of ideas.

“Immanuel Kant: A European Thinker” was a good title for that conference report in 2019, when Brexit seemed to threaten the ideal of European unification Germans supported. Just a few years later, “European” has become a slur. At a time when the Enlightenment is regularly derided as a Eurocentric movement designed to support colonialism, who feels comfortable throwing a yearlong birthday party for its greatest thinker?

Before Kant, it’s said, philosophers were divided between Rationalists and Empiricists, who were concerned about the sources of knowledge. Does it come from our senses, or our reason? Can we ever know if anything is real? By showing that knowledge requires sensory experience as well as reason, we’re told, Kant refuted the skeptics’ worry that we never know if anything exists at all.

All this is true, but it hardly explains why the poet Heinrich Heine found Kant more ruthlessly revolutionary than Robespierre.

In the course of those cases and confrontations, I’ve learned that the issue of campus protest is remarkably complex and that campus culture is at least as important as law and policy in setting the boundaries of debate.

There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions between free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission

Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms, but not cooperating with student activists to advance shared goals — or does it incorporate activism as part of the educational process itself, including by coordinating with the protesters and encouraging their activism?

You probably use a device with a chip made by TSMC every day, but TSMC does not actually design or market those chips. That would have sounded completely absurd before the existence of TSMC. Back then, companies designed chips that they manufactured themselves. Chang’s radical idea for a great semiconductor company was one that would exclusively manufacture chips that its customers designed. By not designing or selling its own chips, TSMC never competed with its own clients. In exchange, they wouldn’t have to bother running their own fabrication plants, or fabs, the expensive and dizzyingly sophisticated facilities where circuits are carved on silicon wafers.

The innovative business model behind his chip foundry would transform the industry and make TSMC indispensable to the global economy. Now it’s the company that Americans rely on the most but know the least about

I wanted to know more about his decision to start a new company when he could have stopped working altogether. What I discovered was that his age was one of his assets. Only someone with his experience and expertise could have possibly executed his plan for TSMC. 

As the leaders of the West gathered in Munich over the past three days, President Vladimir V. Putin had a message for them: Nothing they’ve done so far — sanctions, condemnation, attempted containment — would alter his intentions to disrupt the current world order.

In Munich, the mood was both anxious and unmoored, as leaders faced confrontations they had not anticipated. Warnings about Mr. Putin’s possible next moves were mixed with Europe’s growing worries that it could soon be abandoned by the United States, the one power that has been at the core of its defense strategy for 75 years.

Barely an hour went by at the Munich Security Conference in which the conversation did not turn to the question of whether Congress would fail to find a way to fund new arms for Ukraine, and if so, how long the Ukrainians could hold out. And while Donald Trump’s name was rarely mentioned, the prospect of whether he would make good on his threats to pull out of NATO and let Russia “do whatever the hell they want” with allies he judged insufficient hung over much of the dialogue.