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When his defense secretary at the time, Robert Gates, and his national security adviser, Tom Donilon, told him that he would be crazy to intervene in Libya — a country where, in Mr. Gates’s words, the United States had “no significant national interests” — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Mr. Donilon’s successor, Susan E. Rice, recalled the massacre of 800,000 Rwandans during the Clinton presidency, and said Mr. Obama could not allow another genocide in the making. Reluctantly, Mr. Obama agreed, and ordered a bombing attack, alongside NATO and the Arab League. America could not stand by, he said later, because “that’s just not who we are.”

last month, as he debated with his staff what looked like imminent American strikes on Syria, he talked about how the box he found himself in differed from what he had faced on Libya. “He made the case that Libya was a lot simpler,” one participant in the conversation said recently, recounting the stages the president went through as he moved from tentatively embracing a bombing plan, to a failed effort to secure Congressional authorization, to the Russian-authored diplomacy now in place. “In Libya, he had only a narrow window of time to make the decision, or it would have been too late. He had a U.N. Security Council resolution.” The president, the aide said, ran through his long list and concluded that in Syria, “all that is missing.”

Mr. Obama had absorbed some bitter lessons. His decision to stay on in Afghanistan had not enhanced the perception of American power in the region, and Libya, once the bombing was over, descended into new chaos. Mr. Gates said last week that he saw, in the Syria gyrations, a president absorbing the lesson of a decade of American mistakes, and coming to the right conclusion after the worst possible process. “Haven’t Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya taught us something about the unintended consequences of military action?” Mr. Gates asked.

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The right has all the advantages, just as the devil has all the best tunes. Conservatism appeals to our selfishness and fear, our desire and self-interest; they neatly nurture and then harvest the inherent and incubating individualism. I imagine that neurologically the pathway travelled by a fearful or selfish impulse is more expedient and well travelled than the route of the altruistic pang. In simple terms of circuitry I suspect it is easier to connect these selfish inclinations.

This natural, neurological tendency has been overstimulated and acculturated. Materialism and individualism do in moderation make sense.

On October 1, Obamacare’s subsidized insurance exchanges went live. Most of the exchange websites crashed on the first day, a development that led some of the law’s supporters to conclude that there was overwhelming demand for Obamacare’s insurance products.

. “Very, very few people that we’re aware of have enrolled in the federal exchange,” said one anonymous insurance industry official to the Washington Post. “We are talking single digits.”

Covered California, that state’s subsidized insurance exchange, initially claimed that its website had received 5 million hits on October 1. They later had to revise that number down 87 percent, to 645,000. KUSI-TV in San Diego is reporting that not one policy has yet been sold on the California exchange.

a major change is under way in how libraries organize information. Instead of bewildering users with a bevy of specialized databases—books here, articles there—many libraries are bulldozing their digital silos. They now offer one-stop search boxes that comb entire collections, Google style.

one fear is that firms could favor their own content in results.

Another is that discovery software, by sluicing content together, could deluge users with less-appropriate resources

Of course, I wish my homeland victory. But what would constitute a victory for my country? Each one of Hitler’s victories was a defeat for the German people. And the final rout of Nazi Germany was a victory for the Germans themselves, who demonstrated how a nation can rise up and live like human beings without the delirium of war in their heads.

Today, though, Victory Day has nothing to do with the people’s victory or my father’s victory. It is not a day of peace and remembrance for the victims. It is a day for rattling swords, a day of zinc coffins, a day of aggression, a day of great hypocrisy and great baseness.

hanks to the “zombie box,” the population now has a make-believe idea of the world: The West wants to destroy us, so we are compelled, like our fathers and grandfathers, to wage holy war against fascism and we must be prepared to sacrifice everything for victory.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful Darwinism,”

his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

What do a pizza box, a polar bear and you have in common?All carry a kind of industrial toxicant called poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, that do two things: They make life convenient, and they also appear to increase the risk of cancer.

The scientists I interviewed say that they try to avoid these chemicals in their daily lives, but they’re pretty much unavoidable and now are found in animals all over the planet (including polar bears in Greenland and probably you and me)

PFASs are used to make nonstick frying pans, waterproof clothing, stain-resistant fabrics, fast-food wrappers, microwave popcorn bags, firefighting foam and thousands of other products. Many are unlabeled, so even chemists sometimes feel helpless.

What I found was this: All of the current products offered varying levels of protection, but nothing worked as well as traditional chemical repellent. Nothing, that is, until I tested the patch, which could very well remove humans from the mosquito food chain for good.

Then came a test of the Kite compound. The patch, which isn’t available yet, smelled an awful lot like cloves, and as I inserted my arm into the glass box again, no mosquitoes landed anywhere near it.

I wasn’t able to talk anyone into telling me exactly what the highly coveted proprietary blend is made of, only that the first version to be released in 2016 — the one I tried — is made of plant-based fragrances and other compounds that don’t require E.P.A. approval. A second version is awaiting regulatory approval for 2017.

