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At the end of last year, Isis published its penal code which lists amputation, stoning and crucifixion as the required punishments for certain crimes.

But it came as a US official attending a Paris summit said that some 10,000 Isis fighters have been killed by US-led coalition air strikes since they began last year.

Jewish educators often shy away from teaching subjects that they deem too political, arguing that politics do not belong in the classroom. They believe that their role is solely to teach about Israel and to impress upon young Jews that Israel is core to their Jewish identities. Yet educators have a responsibility to teach not only about the vision or dream of Israel but also the reality of Israel — and it’s impossible to do this without political discussions.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central to Jewish life. It’s as important to Jewish identity as prayer and the weekly Torah portion. While American Jews can certainly live rich Jewish lives without ever thinking about Israel, it’s the epicenter of Jewish politics. Involving middle- and high-school students in the debates around the conflict allows them to grapple with Jewish history, explore the many variations of Zionism and understand religious and political differences within the Jewish community.

In his tweets, Mr Joseph gave a lacerating commentary on anything from policy to personal appearance.

, Mr Joseph joined Republican attacks on Mrs Clinton for perceived failings of her handling of last year's attack on the US diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya.

The Daily Beast website broke the news of his sacking, describing it as a shock and saying Mr Joseph was "well known among policy wonks".

But it said that "inside the administration, there was little sympathy for the man who they feel had betrayed their confidence while taunting them all the while".

In an apology emailed to Politico, Mr Joseph said: "It has been a privilege to serve in this administration and I deeply regret violating the trust and confidence placed in me.

"What started out as an intended parody account of DC culture developed over time into a series of inappropriate and mean-spirited comments. I bear complete responsibility for this affair and I sincerely apologise to everyone I insulted."

Why can’t Europeans enjoy the conveniences of a common currency?Two reasons. First, unlike Europe, the United States has a fiscal union in which prosperous regions of the country subsidize less prosperous ones. Second, the United States has fewer barriers to labor mobility than Europe. In the United States, when an economic downturn affects one region, residents can pack up and find jobs elsewhere. In Europe, differences in language and culture make that response less likely.

As a result, Mr. Friedman and Mr. Feldstein contended that the nations of Europe needed a policy tool to deal with national recessions. That tool was a national monetary policy coupled with flexible exchange rates. Rather than heed their counsel, however, Europe adopted a common currency for much of the Continent and threw national monetary policy into the trash bin of history.

The motive was more political than economic. Europeans believed that their continent, once united with a common market and currency, would provide a better counterweight to American hegemony in world affairs. They also hoped that a united Europe in the 21st century would damp down the nationalist sentiments that led to two world wars in the 20th.

Flash-forward to today. Greece finds itself overwhelmed by its accumulated debts. To be sure, it bears primary responsibility. The Greek government borrowed too much, and for years it hid its fiscal problems from its creditors. Once the truth came to light, a large dose of austerity was the only course left. The result was an economic downturn with a quarter of the Greek labor force now unemployed. Continue reading the main story 136 Comments Making matters worse, however, was the common currency. In an earlier era, Greece could have devalued the drachma, making its exports more competitive on world markets. Easy monetary policy would have offset some of the pain from tight fiscal policy. Mr. Friedman and Mr. Feldstein were right: The euro has turned into an economic liability that has exacerbated political tensions. For this, the European elites who pushed for the currency union bear some responsibility

Defenders of the battle flag often further assert that Southern secession and the resultant Civil War had little or nothing to do with slavery, arguing that only a tiny fraction of people in the seceding states—usually cited as 3% to 6%—actually owned slaves. Thus, they say, the flag’s opponents are wrong to condemn it is a symbol of slavery and oppression.

But somebody owned the 3.5 million slaves in the Confederate states in 1861. In fact, census records reveal that 31% of all Confederate households held one or more slaves. The same records show that on farms large enough to avail themselves of slave labor, as many as 70% of planters owned their workers. Such ownership defined wealth and social status, regional culture and economic survival. The prospect of abolishing slavery threatened to upend the slave states’ societies and economies

My fellow white Southerners today need feel no shame in confronting the motivations of our ancestors. The Confederates were men and women of their era; we can only judge them legitimately in that context. Otherwise, we could reject virtually all of human history on one currently unacceptable ground or another. As with symbols, standards, norms and mores change over the ages. We could be shocked indeed were we to live long enough to see how Americans 150 years from now might judge us by the measures of their time.

