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Statusization — to coin a useful term — is ubiquitous, no matter what your altitude. While you’re in your hospital bed spooning up red Jell-O, a patient in a private suite is enjoying strawberries and cream. On your way to a Chase A.T.M., you notice a silver plaque declaring the existence within of Private Client Services. This man has a box seat at a Yankees game; that man has a skybox. And the skybox isn’t the limit: high overhead, the 1 percent fly first class; the .1 percent fly Netjets; the .01 fly their own planes. Why should it be any different up above from down below?

In his new book, “The Great Degeneration,” the historian Niall Ferguson confirms my intuition. His argument is that we’ve seen a precipitous decline in social mobility over the last 30 years: “Once the United States was famed as a land of opportunity, where a family could leap from ‘rags to riches’ in a generation.

flying has become like driving — only instead of collapsing bridges and potholed roads, the hazards a traveler in economy faces are crippling back pain and plastic-wrapped ham sandwiches tossed on a tray by hassled flight attendants. It’s just another infrastructure in collapse.

The introduction of the scientific method transformed society by using science and reason rather than political or religious dogma to explain natural phenomena.

Dying Infants and No Medicine: Inside Venezuela’s Failing Hospitals

“The death of a baby is our daily bread,” said Dr. Osleidy Camejo, a surgeon in the nation’s capital, Caracas, referring to the toll from Venezuela’s collapsing hospitals.

It is just part of a larger unraveling here that has become so severe it has prompted President Nicolás Maduro to impose a state of emergency and has raised fears of a government collapse.

“Among millennials, especially,” Douthat argues, “there’s a growing constituency for whom rightwing ideas are so alien or triggering, leftwing orthodoxy so pervasive and unquestioned, that supporting a candidate like Hillary Clinton looks like a needless form of compromise.”

Unlike Twitter – or real life – where interaction with those who disagree with you on political matters is an inevitability, Facebook users can block, mute and unfriend any outlet or person that will not further bolster their current worldview.

Even Facebook itself sees the segmentation of users along political lines on its site - and synchronizes it not only with the posts users see, but with the advertisements they’re shown.

And Ms. Trump has used the carefully cultivated image of her own career and family to sell both her brand and her father’s political ambitions. Her Instagram feed is full of images with motivational captions about the importance of stay-at-home motherhood or maternal multitasking, often with the hashtag #WomenWhoWork. “I have a few very important roles, but being a mother will always be my favorite,” she posted with a family photo.

Ms. Trump embodies a feminine ideal, even while she lives a more feminist reality.

Her push for paid parental leave is certainly laudable and especially out of the box for the Republican Party, but the policy she urged her father to propose wasn’t really about parents — it offered maternity leave only, emphasizing that the task of raising children remains the domain of women (even “women who work”). And her soft-focus feminism is put to use covering for her father’s boorishness: Mr. Trump has repeatedly boasted of his refusal to do any child care whatsoever for his five children, but his daughter nevertheless deems him “a feminist.”

I don’t mean to suggest that the Democrats’ situation is hopeless. The numbers of supporters are still roughly equal in presidential years. The Republicans have benefitted over the last eight years from a halting recovery to the great recession (which they were partly to blame for) and by the unpopularity of the Affordable Care Act, Barack Obama’s signature program, as well as by the rise of ISIS, and continuation of terrorist attacks in the United States. That allowed them to run as the candidates promising change without specifying exactly what those changes would consist of

now, with Republicans in charge, the shoe is on the other foot. Trump could prove very vulnerable politically. Trump promised in his campaign that he would protect Medicare and Social Security, but if he and his nominee for Health and Human Services, Tom Price, accede to Congressional Republican plans to privatize Medicare, cut Social Security, and repeal without significantly replacing the ACA, he could lose the support of the “Trump Democrats.”

In August 1995, Bill Clinton did in House Speaker Newt Gingrich by showing that Gingrich planned to finance tax cuts for the wealthy by cuts in Medicare. In 2005, Senate Minority leader Harry Reid took the winds out of George W. Bush’s re-election by blocking his plan to privatize Social Security.

Trump’s GOP rivals and the Super PACs hoping to stop him have previously attacked Trump for other similar revelations, declaring him a hypocrite and a phony who is conning working class voters by pretending to be on their side. But such attacks don’t appear to work. Why not

in a perverse way, revelations like these actually bolster his message, rather than undercutting it. Trump’s argument is that he has a unique grasp, via direct experience and participation, of all the ways in which our political and economic system is rigged to make it easier for people such as himself to fleece working Americans. This understanding of how the game really works positions him well to fix it. He has been in on the elites’ scam for decades, and now, having made a killing off of it, he’s here to put an end to it.