Increasingly on the Internet, websites are personalizing themselves to suit our interests. We all see this happening at Amazon, where if you order a book, Amazon will send you the next book. We see it happening in Netflix, but it's also happening in a bunch of places where it's much less visible. For example, on Google, most people assume that if you search for BP, you'll get one set of results that are the consensus set of results in Google. Actually, that isn't true anymore. Since Dec. 4, 2009, Google has been personalized for everyone. So when I had two friends this spring Google "BP," one of them got a set of links that was about investment opportunities in BP. The other one got information about the oil spill. Presumably that was based on the kinds of searches that they had done in the past. If you have Google doing that, and you have Yahoo doing that, and you have Facebook doing that, and you have all of the top sites on the Web customizing themselves to you, then your information environment starts to look very different from anyone else's. And that's what I'm calling the "filter bubble": that personal ecosystem of information that's been catered by these algorithms to who they think you are.

What it's looking like increasingly is that the Web is connecting us back to ourselves. There's a looping going on where if you have an interest, you're going to learn a lot about that interest. But you're not going to learn about the very next thing over. And you certainly won't learn about the opposite view. If you have a political position, you're not going to learn about the other one. If you Google some sites about the link between vaccines and autism, you can very quickly find that Google is repeating back to you your view about whether that link exists and not what scientists know, which is that there isn't a link between vaccines and autism. It's a feedback loop that's invisible. You can't witness it happening because it's baked into the fabric of the information environment.

The Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, likes to tell people this statistic: From the beginning of civilization to 2003, if you took all of human intellectual output, every single conversation that ever happened, it's about two exabytes of data, about a billion gigabytes. And now two exabytes of data is created every five days

one-third of those they surveyed in 2010 have listened to an audio book, and the percentage of listeners in the 18-24 age group is increasing because of the iPod and the ease of adapting audio (and podcasts) to MP3s

31 percent of audiobooks are mysteries, thrillers, and suspense; 21 percent are bestsellers (presumably books such as Bossypants); 20 percent are general fiction; and 15 percent are history.

the demise of Borders, which featured CDs prominently, and a general reduction in bookstore shelf-space means there is less room for the packaging of boxed recordings. Libraries, however, continue to favor CDs, and a significant portion of audio listeners prefer to borrow rather than buy CDs. So, the domain of CD listenership is increasingly composed of library patrons.

Three Turkish cabinet ministers resigned on Wednesday in an intensifying corruption scandal that has challenged the government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and polarized the country.

Economy Minister Zafer Caglayan and Interior Minister Muammer Guler, both of whose sons have been arrested in the anticorruption investigation, stepped down.

Hours later, Erdogan Bayraktar, the environment and urban planning minister, announced his resignation in an interview with the private NTV television network. Mr. Bayraktar’s son was detained as part of the corruption probe but later released.

What motivates our colleague to show up in an unwell state, and why should his presence in the office make the rest of us so edgy, sometimes to the point of anger? Perhaps we all share a common ailment of the workplace, a condition whose major symptom is the morbid fear of downtime.

If overwork can be taken as a sickness in itself, then America is a bastion of infirmity. We clock in some 1,788 hours a year, 120 more than our counterparts in Britain, 300 more than our counterparts in France and 400 more than our counterparts in Germany.

America, notoriously, does not require employers to offer paid sick leave. Employers grant new employees just eight sick days, on average, down 20 percent since 1993, and that’s only what we have on paper.

I look to historians for their power to illuminate not just the invisible lineaments of the present, but also that which is not present. What are the roads that were not taken that most shape our own time?

Nelson Lichtenstein, who parlayed a career writing about midcentury capitalism and industrial unionism into extraordinarily penetrating accounts of why the economic regime we live under today is so deeply unsatisfying. One abandoned idea documented in his most recent book, “A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor,” haunts me. Powerful people in the Democratic Party, like Senator Robert Wagner of New York, used to insist that the job of liberalism was to penetrate the “black box” of the corporation and turn the workplace into a more democratic institution. They believed that to leave decision-making in the great firms that dominate our lives merely to owners (as opposed to, say, the system of “co-determination” between labor and management under which the German economy now thrives) was no less than a violation of the Constitution’s 13th Amendment, which outlawed involuntary servitude.

who today are the best writers on American politics? There are two, and they both are bloggers. One, Corey Robin of Brooklyn College, is also a political theorist; his book “The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism From Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin” provides the most convincing account about what right-wing habits of mind are ultimately all about.

Last month, the University of California system announced that a version of the Big History Project course could be counted in place of a more traditional World History class, paving the way for the state’s 1,300 high schools to offer it.

“We didn’t know when the last time was that somebody introduced a new course into high school,” Gates told me. “How does one go about it? What did the guy who liked biology — who did he call and say, ‘Hey, we should have biology in high school?’ It was pretty uncharted territory. But it was pretty cool.”