Moreover, defending the battle flag with appeals to pride in ancestry and heritage evades the issue, deliberately and unsubtly. Black and white Americans today do not reject this emblem primarily because of what happened in the 1860s. They object because of what the flag has come to symbolize in the U.S. and around the world in our own lifetimes.

When we remember that common tax revenues support every expense connected with flying that flag or with displaying Confederate emblems on federal, state or municipal property, we confront the cruel irony of African-American taxpayers being forced to subsidize constant reminders of past and present injustices. Whatever private individuals and groups choose to do on their persons and their private property—and as Americans, they must be allowed their freedom of expression—the battle flag should disappear from display on public property

Lee understood symbols. After the war, he opposed efforts to place monuments on the Confederacy’s battlefields. In 1869, he counseled that Southerners ought to “obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered.”

All of which demands that we ask: Can we ever separate the memory of the Confederate experience from the memory of slavery? Is there any positive legacy to be drawn from the Confederacy? Can we admire Confederate leaders, even the all-but-deified Lee, without tacitly endorsing their cause? Ultimately, can we make the Confederacy worth remembering for the descendants of the slaves and those following generations of freedmen whom the whole nation betrayed by ignoring their new rights and liberties for a century?

Such an exercise can come only by directly and honestly addressing the Confederacy and the war it fought, and owning up to the ways they are remembered—both of which are vital to understanding America’s course since 1860. To that end, the Confederacy’s monuments and symbols can be vital learning tools if placed in context. They must be preserved, not expunged. They must be understood, not whitewashed.

The shibboleth that “state rights” caused secession is a suit of clothes desperately lacking an emperor. Only slavery (and its surrounding economic and political issues) had the power to propel white Southerners to disunion and, ultimately, war. Ironically, by taking a course that led to a war that they lost, the Confederates themselves launched the juggernaut that led to emancipation. To understand how freedom and justice came, why it was delayed for a century after the Civil War and why today so much mistrust and misunderstanding persists between black and white Americans, the vital starting point remains the Confederacy.

In the end, Americans cannot afford to forget the Confederacy. It is a good thing that the Confederacy failed—not least because a permanently divided America would have had neither the strength nor the worldliness to confront the next century’s totalitarian menaces. But the Confederate experience also teaches lessons about Americans themselves—about how they have reacted in crisis, about matters beyond just bravery and sacrifice that constitute the bedrock of our national being.

The Confederates were seen at the time as traitors by the North, and they are seen as racists down to the present day, but in the main, they sincerely believed that they were holding true to the guiding principles of democracy.

To paraphrase Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, America has ever been a laboratory for that democracy. The Confederacy is its most notable failed experiment. The debate over the relation of the states to the federal government had been present since independence. The idea that secession was an alternative if conflicts over sovereignty couldn’t be resolved arose often enough that it was likely to be tried eventually, and so the Confederates tried. They failed. But good scientists don’t erase their laboratory failures; they learn from them.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

The destroyers will rarely be held accountable. Mostly they will receive pensions.

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

The real revelation on Wednesday, however, was the way some of the candidates went beyond expounding bad analysis and peddling bad history to making outright false assertions, and probably doing so knowingly, which turns those false assertions into what are technically known as “lies.”

the truly awesome moment came when she asserted that the videos being used to attack Planned Parenthood show “a fully formed fetus on the table, its heart beating, its legs kicking while someone says we have to keep it alive to harvest its brain.” No, they don’t. Anti-abortion activists have claimed that such things happen, but have produced no evidence, just assertions mingled with stock footage of fetuses.

I began writing for The Times during the 2000 election campaign, and what I remember above all from that campaign is the way the conventions of “evenhanded” reporting allowed then-candidate George W. Bush to make clearly false assertions — about his tax cuts, about Social Security — without paying any price. As I wrote at the time, if Mr. Bush said the earth was flat, we’d see headlines along the lines of “Shape of the Planet: Both Sides Have a Point.”

Based on the current trajectory, war between the United States and China in the decades ahead is not just possible, but much more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is more likely than not.

A risk associated with Thucydides’s Trap is that business as usual—not just an unexpected, extraordinary event—can trigger large-scale conflict. When a rising power is threatening to displace a ruling power, standard crises that would otherwise be contained, like the assassination of an archduke in 1914, can initiate a cascade of reactions that, in turn, produce outcomes none of the parties would otherwise have chosen.