Trump has made this argument explicitly, again and again and again, in multiple different ways. At the most recent GOP debate, Trump effectively declared that he understood better than any other candidate that politicians are bought and paid for — because he has bought and paid for politicians himself!

Alberta wildfire: Emergency declared in Fort McMurray

A state of emergency has been declared in the province of Alberta in Canada

Officials say the fast-moving blaze could destroy much of the city.

George W. Bush returns to the political scene

His return to the political scene comes as President Donald Trump's new administration is rocking Washington with upheaval and instability.

Bush "was a president who after 9/11 talked about Islam as a religion of peace," said Steve Schmidt, a Republican strategist and former Bush aide. "He talked about the act of illegal immigration -- people who took great risk coming across the desert -- as an act of love for their families."

wo years ago, some European and US experts gathered to discuss China in an elegant English country house. The setting was seductive, but the mood was dark. Two years into Xi Jinping’s presidency, China’s politics were turning away from the liberalising trend of the previous three decades, towards a hard-edged nationalism that was discomfiting China’s immediate neighbours and their western allies.

a global conflict between the systems, values and norms of the pluralist, democratic United States and China’s Communist party seemed inevitable. It would be unpleasant, but nobody doubted that US values would prevail.

The group discussed whether China could succeed. What might go wrong?

Mike Lofgren, for many decades a Republican Senate staffer

He writes:

Our great-grandparents would have recognized the current Supreme Court and the Citizens United decisions for what they are: the institutions of government in the grip of what they then called the Money Power.

Roberts added that in some ways he considered his situation—overseeing a Court that is evenly divided on important issues—to be ideal. “You do need some fluidity in the middle, [if you are going] to develop a commitment to a different way of deciding things.” In other words, on a divided Court where neither camp can be confident that it will win in the most controversial cases, both sides have an incentive to work toward unanimity, to achieve a kind of bilateral disarmament.

Marshall’s example had taught him, Roberts said, that personal trust in the chief justice’s lack of an ideological agenda was very important, and Marshall’s ability to win this kind of trust inspired him

“If I’m sitting there telling people, ‘We should decide the case on this basis,’ and if [other justices] think, ‘That’s just Roberts trying to push some agenda again,’ they’re not likely to listen very often,” he observed.

swearing is ubiquitous: “we say taboo words as soon as we speak and we continue to swear into old age even through dementia and senile decline.” And we do so at a rate of about one taboo word per 200 words. This rate, however, differs dramatically among age groups (swearing peaks in adolescence), between genders (men swear more often and more offensively), and most importantly and perhaps obviously of all, from one individual to the next.

we know that by the time said toddler is old enough for college, his memory for taboo words in psychology experiments is excellent. Taboo words tend to be emotional words, and emotional things attract our attention and keep it

Some researchers have even suggested—and here things get more controversial—that taboo words have a hold on us that goes beyond their emotional impact or distinctiveness, that we evolved to use and attend to taboo words as a survival strategy.

NEW YORK — Scores of lawsuits involving thousands of former players touched by concussions and brain injuries have been consolidated into one master complaint, setting up a massive and potentially costly case for the NFL.

"The NFL, like the sport of boxing, was aware of the health risks associated with repetitive blows producing sub-concussive and concussive results and the fact that some members of the NFL player population were at significant risk of developing long-term brain damage and cognitive decline as a result," the complaint charges. "Despite its knowledge and controlling role in governing player conduct on and off the field, the NFL turned a blind eye to the risk and failed to warn and/or impose safety regulations governing this well-recognized health and safety problem."

Hall of Fame quarterback Terry Bradshaw said he believed that concern over head injuries would cause football to be eclipsed in popularity by soccer and other sports within 10 years.

“Football is really on the verge of a turning point here. We may see it in 15 years in pretty much the same place as boxing or ultimate fighting.” In other words, less a lucrative American colossus and more a niche sport beloved for its brutality.

there is a growing sentiment among those who love the sport and those who loathe it that football has come to a critical juncture.

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Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".

Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,

They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands.

When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”

A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

three years, one long and bitterly contested GOP primary, and a running-mate-selection process away, but it's fun to speculate. Plus there's already some evidence of their chemistry between Chris Christie and Susana Martinez.

“I love his authenticity, I love who he is,” she told the New York Times. “I will support Governor Christie in anything he decides to do in life.”

Christie spent the final weeks of the race trying to run up his margin of victory in order to reinforce his case for a 2016 presidential run. Martinez's job was to show up in heavily Hispanic areas like Union City and help turn out the Latino vote.