History Readings

Indyk somehow retains hope for a peace deal. For all the stasis and backsliding over the past two decades, he argues that the Palestinians have made some strides over the years. Instead of rejecting Israel, they've accepted its right to exist. Instead of practicing terrorism, Abbas's Fatah party has embraced non-violence. Palestinian officials have come to terms with acquiring a demilitarized state encompassing only 22 percent of historic Palestine as part of a two-state solution.

On the Israeli side, Indyk added, annexing the West Bank and its 2.5 million Palestinian Arabs, as some Israelis on the right are calling for, is antithetical to Israel functioning as a democratic, Jewish state. If it remains democratic under this scenario, then the Palestinians will constitute a majority of the population. If it remains Jewish, then the Palestinians will be stripped of their rights.

But then, beginning in mid-February, Abbas suddenly "shut down." By the time the Palestinian leader visited Obama in Washington in March, he "had checked out of the negotiations," repeatedly telling U.S. officials that he would "study" their proposals, Indyk said. Abbas later signed 15 international conventions and struck a unity deal with the Gaza-based militant group Hamas. These moves deflated the peace process.

Abu Khdeir’s murderers are not “Jewish extremists.” They are the descendants and builders of a culture of hate and vengeance that is nurtured and fertilized by the guides of “the Jewish state": Those for whom every Arab is a bitter enemy, simply because they are Arab; those who were silent at the Beitar Jerusalem games when the team’s fans shouted “death to Arabs” at Arab players; those who call for cleansing the state of its Arab minority, or at least to drive them out of the homes and cities of the Jews. No less responsible for the murder are those who did not halt, with an iron hand, violence by Israeli soldiers against Palestinian civilians, and who failed to investigate complaints “due to lack of public interest.”

The term “Jewish extremists” actually seems more appropriate for the small Jewish minority that is still horrified by these acts of violence and murder. But they too recognize, unfortunately, that they belong to a vengeful, vindictive Jewish tribe whose license to perpetrate horrors is based on the horrors that were done to it.

The Israel Police was quick to label the murderers “Jewish extremists,” meaning they aren’t part of the herd, they are outliers, “wild weeds.” This is the police’s way of trying to justify a sin, to “make the vermin kosher.” But the vermin is huge, and many-legged. It has embraced the soldiers and other young Israelis who overran the social media networks with calls for revenge and with hatred for Arabs. The vermin was welcomed by Knesset members, rabbis and public figures who demanded revenge. Nor did it skip over the prime minister, who declared “Vengeance for the blood of a small child, Satan has not yet created.”

E.P.A. officials did not start working in earnest on the rule until fall 2013, when they held sessions around the country to hear from regulators, utilities and many others the Natural Resources Defense Council had by then been briefing for months. Many told the E.P.A. that they wanted to see an innovative plan like the one they had heard about from the council, even if they did not specifically name it as the group’s plan.

“They were the first out of the gate,” said Adam Kushner, a former top legal official at the E.P.A. “And the first out of the gate frames the debate.”

Academic research has found that generations do indeed have ideological identities. People are particularly shaped by events as they first become aware of the world, starting as young as 10 years old

The generation that came of age during the five presidential terms of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry Truman leaned Democratic for its entire life. So have those young liberals of the 1960s, who learned American politics through the glamour of John F. Kennedy. The babies of the late 1960s and early 1970s, who entered political consciousness during the Reagan years, lean Republican.

These identities are a more useful guide to American politics than the largely useless cliché about adults starting off liberal and slowly becoming more conservative. Like a broken clock, that cliché can seem accurate at times, mostly thanks to luck.

In just two months, we’d gone from making a combined $120,000 a year to making just $25,000 and leeching out funds to a mortgage we couldn’t afford. Our savings dwindled, then disappeared.

The most embarrassing part was how I felt about myself. How I had so internalized the message of what poor people should or should not have that I felt ashamed to be there, with that car, getting food. As if I were not allowed the food because of the car. As if I were a bad person.

what I learned there will never leave me. We didn’t deserve to be poor, any more than we deserved to be rich. Poverty is a circumstance, not a value judgment. I still have to remind myself sometimes that I was my harshest critic. That the judgment of the disadvantaged comes not just from conservative politicians and Internet trolls. It came from me, even as I was living it.