The preeminent geostrategic challenge of this era is not violent Islamic extremists or a resurgent Russia. It is the impact that China’s ascendance will have on the U.S.-led international order, which has provided unprecedented great-power peace and prosperity for the past 70 years. As Singapore’s late leader, Lee Kuan Yew, observed, “the size of China’s displacement of the world balance is such that the world must find a new balance. It is not possible to pretend that this is just another big player. This is the biggest player in the history of the world.”

More than 2,400 years ago, the Athenian historian Thucydides offered a powerful insight: “It was the rise of Athens, and the fear that this inspired in Sparta, that made war inevitable.

Note that Thucydides identified two key drivers of this dynamic: the rising power’s growing entitlement, sense of its importance, and demand for greater say and sway, on the one hand, and the fear, insecurity, and determination to defend the status quo this engenders in the established power, on the other.

However unimaginable conflict seems, however catastrophic the potential consequences for all actors, however deep the cultural empathy among leaders, even blood relatives, and however economically interdependent states may be—none of these factors is sufficient to prevent war, in 1914 or today.

Four of the 16 cases in our review did not end in bloodshed. Those successes, as well as the failures, offer pertinent lessons for today’s world leaders. Escaping the Trap requires tremendous effort

Lee Kuan Yew, the world’s premier China watcher and a mentor to Chinese leaders since Deng Xiaoping. Before his death in March, the founder of Singapore put the odds of China continuing to grow at several times U.S. rates for the next decade and beyond as “four chances in five.

Could China become #1? In what year could China overtake the United States to become, say, the largest economy in the world, or primary engine of global growth, or biggest market for luxury goods?

Could China Become #1? Manufacturer: Exporter: Trading nation: Saver: Holder of U.S. debt: Foreign-direct-investment destination: Energy consumer: Oil importer: Carbon emitter: Steel producer: Auto market: Smartphone market: E-commerce market: Luxury-goods market:   Internet user: Fastest supercomputer: Holder of foreign reserves: Source of initial public offerings: Primary engine of global growth: Economy: Most are stunned to learn that on each of these 20 indicators, China has already surpassed the U.S.

In 1980, China had 10 percent of America’s GDP as measured by purchasing power parity; 7 percent of its GDP at current U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 6 percent of its exports. The foreign currency held by China, meanwhile, was just one-sixth the size of America’s reserves. The answers for the second column: By 2014, those figures were 101 percent of GDP; 60 percent at U.S.-dollar exchange rates; and 106 percent of exports. China’s reserves today are 28 times larger than America’s.

On whether China’s leaders are serious about displacing the United States as the top power in Asia in the foreseeable future, Lee answered directly: “Of course. Why not … how could they not aspire to be number one in Asia and in time the world?” And about accepting its place in an international order designed and led by America, he said absolutely not: “China wants to be China and accepted as such—not as an honorary member of the West.”

As the United States emerged as the dominant power in the Western hemisphere in the 1890s, how did it behave? Future President Theodore Roosevelt personified a nation supremely confident that the 100 years ahead would be an American century. Over a decade that began in 1895 with the U.S. secretary of state declaring the United States “sovereign on this continent,” America liberated Cuba; threatened Britain and Germany with war to force them to accept American positions on disputes in Venezuela and Canada; backed an insurrection that split Colombia to create a new state of Panama (which immediately gave the U.S. concessions to build the Panama Canal); and attempted to overthrow the government of Mexico, which was supported by the United Kingdom and financed by London bankers. In the half century that followed, U.S. military forces intervened in “our hemisphere” on more than 30 separate occasions to settle economic or territorial disputes in terms favorable to Americans, or oust leaders they judged unacceptable

When Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s fast march to the market in 1978, he announced a policy known as “hide and bide.” What China needed most abroad was stability and access to markets. The Chinese would thus “bide our time and hide our capabilities,” which Chinese military officers sometimes paraphrased as getting strong before getting even.

With the arrival of China’s new paramount leader, Xi Jinping, the era of “hide and bide” is over

Many observers outside China have missed the great divergence between China’s economic performance and that of its competitors over the seven years since the financial crisis of 2008 and Great Recession. That shock caused virtually all other major economies to falter and decline. China never missed a year of growth, sustaining an average growth rate exceeding 8 percent. Indeed, since the financial crisis, nearly 40 percent of all growth in the global economy has occurred in just one country: China

What Xi Jinping calls the “China Dream” expresses the deepest aspirations of hundreds of millions of Chinese, who wish to be not only rich but also powerful. At the core of China’s civilizational creed is the belief—or conceit—that China is the center of the universe. In the oft-repeated narrative, a century of Chinese weakness led to exploitation and national humiliation by Western colonialists and Japan. In Beijing’s view, China is now being restored to its rightful place, where its power commands recognition of and respect for China’s core interests.