The American high school experience, at least as we now know it, is a relatively recent invention. Attendance did not start to become mandatory until the 1850s, and the notion of a nationwide standardized curriculum didn’t emerge until the turn of the century. But by the early 1900s, most children were taking the same list of classes that remains recognizable to this day: English, math, science and some form of history. For much of the 20th century, this last requirement would usually take the form of Western Civilization, a survey course that focused on European countries from around the rise of Rome through modernity.

As a descendant of Irish laborers, he has no direct ties to slaveholders; still, in a departure from the views held by many Southern whites, Cummings considered the issue a personal one. “If ‘guilt’ is the best word to use, then yes, I feel guilt,” he said. “I mean, you start understanding that the wealth of this part of the world — wealth that has benefited me — was created by some half a million black people who just passed us by. How is it that we don’t acknowledge this?”

the German Coast Uprising, an event rarely mentioned in American history books. In January 1811, at least 125 slaves walked off their plantations and, dressed in makeshift military garb, began marching in revolt along River Road toward New Orleans. (The area was then called the German Coast for the high number of German immigrants, like the Haydels.) The slaves were suppressed by militias after two days, with about 95 killed, some during fighting and some after the show trials that followed. As a warning to other slaves, dozens were decapitated, their heads placed on spikes along River Road and in what is now Jackson Square in the French Quarter.

just in case you’re worried about people getting distracted by the pretty house over there, the last thing you’ll see before leaving here will be 60 beheaded slaves.”

The passion and urgency with which these battles are fought reflect the misguided way history is taught in schools. Currently, most students learn history as a set narrative—a process that reinforces the mistaken idea that the past can be synthesized into a single, standardized chronicle of several hundred pages. This teaching pretends that there is a uniform collective story, which is akin to saying everyone remembers events the same.

Yet, history is anything but agreeable. It is not a collection of facts deemed to be "official" by scholars on high. It is a collection of historians exchanging different, often conflicting analyses.

rather than vainly seeking to transcend the inevitable clash of memories, American students would be better served by descending into the bog of conflict and learning the many "histories" that compose the American national story.

Sadly, it’s gotten only worse since Jon Stewart built a secular church around the nightly ritual of mockery of the deserving class. So, while more people are in on the joke, more people continue to offer a steady stream of material for the jokes.

“I think that Roger Ailes’s great gift was mainstreaming that nativist, paranoid streak in American politics, and putting it on television in a much prettier, shinier box,” he told Rolling Stone last year.

Stewart didn’t degrade politics and the press. He walked through a degraded landscape, the tour guide who’s also a smartass.

Every addition to the increasing number of ways that Americans amuse themselves — D.V.R.s, streaming content on computers and mobile devices and perhaps soon our watches — benefits the lords of professional football. Their game only becomes more valuable as the number of people watching TV programs in real time shrinks

The sole non-N.F.L. event on the 2013 list of the Top 10 most-watched television programs was the Academy Awards broadcast, at No. 7, between two postseason playoff games. The Oscars had 40 million viewers, the Super Bowl 108 million. N.F.L. revenue last year was about $9 billion, but the stated goal of its commissioner, Roger Goodell, in 2010 was to increase that to $25 billion by 2027.

And yet, past the halfway point of the season, the game is as popular as ever. Ratings are up. The N.F.L.'s associated spinoffs, like the sale of licensed merchandise and participation in the fantasy-football phenomenon, continue to grow. The Buffalo Bills, one of the league’s least valuable franchises, recently changed hands for more than $1 billion. The Dallas Cowboys are worth an estimated $3.2 billion.

the Pew Research Center put together a “political typology” that identified three major right-of-center voting blocs. The first, which Pew called “Enterprisers,” were “highly patriotic and strongly pro-business,” hawkish and opposed to social welfare programs. Their political views basically tracked with the party’s official commitments

Enterprisers were only about a third of the Republican coalition. Another third were “Social Conservatives” — more religious than the Enterprisers, more anxious about mass immigration and more skeptical of business, and more supportive of an active government. The final third was what Pew called “Pro-Government Conservatives” — more financially stressed than the other groups, and even more likely than the Social Conservatives to be supportive of government regulations and a stronger safety net.

the 2005 edition captured a crucial point that’s been brought home by Donald Trump’s success in 2016: The Republican coalition, its authors wrote, “now includes more lower-income voters than it once did, and many of these voters favor an activist government to help working class people.”

American aircraft on Saturday struck a training camp in Somalia belonging to the Islamist militant group the Shabab, the Pentagon said, killing about 150 fighters who were assembled for what American officials believe was a graduation ceremony and prelude to an imminent attack against American troops and their allies in East Africa.

Defense officials said the strike was carried out by drones and American aircraft, which dropped a number of precision-guided bombs and missiles on the field where the fighters were gathered.

Pentagon officials said they did not believe there were any civilian casualties, but there was no independent way to verify the claim. They said they delayed announcing the strike until they could assess the outcome