Often, Israel is judged by a quadruple standard. There is one standard for developing-world countries; a second for Europe; a third, more stringent standard, for the U.S., and a fourth, impossible, standard for Israel.

the truth is that I judge Israel by a higher standard than I judge other countries, precisely because it is a Jewish country. Jews gave the world the gift of ethical monotheism, and the idea that all people—not just kings—are created in the image of God. Judaism holds that Muhammad Abu Khdeir, and Tariq Khdeir, are created in the image of God, and therefore, to abuse them, to destroy them, is to desecrate God's name. Each time a Palestinian is abused in custody by Israeli authorities, those who commit the beating are violating the spirit and promise of their country.

For the first time perhaps, hope is not as much a characteristic of American feelings.

Andrew Kohut, who has polled for Gallup and the Pew Research Center for over four decades, calls the mood “chronic disillusionment.” He said that in this century we have had only three brief moments when a majority of Americans said they were satisfied with the way things were going: the month W. took office, right after the 9/11 attacks and the month we invaded Iraq.

Bush and Cheney were black and white, and after them, Americans wanted someone smart enough to get the nuances and deal with complexities. Now I think people are tired of complexity and they’re hungering for clarity, a simpler time. But that’s going to be hard to restore in the world today.”

slam, or at least modern reinterpretations of it, is at the core of some of the Arabs’ deep troubles. The faith’s claim, promoted by many of its leading lights, to combine spiritual and earthly authority, with no separation of mosque and state, has stunted the development of independent political institutions.

But religious extremism is a conduit for misery, not its fundamental cause (see article). While Islamic democracies elsewhere (such as Indonesia—see article) are doing fine, in the Arab world the very fabric of the state is weak.

Economic stagnation bred dissatisfaction. Monarchs and presidents-for-life defended themselves with secret police and goons. The mosque became a source of public services and one of the few places where people could gather and hear speeches. Islam was radicalised and the angry men who loathed their rulers came to hate the Western states that backed them. Meanwhile a vast number of the young grew restless because of unemployment.

While fewer Americans are going to the movies, it is a totally different story in many other parts of the world, where cinema is booming. Non-U.S. moviegoers accounted for about 70% of global box office receipts last year (which hit $35.9 billion) compared to about 63% in 2007.

Emerging economies are responsible for most of that growth, and there is plenty of room for more, because there are significantly fewer cinema screens per capita and lower ticket prices

But the emerging world enthusiasm for Hollywood films does not extend to comedies, or at least not relative to its love of action movies and animated films.

f you are a bank in Paris or Jakarta or São Paulo, you can’t really serve your clients unless you are able to connect them to the global market for dollars. And you can’t do that unless you are in good standing with United States regulators. And you will very much not be in good standing with them if there is evidence you facilitated financing of terrorism or governments that the United States considers global threats.

That’s one of the important reasons that United States-led economic sanctions against Sudan or Iran carry weight. Those countries cannot easily gain access to the global financial system by going to a bank in a more sympathetic country.

the potential rivals for this position have problems of their own. The euro is only a couple of years removed from an existential crisis.China is pushing to internationalize the renminbi, and while its currency is being used more for trade within Asia, it has a long way to go to become a truly global currency. (Among other things, China would need to develop a much deeper market for bonds denominated in its currency than now exists, and start allowing the freer transfer of capital into and out of the country.)

Clinton's remarks on Monday provide the latest evidence that she remains prone to military interventions of choice even when the likely outcome of intervening is unclear. 

it's hard to think of any instance where humility caused her to take a dovish position. As president, she would likely be a reflexive hawk.

What would I have her say instead? The Iraq War taught me my own limits, and the limits of all foreign-policy decision-makers, to accurately foresee the future. Even after studying decisions about war and peace from inside the White House during my husband's two terms, I didn't even come close to correctly forecasting the Iraq War. I underestimated the costs of the war in Iraq. I overestimated the benefits. I cannot promise that will be the last mistake that I'll make, but I've learned from it. I'll never make the same mistake. I've learned that a war of choice gone wrong does more damage to the United States than any other mistaken policy. So while the United States may well be forced to wage a war of necessity  in the future, whether to defend the nation after an attack or to prevent an imminent one, I'll never again favor a war if choice. If the consequences of foreign intervention are so unclear that experts are deeply divided, I will err on the side of nonintervention after that wise physicians' guidepost: "First do no harm." There are a lot of very smart people working at the highest levels of the U.S. government. So in a country like Syria, it's tempting to imagine that we can funnel weapons to the particular rebels that are most aligned with the values and interests of the United States. It's tempting to think that we can know the consequences and the possible unintended consequences of intervening in Syria. But Iraq taught me that of course we can't.