Last November, in a seminal meeting of the entire Chinese political and foreign-policy establishment, including the leadership of the People’s Liberation Army, Xi provided a comprehensive overview of his vision of China’s role in the world. The display of self-confidence bordered on hubris. Xi began by offering an essentially Hegelian conception of the major historical trends toward multipolarity (i.e. not U.S. unipolarity) and the transformation of the international system (i.e. not the current U.S.-led system). In his words, a rejuvenated Chinese nation will build a “new type of international relations” through a “protracted” struggle over the nature of the international order. In the end, he assured his audience that “the growing trend toward a multipolar world will not change.”

Given objective trends, realists see an irresistible force approaching an immovable object. They ask which is less likely: China demanding a lesser role in the East and South China Seas than the United States did in the Caribbean or Atlantic in the early 20th century, or the U.S. sharing with China the predominance in the Western Pacific that America has enjoyed since World War II?

At this point, the established script for discussion of policy challenges calls for a pivot to a new strategy (or at least slogan), with a short to-do list that promises peaceful and prosperous relations with China. Shoehorning this challenge into that template would demonstrate only one thing: a failure to understand the central point I’m trying to make

What strategists need most at the moment is not a new strategy, but a long pause for reflection. If the tectonic shift caused by China’s rise poses a challenge of genuinely Thucydidean proportions, declarations about “rebalancing,” or revitalizing “engage and hedge,” or presidential hopefuls’ calls for more “muscular” or “robust” variants of the same, amount to little more than aspirin treating cancer. Future historians will compare such assertions to the reveries of British, German, and Russian leaders as they sleepwalked into 1914

The rise of a 5,000-year-old civilization with 1.3 billion people is not a problem to be fixed. It is a condition—a chronic condition that will have to be managed over a generation

Success will require not just a new slogan, more frequent summits of presidents, and additional meetings of departmental working groups. Managing this relationship without war will demand sustained attention, week by week, at the highest level in both countries. It will entail a depth of mutual understanding not seen since the Henry Kissinger-Zhou Enlai conversations in the 1970s. Most significantly, it will mean more radical changes in attitudes and actions, by leaders and publics alike, than anyone has yet imagined.

Never ones to let a serious crisis go to waste, leading Republicans seized the ensuing constitutional crisis as an opportunity to remake the nation’s political economy and geography. In the summer of 1862, as Lincoln mulled over the Emancipation Proclamation’s details, officials in his administration created the Department of Agriculture, while Congress passed the Morrill Land Grant Act, the Pacific Railroad Act and the Homestead Act.

s a result, federal authorities could offer citizens a deal: Enlist to fight for Lincoln and liberty, and receive, as fair recompense for their patriotic sacrifices, higher education and Western land connected by rail to markets. It seemed possible that liberty and empire might advance in lock step.

the project of continental expansion fostered sectional reconciliation. Northerners and Southerners agreed on little at the time except that the Army should pacify Western tribes. Even as they fought over the proper role for the federal government, the rights of the states, and the prerogatives of citizenship, many Americans found rare common ground on the subject of Manifest Destiny.

many American soldiers, whether they had fought for the Union or the Confederacy, redeployed to the frontier. They became shock troops of empire. The federal project of demilitarization, paradoxically, accelerated the conquest and colonization of the West.

The Indian wars of the Reconstruction era devastated not just Native American nations but also the United States.

For a moment, it seemed that the federal government could accomplish great things. But in the West, Native Americans would not simply vanish

Red Cloud’s War, then, undermined a utopian moment and blurred the Republican Party’s vision for expansion

at least the Grant administration had a plan. After he took office in 1869, President Grant promised that he would pursue a “peace policy” to put an end to violence in the West, opening the region to settlers. By feeding rather than fighting Indians, federal authorities would avoid further bloodshed with the nation’s indigenous peoples. The process of civilizing and acculturating Native nations into the United States could begin.

President Grant’s Peace Policy perished in the Modoc War. The horror of that conflict, and the Indian wars more broadly, coupled with an endless array of political scandals and violence in the states of the former Confederacy – including the brutal murder, on Easter Sunday 1873 in Colfax, La., of at least 60 African-Americans – diminished support for the Grant administration’s initiatives in the South and the West.

