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“There’s all these clothes out there, but it’s just that they may not be as durable as you would like,” Mr. Minter said. Because of fast fashion, more than 60 percent of fabric fibers are now synthetics, derived from fossil fuels.

“I’d say that the golden age of thrifting is over,” Megan Miller, 65, said in an interview. “The ability to find high-quality, well-made things is definitely on the wane.”

Angela Petraline, 52, owner of Dorothea’s Closet Vintage, an online boutique operated out of Des Moines, has been thrifting since the 1980s. “It would take minutes to find something cool,” she said of the old days. “Now I’m lucky to find anything cool at all.”

Immigrants and their children are assimilating into the United States as quickly now as in the past

“first-generation immigrants are more costly to governments than are the native-born,” according to a 2017 report by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the “second generation are among the strongest fiscal and economic contributors in the U.S.”

Second-generation-immigrant success stories have long been a part of America’s history. Looking at census records from 1880, the researchers found that men whose fathers were low-income immigrants made more money as adults than the sons of low-income men born in the United States

the story doesn’t end here. While the pro-life movement has won the right to legislate against abortion, it has not yet proven that it can do so in a way that can command durable majority support. Its weaknesses will not disappear in victory. Its foes and critics have been radicalized by its judicial success. And the vicissitudes of politics and its own compromises have linked the anti-abortion cause to various toxic forces on the right — some libertine and hyperindividualist, others simply hostile to synthesis, conciliation and majoritarian politics.

among its own writers and activists, the movement has understood itself to also be carrying on the best of America’s tradition of social reform, including causes associated with liberalism and progressivism.

To win the long-term battle, to persuade the country’s vast disquieted middle, abortion opponents need models that prove this critique wrong. They need to show how abortion restrictions are compatible with the goods that abortion advocates accuse them of compromising — the health of the poorest women, the flourishing of their children, the dignity of motherhood even when it comes unexpectedly or amid great difficulty.

many feminists tried to find a way to move beyond the reflexive doubt that too often greets people who speak out about sexual misbehavior. But a reflexive assumption of guilt is not a decent substitute

Privately, we are free to come to our own conclusions. In public life, however, we should aim to hold several, sometimes contradictory ideas in our heads at once — that accusers have little incentive to lie and deserve a presumption of good faith, that to be subject to a false accusation can be shattering, and that in some cases, both parties think they’re telling the truth.

due process usually means hearing people out and treating them according to clear and neutral rules. In the Franken case in particular, I was wrong in thinking it was possible to separate what was fair to him and what was fair to everyone else.

Why did we think big protests reliably brought about social change? Because it seemed to be the case in the past

In the past, a truly big march was the culmination of long-term organizing, an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence, indicating prior planning and strength.

they didn’t just manage to hold a protest; lacking easier ways to organize, they ended up having to build organizational capacity, which then helped navigate what came after.

we think that rich people are not acting normal. Here in Holland, we don’t believe that everybody can be rich the way people do in America, where the sky is the limit. We think ‘Be average.’ That’s good enough.”

“When I was about 11 years old, we had an American boy stay with us for a week, an exchange student,” she recalled. “And my mother told him, just make your own sandwich like you do in America. Instead of putting one sausage on his bread, he put on five. My mother was too polite to say anything to him, but to me she said in Dutch, ‘We will never eat like that in this house.’”

The streak of austerity in Dutch culture can be traced to Calvinism, say residents, the most popular religious branch of Protestantism here for hundreds of years. It emphasizes virtues like self-discipline, frugality and conscientiousness. Polls suggest that most people in the Netherlands today are not churchgoers, but the norms are embedded, as evidenced by Dutch attitudes toward wealth.

“We have been confronted with a series of crises, one more grave than the other,” Mr. Macron said in a televised speech to the nation late last month. “The picture that I’m painting is one of the end of abundance,” he added. “We have reached a tipping point.”

The national effort calls for businesses and individuals to embrace energy conservation by increasing car-pooling, lowering thermostats and shutting off illuminated advertising signs at night — to name a few — or face the risk of rolling blackouts or energy rationing.

The government has been spending lavishly — over 26 billion euros ($26 billion) since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine — to keep gas and electric bills affordable, and last week it announced that its cap on household energy bills would be extended until the end of the year. The moves to control energy costs, including the re-nationalization of the energy provider EDF, have helped give France one of the lowest inflation rates in Europe, at 6.5 percent. (The overall eurozone rate for August was 9.1 percent.)

Remnants of low walls encircle parts of the excavation site, especially near the palace, which is unusual for the region’s bygone kingdoms; typically such bulwarks were built on the outskirts. One aim of the next season of research is to determine whether the walls were hastily built in the dynasty’s final days, as Dr. Scherer believes, or if they were part of the original construction, or at least modification, of the Classic period site center. Defense seems to have been the overarching concern at Lacanjá Tzeltal, a densely packed stronghold hemmed in by arroyos and steep riverbanks. The stone barricades presumably reinforced wooden palisades.

“The Maya were truly the Greeks of the ancient Americas,” Dr. Martin said. “They built an advanced civilization despite, or perhaps even because of, profound political divisions — with well over a hundred competing kingdoms.”

Maya society extended beyond modern borders, north from Guatemala into the Yucatán Peninsula, east into Belize and south through the western extremities of El Salvador and Honduras. Never politically unified, the Maya of the Classic period were a hodgepodge of city-states.

The shift to thrift is a worrying sign for China’s leaders, who need people to spend more. To stimulate growth, policymakers are banking on an increase in domestic consumption as an alternative to the boom-or-bust cycle of infrastructure spending and real estate investment that has left local governments and developers awash in debt.

“Chinese people actually don’t have a lot of money in their pockets, so the policy of relying on people’s consumption to promote China’s economy hasn’t been successful,” said He-Ling Shi, an associate economics professor at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. “With people cutting back on spending, it’s even less likely to succeed.”

Instead of buying coffee at Starbucks, Ms. Chen said, she chooses between Luckin and Cotti based on “whichever is cheaper.” She used to use an expensive Japanese skin toner, but she switched to a Chinese brand that is 90 percent cheaper. She also stopped shopping at Victoria’s Secret for bras and underwear, choosing a no-name brand that costs $3 each.

Despite the turmoil in the streets, the ruling coalition refused to accept the fact that with a slim majority, it could not enforce such big changes without consensus, plowing ahead with ever more anxiety-inducing policies day by day.

As a nation, Israelis acted as if we could afford the luxury of a vicious internal fight, the kind in which your political rival becomes your enemy. We let animosity, demagogy and the poisonous discourse of social media take over our society, rip apart the only Jewish army in the world. This is our tragedy.

And it carries a lesson for other polarized democracies: There is someone out there waiting to gain from your self-made weakness. This someone is your enemy.

“Anybody who studies history learns two things: They learn to do research and they learn to write,” Richardson said. “The reason that matters now is that most people who are in college now are going to end up switching jobs a number of times in their careers.”

What history will give you is the ability to pivot into the different ideas, the different fields, the different careers as they arise.”

A historian will also know how to metabolize confounding situations, distill them to their essence and communicate that information to others