History Readings

The real lesson from financial crises is that, at the pit of the crisis, you do what you have to do. You bail out the banks. You bail out the weak European governments. But, at the same time, you lock in policies that reinforce the fundamental link between effort and reward. And, as soon as the crisis passes, you move to repair the legitimacy of the system. That didn’t happen after the American financial crisis of 2008. The people who caused the crisis were never held responsible. There never was an exit strategy to unwind the gigantic debt buildup. The structural problems plaguing the economy remain unaddressed. As a result, the United States suffers from a horrible crisis of trust that is slowing growth, restricting government action and sending our politics off in strange directions.

At 8 a.m. Eastern time on Tuesday morning, scientists from CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, are scheduled to give a progress report on the search for the Higgs boson — infamously known as the “God particle” — whose discovery would vindicate the modern theory of how elementary particles get mass

no one thinks the Higgs is the final word about what underlies the Standard Model of particle physics, the theory that describes the most basic elements of matter and the forces through which they interact. Even if the Higgs boson is discovered, the question will still remain of why masses are what they are.

According to quantum field theory — the theory that combines quantum mechanics and special relativity — masses would be expected to be ten thousand trillion times bigger. Without some deeper ingredient, a fudge of that size would be required to make it all hang together. No particle physicist believes that.

Data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress show that more than 40 percent of the variation in average reading scores and 46 percent of the variation in average math scores across states is associated with variation in child poverty rates

No Child Left Behind required all schools to bring all students to high levels of achievement but took no note of the challenges that disadvantaged students face. The legislation did, to be sure, specify that subgroups — defined by income, minority status and proficiency in English — must meet the same achievement standard. But it did so only to make sure that schools did not ignore their disadvantaged students — not to help them address the challenges they carry with them into the classroom.

requiring all schools to meet the same high standards for all students, regardless of family background, will inevitably lead either to large numbers of failing schools or to a dramatic lowering of state standards. Both serve to discredit the public education system

As much as it pains me to say this: privacy is on its deathbed. I came to this sad realization recently when a stranger began leaving comments on photos I had uploaded to Instagram, the iPhone photo-sharing app

There it was: a full name. With that, I searched Google and before I knew it, I had this person’s phone number, home address and place of employment.Creepy, right? I even had a link to a running app that she uses that showed the path of her morning run. This took all of 10 minutes.

A friend who works in technology recently told me I would never be able to figure out her age online. She had gone to great lengths to hide it. It took me exactly two minutes.

“It’s amazing that this awakening of civic consciousness has affected the church as well, and not just lay people but clergy, too,” Sergei Chapnin, editor of the Journal of the Moscow Patriarchate, said last week, on the sidelines of a seminar about Russia’s historical identity

the reaction inside the church arose from disgust at official dishonesty surrounding the election. “A Christian has to protest against lies, especially lies to millions of people,

He said clergy members were speaking out because they saw vote-rigging and fraud as violations of the Ten Commandments.

Why are these other countries beating us if we spend so much more? The truth is that we may not be spending more

we broadened the scope of traditional health care industry analyses to include spending on social services, like rent subsidies, employment-training programs, unemployment benefits, old-age pensions, family support and other services that can extend and improve life.

We studied 10 years’ worth of data and found that if you counted the combined investment in health care and social services, the United States no longer spent the most money — far from it. In 2005, for example, the United States devoted only 29 percent of gross domestic product to health and social services combined, while countries like Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Denmark dedicated 33 percent to 38 percent of their G.D.P. to the combination. We came in 10th.

Newt Gingrich, who led the field of Republican presidential candidates last week, argued that the concept of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent is “un-American.” His rival Rick Perry, who led the Republican pack in September, answered a question about taxes and inequality by saying “I don’t care about that.”

This indifference is grounded in a proposition that has for decades dominated American debate over redistributive policies like steeper taxes for the rich: that inequality is an expected outcome of economic growth, and that efforts to tamp down inequality would slow growth down

As Mr. Gingrich put it, “You are not going to get job creation when you engage in class warfare because you have to attack the very people you hope will create jobs.”

“In Moscow, rising incomes correlate with respondents’ saying discontent is rising,” Mr. Dmitriyev wrote. Moscow and other cities, he wrote, are incubating a hostile population, especially of young men. “These are five million individuals dangerously concentrated within a 10-mile proximity around the Kremlin,

Authoritarian leaders who pursue effective economic policies become victims of their own success, with General Pinochet in Chile being a prime example. In Russia, after a decade-long oil boom, about a third of the population is now considered middle class.

The belief that the Civil War wasn’t for us was the result of the country’s long search for a narrative that could reconcile white people with each other, one that avoided what professional historians now know to be true: that one group of Americans attempted to raise a country wholly premised on property in Negroes, and that another group of Americans, including many Negroes, stopped them. In the popular mind, that demonstrable truth has been evaded in favor of a more comforting story of tragedy, failed compromise, and individual gallantry. For that more ennobling narrative, as for so much of American history, the fact of black people is a problem.

Honor is salvageable from a military defeat; much less so from an ideological defeat, and especially one so duly earned in defense of slavery in a country premised on liberty.

The fallen Confederacy’s chroniclers grasped this historiographic challenge and, immediately after the war, began erasing all evidence of the crime—that is to say, they began erasing black people—from the written record.

This, in sum, is the founding charter of the United States of Europe. Notice two problems however. First, it is not clear how the European Commission, Council, and Court can act in this way, policing a 23-member fiscal union that is not covered by any treaty. Second, the balanced-budget rule is nuts. As it stands, it’s a recipe for excessive rigidity in fiscal policy

In the past few months, incompetent leadership has brought the euro-zone economy, and with it the world economy, to the edge of a precipice strongly reminiscent of 1931. Then, as now, it proved impossible to arrive at sane debt restructurings for overburdened sovereigns. Then, as now, bank failures threatened to bring about a complete economic collapse. Then, as now, an excessively rigid monetary system (then the gold standard, now the euro) served to worsen the situation.

For some time it has been quite obvious that the only way to save the monetary union is to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s. That means, first, massive quantitative easing (bond purchases) by the European Central Bank to bring down the interest rates (yields) currently being paid by the Mediterranean governments; second, restructuring to reduce the absolute debt burdens of these governments; third, the creation of a new fiscal mechanism that transfers resources on a regular basis from the core to the periphery; and finally the recapitalization of the ailing banks of the euro zone.

protesters have succeeded in implanting “We are the 99 percent,” referring to the vast majority of Americans (and its implied opposite, “You are the one percent,” the tiny proportion who, some estimates say, control 40 percent of the nation’s wealth), into the cultural and political lexicon.

Easily grasped in its simplicity and Twitter-friendly in its brevity, the slogan has practically dared listeners to pick a side.

Perhaps most important for the movement, there was a sevenfold increase in Google searches for the term “99 percent” between Sept

The only way our business works is if we can track what you do and sell that information to advertisers. Did you honestly not realize that?

You are not our customer. You are the product that we sell. For us to say we’re going to protect you is like the poultry industry promising to create more humane living conditions for chickens.

We will never, ever stop trying to pry data out of you. How could we? We’re a business. We’re doing this to make money.