One hundred and fifty years after the Civil War, collective memory casts that conflict as a war of liberation, entirely distinct from the Indian wars.

though Reconstruction is typically recalled in the popular imagination as both more convoluted and contested – whether thwarted by intransigent Southerners, doomed to fail by incompetent and overweening federal officials, or perhaps some combination of the two – it was well intended nevertheless, an effort to make good on the nation’s commitment to freedom and equality.

But this is only part of the story. The Civil War emerged out of struggles between the North and South over how best to settle the West – struggles, in short, over who would shape an emerging American empire. Reconstruction in the West then devolved into a series of conflicts with Native Americans

so, while the Civil War and its aftermath boasted moments of redemption and days of jubilee, the era also featured episodes of subjugation and dispossession, patterns that would repeat themselves in the coming years.

When Chief Joseph surrendered, the United States secured its empire in the West. The Indian wars were over, but an era of American imperialism was just beginning.

“It was just kind of sitting there, and I couldn’t believe no one had taken it on,” said Mr. Neri, author of six books for teenagers, including “Ghetto Cowboy.” “Both she and Truman used their real lives as fodder for their fiction, and I figured if they did it, maybe I could do it too.”

“Go Set a Watchman,” which takes place 20 years after “Mockingbird” when Scout is an adult, is punctuated by flashbacks to her childhood adventures with her brother, Jem, and her best friend, Dill, the Capote figure: “He was a short, square-built, cotton-headed individual with the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat,” Ms. Lee wrote. “He was a year older than she, but she was a head taller.”

In one scene of “Watchman” that parallels an actual childhood incident, Dill, Scout and Jem put on a mock Baptist revival, culminating with a baptism in the fish pond. To their mortification, their antics are interrupted by dinner guests, the minister and his wife. In reality, Nelle, Truman and his cousin put on a mock carnival sideshow on a similar occasion, shocking the visitors, an episode woven into Mr. Neri’s book.

Born a year and a half apart, the young Harper and Truman both had active imaginations and distant mothers. Neither of them fit in especially well in a small Southern community.“Nelle was too rough for the girls, and Truman was scared of the boys, so he just tagged on to her and she was his protector,” a family friend, Charles Ray Skinner, recalled in “Mockingbird,” Charles J. Shields’s biography of Ms. Lee. When schoolyard bullies ganged up on Truman, who was small for his age, Nelle, who was younger, got in fistfights to protect him.

Ms. Lee, who stopped giving formal interviews in the 1960s, once described feeling bound to Mr. Capote by “a common anguish” and said of her childhood, “We lived in our imagination most of the time.” Mr. Capote recalled in an interview that the two often felt like “apart people.”

his public readings are crammed with fans. I attended one the other day and was shocked to see how a teenage schoolgirl was shouted down and hustled out of the room by security guards for mildly questioning the Sarrazin thesis.

a party that would be critical of Islamic expansion in Europe and that seeks to control immigration -- could win 15 percent of the vote, thus seriously shaking up the German political system

"The crimes of the Nazi era," he told the cheering crowd, "are not an excuse for you to refuse to fight for your own identity. Your only responsibility is to avoid the mistakes of the past." The cardinal error of the interwar years, according to Wilders, was the failure to identify gathering threats against democracy. In his analogy, it was the Muslims who were the Nazis. The audience rose to its feet to applaud him. It was the first time in decades of reporting from Germany that I witnessed a passionate response to a passionately delivered political speech.

Merkel does not want to grasp the nettle of anti-immigrant populism -- one senses it stings her as much as it does the Muslims she finds herself unloading against. But if she doesn't, if she simply bides her time, she will see her Christian Democratic party crumble. Germans are restless, and they increasingly believe their political class is tone-deaf. Popular resentment is running high, and there is a powerful head of steam behind the emerging anti-Islam movement

But Germans are no longer so ready to be put on the moral defensive or to view the Nazi era as the defining episode of their past. Even non-Germans seem willing to move on. Recent books like “Germania” and “The German Genius” suggest that English-language publishing may be entering a post-swastika phase. Germany still atones but now also preaches, usually on the evils of debt, the importance of nurturing industry and the superiority of long-term thinking in enterprise. Others are disposed to listen. “Everyone orients himself towards Germany,”