European banks, spotting a lucrative business opportunity that American rivals shunned, opened their doors to countries under sanctions and ultimately exposed their reputations to the stain of criminal cases.

The banks chose to cooperate, producing reams of records that laid bare a scheme to disguise how Bank Melli was funneling money into the United States. To avoid detection, the records showed, Credit Suisse and Lloyds falsified money-transfer paperwork, replacing Bank Melli’s name with their own.

The cases benefited from a trove of internal emails from Credit Suisse that showed how bank executives strategized ways to capture business from Iran once Lloyds left the market. If Credit Suisse did not act fast, the emails warned, it might lose out to other European banks.

trust, mediated by technology, is making a comeback, along with the paradigm of the village. It's what's motivating millions of people in tens of thousands of cities around the world to book lodging with semi-screened strangers through his service. Choose your buzzword: the sharing economy, the peer-to-peer economy, the trust economy. Whatever you call it, it's what's propelled not just Airbnb, but also new car services like Uber and Lyft and labor services like TaskRabbit.

the Internet moving into your neighborhood," Chesky said. "And what it really means is that people, for the first time, can become micro-entrepreneurs. They can actually build a reputation, and they can offer goods and services."

"At the most macro level, I think we're going to go back to the village, and cities will become communities again," he added. "I'm not saying they're not communities now, but I think that we'll have this real sensibility and everything will be small. You're not going to have big chain restaurants. We're starting to see farmers' markets, and small restaurants, and food trucks. But pretty soon, restaurants will be in people's living rooms."

email, long dismissed as a festering petri dish of marketing come-ons, has cleaned up its act. Gmail, in particular, has stamped out a lot of spam and segmented the inbox into personal, social and promotional streams that make email much less a mess than it used to be.

It makes sense. My personal digital hierarchy, which I assume is fairly common, goes like this: email first, because it is for and about me; social media next, because it is for and about me, my friends and professional peers; and finally, there is the anarchy of the web, which is about, well, everything.

With an email, there is a presumption of connection, of something personal, that makes it a good platform for publishers.

The Great Divide, a series in The New York Times for which I have served as moderator, has also presented a wide range of examples that undermine the notion that there are any truly fundamental laws of capitalism. The dynamics of the imperial capitalism of the 19th century needn’t apply in the democracies of the 21st.

We don’t need to have this much inequality in America.

Our current brand of capitalism is an ersatz capitalism.

The real lesson from Kansas is the enduring power of bad ideas, as long as those ideas serve the interests of the right people.

In 1998, in the first edition of his best-selling economics textbook, Harvard’s N. Gregory Mankiw — very much a Republican, and later chairman of George W. Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers — famously wrote about the damage done by “charlatans and cranks.” In particular, he highlighted the role of “a small group of economists” who “advised presidential candidate Ronald Reagan that an across-the-board cut in income tax rates would raise tax revenue.”

the Brownback tax cuts didn’t emerge out of thin air. They closely followed a blueprint laid out by the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC, which has also supported a series of economic studies purporting to show that tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy will promote rapid economic growth

the post-Cold War era hasn’t meant the triumph of one ideology; it destroyed the tendency to rely upon big historic visions of any sort. Lilla argues that we have slid into a debauched libertarianism. Nobody envisions the large sweep of events; we just go our own separate ways making individual choices.

now the nation is tired, distrustful, divided and withdrawing. Democratic vistas give way to laissez-faire fatalism: History has no shape. The dream of universal democracy seems naïve. National interest matters most.

This loss of faith is ruinous from any practical standpoint. The faith bound diverse Americans, reducing polarization. The faith gave elites a sense of historic responsibility and helped them resist the money and corruption that always licked at the political system.