History Readings

He has spent the last four years writing a book that he hopes will forever change the way we view the superrich’s role in our society. “Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You’ve Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong,” to be published in hardcover next month by Portfolio, aggressively argues that the enormous and growing income inequality in the United States is not a sign that the system is rigged. On the contrary, Conard writes, it is a sign that our economy is working. And if we had a little more of it, then everyone, particularly the 99 percent, would be better off.

most Americans don’t know how the economy really works — that the superrich spend only a small portion of their wealth on personal comforts; most of their money is invested in productive businesses that make life better for everyone. “Most citizens are consumers, not investors,” he told me during one of our long, occasionally contentious conversations. “They don’t recognize the benefits to consumers that come from investment.”

Dean Baker, a prominent progressive economist with the Center for Economic and Policy Research, says that most economists believe society often benefits from investments by the wealthy. Baker estimates the ratio is 5 to 1, meaning that for every dollar an investor earns, the public receives the equivalent of $5 of value

The euro zone has Greece. The United States has Mississippi. Or Missouri.

clever graph which shows fiscal transfers (don't worry, that's just another word for money) between the rich California-Connecticut-Illinois-New Jersey-New York quintuple and poorer states like Tennessee. If similar, seamless transfers existed in the EU, the rich north would have to send to Portugal and Greece at least an additional 30 cents for every dollar they paid in taxes, year after year after year.

When you hear commentators say, "the euro zone must begin to transition toward a fiscal union," what they are saying, in human-speak, is that the Europe needs to be more like the United States, with balanced budget laws for its individual members and seamless fiscal transfers from the rich countries to the poor, to protect the indigent, old, and sick, no matter where they reside.The Germans call this sort of thing "a permanent bailout." We just call it "Missouri."

Apparently, all right-minded people want the "if-you-want-your-taxes-raised-why-don't-you-send-the-IRS-a-bigger-cheque" meme finally dead and buried. All right, but before we bury it let's see if we can understand it. I think it's childishly simple once you recognize that two separate questions are involved. Would IRS donations by Warren Buffett and Stephen King make the tax code fairer? No. Would IRS donations by Warren Buffett and Stephen King help to remedy the inequity they say the tax code causes? Yes. In other words, Warren Buffett and Stephen King should write generous checks to the IRS and not shut up, but keep demanding the fairer system they say they want.

To discuss the wider cultural implications of Seau's death, the Saints' scandal, and football's ongoing identity crisis, The Atlantic spoke with documentary filmmaker Sean Pamphilon. He recently released audio of former New Orleans defensive coordinator Gregg Williams imploring his players to injure opponents and is working on a film, The United States of Football, which explores the sport's dark, beloved place in America society.

What is The United States of Football about? Why are you making it? It's a cultural examination of football from pee-wee to the pros. It's about the motivation for playing and enjoying the sport. The escapism. The violence, for sure—it feeds something in our culture. There's a reason why baseball isn't the top sport anymore. It's too slow. People aren't getting the shit knocked out of them. We're a very aggressive culture.

I started working on it because I realized I was basically training my son to play football. Playing in the park all the time. We had this one patch of grass in a park in Brooklyn that was our field. It was our special place. In 2004, I was interviewing Kyle Turley for Run Ricky Run. He said to me, "If you have a kid, don't let him play football. Let him play any other sport." He was adamant about that. My son was six at the time. We kept playing in the park. Five years later, I read an article about Turley having a seizure. I had heard of CTE before. It never stuck with me. But after reading about Kyle, it did. I felt a personal connection with him. Because of his issues, I was becoming more interested in the health issues that players were having. And I had to decide: Did I still want my son to play football?

Abu Marzook's answers to my questions only reinforced my feelings. He stressed that, should peace talks someday restart, any agreement reached between Israel and the Palestinian Authority would be subject to far-reaching changes if Hamas ever came to power in a democratic Palestinian state. He said that his group would view an agreement -- even one ratified by a referendum of all Palestinians -- as a hudna, or armed truce, rather than as a peace treaty. In power, Hamas would feel free to shift away from those provisions of the agreement that define it as a peace treaty, he said, and move instead toward a relationship or armed truce. "We will not recognize Israel as a state," he said emphatically

While it's understandable President Obama wants to refute the idea that he's America's declinist-in-chief -- and it is a line of attack from Mitt Romney -- I do think it means that we're going to have a 2012 election where on both sides, both candidates will start on a false premise: that relative economic decline is simply to be ignored or dismissed. And I'd describe that as a kind of intellectual ostrich position.