A third of Germans think the country is overrun by foreigners, according to a newly published poll; a majority favour “sharply restricting” Muslim religious practice. Over a tenth would even welcome a Führer who would govern with “a strong hand”—a sign that the embers of extremism still glow.

the Bavarian sister party of the ruling Christian Democratic Union (CDU), declared this month that Germany needs no further immigration from Turkey or the Arab world. Germany is “not an immigration country”, he insisted, contradicting a hard-won consensus among conservatives.

the Berlin republic is a different sort of character from its westward-leaning, Bonn-based predecessor. Scholars had struck several awkward coinages to describe war-chastened Germany: it was a “tamed power” engaged in “attritional multilateralism”. These no longer seem apt for today’s more confident and self-willed Germany. But its identity is still unformed

Despite their economic strength, Germans fear the worst. They believe their country “has passed its zenith”, says Mrs Kocher, the pollster. This pessimism shapes Germany’s dealings with the rest of the world. Unlike most countries, Germany is not driven by any great ambition, but rather by the fear that “things could fall apart if they don’t hold on to stability,”

These unEuropean outbursts startled not just Greeks, who brandished swastikas in response, but Europeans generally. They had grown up believing that the Germans saw their own interests as inseparable from those of their fellow Europeans. Now they glimpsed a different, ugly German, smug about his economy and untroubled by his past.

The crisis has created a new pecking order, at least temporarily. Germany, with its high-competitiveness, low-debt economy, is on top. The rest are having to adjust, including France, traditionally a joint leader of the European project. This is unsettling. “You get an enormous sense of German self-righteousness, which is very difficult to take, especially when there are solid foundations for it,” says François Heisbourg of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. France, which has lagged behind Germany in making structural reforms, feels its influence waning. “France has to do its homework to be able to restore some level of influence in Europe,

Germany’s brightest business prospects do not involve its slow-growing neighbours but the charismatic economies of Asia and Latin America. A German acceptance of Turkish membership of the EU looks less likely than ever.

“Sell your islands, you bankrupt Greeks. And the Acropolis while you’re at it,” demanded Bild, a popular tabloid

Germany’s overall direction is obscure. It is torn, intrigued by its new possibilities but painfully aware that alone it does not count for much in the world. Its population is already shrinking. Europe will lose economic and demographic bulk relative to China, India and Brazil. The EU was virtually ignored at last year’s Copenhagen summit on climate change, even though it had taken the lead in setting targets to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. This was “an enormous shock”, says Guy Verhofstadt, a former Belgian prime minister who now leads the liberals in the European Parliament. “It shows we need one voice.” Fear of war launched the European project; he hopes that fear of irrelevance will drive it forward.

in military terms, Germany remains a midget compared not just with America but with Britain and France, which together account for 70% of the EU’s military research and development and 60% of its deployable forces.

What's the theory behind technology? Do we just deal with each one, one by one, or was there a kind of a framework to understand and have a perspective on technology?

All these technologies that we have now made are interrelated, they are codependent, and they form a kind of an ecosystem of technologies. You might even think of it as if these were species, as if it was a super-organism of technology.

I'm interested in this super-organism of all the technologies. I gave it a name. I call it the Technium.

In the larger sense, the Technium is anything that we make with our minds.

all these things are connected together and they form an interacting whole, a kind of a super-organism, that has in many ways its own slight bit of autonomy, and its own agenda.

It wants in the way that a plant wants light and so it will lean towards the light. It has an urgency to go towards light. It's not intelligent, it's not aware of it, but that's what it wants.

If it does want things, it means that it wants it independent of our choosing. At the same time we are making it; it is there because we exist. It's not independent of us, but it has some slight bit of autonomy.

Biologists are slowly coming around to admitting that there are directions in evolution. The standard orthodoxy for many years was that it was completely random, and that there was no direction whatsoever. Any ordinary person found that shocking because they could definitely see a direction in evolution.

We see an arc of increasing complexity in the long journey of life.

Along the long history there is movement towards increasing diversity.

There is also increasing movement towards specialization.

There is a trend towards increasing structure. Things become more and more complicated.

There is a trend towards emergence

There are other trends—towards ubiquity, towards energy efficiency, towards degrees of freedom.

What I'm suggesting is that there is a continuum, a connection back all the way to the Big Bang with these self-organizing systems that make the galaxies, stars, and life, and now is producing technology in the same way.

The energies flowing through these things are, interestingly, becoming more and more dense.

The amount of energy running through a sunflower, per gram per second of the livelihood, is actually greater than in the sun.

The most energy-dense thing that we know about in the entire universe is the computer chip in your computer. It is sending more energy per gram per second through that than anything we know.

The other thing that is evolving over time is the evolvability of the system. One of the things that life is doing is it's evolving its ability to evolve.

Another way to think about this is that one of the things that life likes to do is make eyeballs. Life evolution independently invented eyeballs 30 different times in different genres and taxonomies. It invented flapping wings four times. It invented venomous stings about 20 times independently, from bees, to snakes, to jellyfish. It also has invented minds many, many times.

We are going to fill the universe with all different kinds of thinkings, because only by having many different kinds of minds can we actually understand the universe. Our own mind is probably insufficient to completely comprehend the universe.

The reason why we want to embrace it with our full arms is because what technology brings us is an opportunity for everybody's special mix of talents to be expressed. Just as we all have different faces, we all have a different mix of aptitudes and abilities. We use technologies to express those things.

The question is: Was Moore's Law inevitable? What drives Moore's Law? Where is this coming from?

Moore's Law, not in terms of transistors, but in terms of measuring computer power, was happening long before Moore or anybody even noticed it. The effect was happening before anybody believed it.

this suggests is that this is actually an inherent attribute of the physics, and it suggests that it is independent of the economy. Even if the silicon chip had been invented in Stalinist Russia under a command economy, it probably would still follow exactly the same kind of curve.

Geoffrey West at the Santa Fe Institute looked at a whole bunch of technologies, like solar and batteries and other kinds of things, and they show this this scaling law holds true in many industries.

It has something to do with the basic shape of the economy and of physics, and it's not really a self-fulfilling prophecy. In this way I suggest that these kinds of curves are inevitable. One of the characteristics of the Technium is it exhibits these scaling laws.

we do know that the media that we have does rewire our brains. We know this by studies of people who are literate. They took scans in Peru of people who were illiterate and those who could read and write. They found that in fact their brains work differently—not just when they're reading, but just in general. After having five, ten or twenty years of education and learning to read and write, it actually changes how your brain works.

It's also very clear that if you are spending five or ten hours a day in front of a computer, that is going to change how your brain works. It is going to rewire how we're doing things.

We have a dependency on the alphabet. That's how we think about things. We need reading and writing. We think in terms of words. We imagine it. We see it around us. It's ubiquitous. We are dependent on the alphabet. That doesn't seem to bother us very much.

As these technologies become more ubiquitous and as we become dependent upon it, that's what it is. We will be dependent upon it. It will be our exobrain. We'll use it to remember. It will always be around.

We invented the external stomach, it's called cooking, that allows us to digest stuff that could not otherwise increase nutrition. It changed our jaw and our teeth. We are physically different people because of our inventions. While we can live on a raw diet, it's actually very hard to breed on a raw diet.

What we have done is become dependent on our technology, and we will become ever more so. That's just the definition of who we are. We are the first domesticated animals. We are a technology ourselves.

What I'm saying is that there is only a little more good in technology than bad, but a little is all we need. If we create one-tenth of a percent more than we destroy every year, we can make civilization, because that tenth of a percent compounded over centuries is all that we need.

Every time there's a new technology that comes along, we have the possibility to use it for harm or for good. We also suddenly have a new possibility and choice that we didn't have before. That new choice is that little tiny tenth of a percent that's better, because we have now another freedom that we didn't have before. That tips it into the good side. It's not much better, but that's all we need over the long term. That's why over the long term it's good, because it increases choices and possibilities.

Technology is not powerful unless it can be powerfully abused. There is going to be a learning period. There are going to be phases that people go through and then become addicted. They don't know how to use it.

DDT is horrible. Don't give it a job as a pesticide, and spray millions of acres of cotton fields. That's a terrible job and causes all kinds of havoc. Yet used locally and sprayed around households, DDT eliminates malaria and saves millions of lives a year, and it has very little environmental impact that way. That's a better job for this technology.

We want to find the right jobs for these things and the right frame. Just like there are no bad children, there are also no bad technologies. You've just got to find the right place for them.

My research has shown that there are very few species of technology that ever go extinct. That's the difference between biological evolution and technological evolution; in technology things don't go extinct. They can be resurrected.

Very few people go backwards. Why? Because we have to surrender so many choices and options.

As wholesome and as satisfying as those lives are, the price of going back to these places is surrendering choices and opportunities. In general, the whole arc of evolution is towards expanding those, and that's why by embracing technology we can align ourselves with this long arc throughout the cosmos into the future.