What is the other type of decline? EL: The other type is the more important one. It is about how America is responding to these challenges, which includes actions and inactions that have exacerbated some of the trends that we associate with this relative decline. These include the impact of globalization on the American economy and the impact of really exponential changes in technology on how Middle America lives and works. Washington's reaction to date has only deepened America's problems by turning this into a more pronounced relative decline than it needs to be.

there's been much less revisiting of the assumptions in the preceding two or three decades before the Lehman Brothers collapse than you would have expected in 2008. I do see some stirrings now of questioning whether, in a world where there is a lot of mercantilism -- or at least where there are a lot of often very effective governments integrated with their private sectors to compete with the United States and others -- whether it is sensible for America to continue to ignore those lessons and those examples not just from Asia, but from places like Germany, Brazil, and Canada. The governments in these countries can often play a constructive role in helping their private sectors compete. But by and large, the preponderance of economists and the intellectual elite in America still hews toward the model that led up to the financial crisis. You could say America has lost a paradigm and not yet found a new one.

Lenin’s seizures in the hours and days before he died are a puzzle and perhaps historically significant. Severe seizures, Dr. Vinters said in an interview before the conference, are “quite unusual in a stroke patient.” But, he added, “almost any poison can cause seizures.”

Dr. Lurie concurred on Friday, telling the conference that poison was in his opinion the most likely immediate cause of Lenin’s death. The most likely perpetrator? Stalin, who saw Lenin as his main obstacle to taking over the Soviet Union and wanted to get rid of him.

Dr. Vinters believes that sky-high cholesterol leading to a stroke was the main cause of Lenin’s death. But he said there is one other puzzling aspect of the story. Although toxicology studies were done on others in Russia, there was an order that no toxicology be done on Lenin’s tissues.

There are no secrets online. That emotional e-mail you sent to your ex, the illness you searched for in a fit of hypochondria, those hours spent watching kitten videos (you can take that as a euphemism if the kitten fits) — can all be gathered to create a defining profile of you.

Your information can then be stored, analyzed, indexed and sold as a commodity to data brokers who in turn might sell it to advertisers, employers, health insurers or credit rating agencies.

you can take steps to do the technological equivalent of throwing on a pair of boxers and a T-shirt. Some of these measures are quite easy and many are free.

A criminal court judge in Manhattan convicted all the defendants in one of the biggest group trials in recent years over a political protest in the city. The trial drew additional attention for counting the civil rights advocate Cornel West among the defendants. They were arrested Oct. 21 while standing in front of a police station door to protest the stopping, questioning and sometimes frisking of hundreds of thousands of people annually.

Mr. West said Friday that the court “did justice.” He added, “I disagree, but that is what democracy is all about.”

Convicted of a violation, he and 18 of the others were sentenced to time served, the relatively brief period they were in custody after their arrests.

Today, Washington is marked by a combination of bitter partisanship and intellectual confusion — and both are, I would argue, largely the result of extreme income inequality.

For the past century, political polarization has closely tracked income inequality, and there’s every reason to believe that the relationship is causal. Specifically, money buys power, and the increasing wealth of a tiny minority has effectively bought the allegiance of one of our two major political parties, in the process destroying any prospect for cooperation.

Disputes in economics used to be bounded by a shared understanding of the evidence, creating a broad range of agreement about economic policy. To take the most prominent example, Milton Friedman may have opposed fiscal activism, but he very much supported monetary activism to fight deep economic slumps, to an extent that would have put him well to the left of center in many current debates.

We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than 40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.

The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition.

When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the country’s challenges.

The surprise to Dr. Clapham was how closely the findings from the Great Dying matched today’s trends in ocean chemistry. High concentrations of carbon-based gases in the atmosphere are leading to warming, rapid acidification and low-oxygen dead zones in the oceans.

he and Dr. Langdon noted that carbon was being injected into the atmosphere today far faster than during the Permian extinction. As Dr. Knoll put it, “Today, humans turn out to be every bit as good as volcanoes at putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.”

“A nation has the right to determine what it should do to defend itself,” Mr. Olmert said at a conference held in a Manhattan hotel by The Jerusalem Post. “But when at the same time we ask the United States and other countries to provide us with the means to do it, no one is entirely independent to act, irrespective of the positions and attitudes and policies of other countries.”

Mr. Olmert said he was expressing legitimate concerns shared by most people in the Israeli security establishment, “present and past,” including many who have not spoken publicly.

Mr. Olmert warned that Mr. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, having likened Iran to Nazi Germany, may find themselves unable to back down from military action. “They talk too much, they talk too loud,” he said in the interview. “They are creating an atmosphere and a momentum that may go out of their control.

With declining profits and grueling 70-hour work weeks, law has long since left behind its genteel heyday as a fulfilling and patrician lifestyle. The legal profession is just one of many undergoing seismic changes in the face of transformational technologies and new economic realities. No doubt many enterprising young lawyers will find creative ways of dealing with these changes, but in the meantime, we wish the 45,000 students graduating law school this year the best of luck.

In Japan, birthrates are now so low and life expectancy so great that the nation will soon have a demographic profile that matches that of the American retirement community of Palm Springs

the overall Japanese population is likely to decline by 20 percent, with grim consequences for an already-stagnant economy and an already-strained safety net.

. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and there were rashes of Internet-enabled group suicides in the last decade.