I did a calculation that showed three-quarters of the total energy that we use on the planet right now, at least in the United States, is used in servicing technology. Roughly, three-quarters of the gasoline that you use in your car is used to move the car and not you. You're just a minor passenger in this whole thing. We have energy used to heat the warehouses that are holding the stuff that we have or to move the stuff that we have. Already this Technium is consuming three-quarters of our energy.

That is also where it's going. There will be more technology used to support more technology. Most of the traffic on the Internet is not people talking to each other; it's machines talking to other machines.

the Christian churches are mainly influential only in the “peripheral areas” of our common life

Thanks in part to this bunker mentality, American Christianity has become what Hunter calls a “weak culture” — one that mobilizes but doesn’t convert, alienates rather than seduces, and looks backward toward a lost past instead of forward to a vibrant future.

believing Christians are no longer what they once were — an overwhelming majority in a self-consciously Christian nation.

The question is whether they can become a creative and attractive minority in a different sort of culture, where they’re competing not only with rival faiths but with a host of pseudo-Christian spiritualities,

Christians need to find a way to thrive in a society that looks less and less like any sort of Christendom — and more and more like the diverse and complicated Roman Empire where their religion had its beginning, 2,000 years ago this week.

In the wealthier districts across the state, the news is better: 72 percent of students in “low need” districts are graduating ready for college or careers. But even that is well under the 95 percent of students in those districts who are now graduating.

A common reaction, Dr. Tisch said, is shock and hesitancy. There are fears of plummeting real estate values, as well as disagreement, particularly in rural areas, with the idea that all students need to be prepared for college.

"History is often taught in categories—women's history, African American history, environmental history—so that many of the students have no sense of chronology. They have no idea what followed what."

"Teachers are the most important people in our society. They need far more pay, obviously, but they need more encouragement. They need more respect. They need more appreciation from all of us. And we shouldn't do anything to hinder them or to make their job harder."

"It's our fault," he says, pointing to his chest. "I mean the parents and grandparents of the oncoming generation. We have to talk about history, talk about the books we love, the biographies and histories." He continues, "We should all take our children to historic places. Go to Gettysburg. Go to the Capitol."

And teach history, he says—while tapping three fingers on the table between us—with "the lab technique." In other words, "give the student a problem to work on."

Mr. McCullough advises us to concentrate on grade school. "Grade school children, as we all know, can learn a foreign language in a flash," he says. "They can learn anything in a flash. The brain at that stage in life is like a sponge. And one of the ways they get it is through art: drawing, making things out of clay, constructing models, and dramatic productions. If you play the part of Abigail Adams or Johnny Appleseed in a fourth-grade play, you're never going to forget it as long as you live."

If everyone’s wages were growing, and if everyone felt secure enough in their jobs to quit every now and again in search of better opportunities elsewhere, I doubt that we’d be talking quite so much about white privilege. We’d definitely talk about broken schools and mass incarceration and law enforcement policies that disproportionately damage the lives of nonwhites. Yet we might talk about these problems in a more forward-looking way

the white-privilege conversation has emerged, paradoxically, because most white Americans – along with most non-white Americans – aren’t doing so great economically. A sense emerges that success (or just access to a living wage) is a zero-sum game. It emerges, that is, in all parts of society, except among the most entrenched of society’s haves.

My experience is that white people who prattle on about white privilege, actually do have privilege, usually middle class, parents paid for college, hetero, etc… The problem is they think all other white people are in the same situation and are shocked that not everyone is.

I’m fine with the concept, I just hate the term. “Privilege” implies something extra to me in connotation. The proverbial silver spoon. That’s not the problem we face. Whites don’t have anything that we don’t all deserve. What we have a problem with is people that are “Disadvantaged”. Ones that don’t have the things we all deserve. The language matters because it influences how we react to the problem and how we think about the necessary solutions. One inspires reflexive resentment from white people, the other inspires reflexive sympathy.

The problem with the term “privilege” – both the luxe the word evokes and the manner in which it’s all too often used – is that it frames questions of justice in terms of haves graciously offering up some of their bottomless reserves of have to have-nots.

It may help some posh racists change their ways, but it’s of absolutely no use in convincing anyone whose racism is one of resentment.

There are, even in crap economic times, a handful of Americans whose central concern is that they have too much unearned comfort. Unfortunately but unsurprisingly, these are the very same people who are directing the cultural conversation about social injustice.