History Readings

Some of their pain comes from abroad. Brazil’s main trading partners are slowing (China), stagnant (the euro area) or tanking (Argentina). Not only are export volumes down; the prices of things Brazil sells—iron ore, petroleum, sugar and soyabeans—are dropping as global demand falters.

Both face stagflation: bubbly prices coupled with growth rates likely to be below 1% this year.

There could be worse to come. The drop in commodity prices looks set to last. Meanwhile, in order to crimp inflation and stem the slide in their currencies the central banks in both countries raised their rates last month: they stand at 11.25% in Brazil and 9.5% in Russia. At the same time, worried finance ministries are keen to bolster their books. In Brazil, fuel-tax hikes are being mooted, and tax breaks on car purchases may be scrapped.

This frugality will hurt. Banks could prove vulnerable as public-sector spending cuts hit incomes and high interest rates make loans hard to service.

Even optimists think the pair will be lucky to grow in 2015. Pessimists see tumbling currencies, bond-market routs and even bank runs.

He has opted for confrontation with the West as the basis for Russian development and the consolidation of his own power.

It is the end of a Western illusion.

The market, i.e., globalization, is tying economies more tightly together than ever before, making our workers, investors and markets much more interdependent and exposed to global trends, without walls to protect them.

the rapid growth of carbon in our atmosphere and environmental degradation and deforestation because of population growth on earth — the only home we have — are destabilizing Mother Nature’s ecosystems faster.

n sum, we’re in the middle of three “climate changes” at once: one digital, one ecological, one geo-economical. That’s why strong states are being stressed, weak ones are blowing up and Americans are feeling anxious that no one has a quick fix to ease their anxiety. And they’re right.

The only fix involves big, hard things that can only be built together over time: resilient infrastructure, affordable health care, more start-ups and lifelong learning opportunities for new jobs, immigration policies that attract talent, sustainable environments, manageable debt and governing institutions adapted to the new speed.

we’re not going to respond to the big global issues until they hit the economy. It’s hard to imagine a stronger example than a city of 20 million people running out of water. Yet despite the clear threat, the main response is ‘we hope it rains.’ Why such denial? Because the implications of acceptance are so significant, and we know in our hearts there’s no going back once you end denial. It would demand that the country face up to the urgency of reversing rather than slowing deforestation” and “the need to prepare the country for the risks that a changing climate presents.”

This method assumes that mobilization is more important than persuasion; that it is more important to target your likely supporters than to try to reframe debates or persuade the whole country.

Obviously demography matters a lot. But, at heart, politics is a personal enterprise. Voters are looking for quality of leadership, character, vision and solidarity that defies quantification. Candidates like Daniel Patrick Moynihan or Jerry Brown can arouse great loyalty in ways that are impossible to predict.

Another victim was President Obama. His 2012 campaign was legendary from an analytic point of view, and, of course, it was victorious. But it lacked a policy agenda and produced no mandate. Without a compelling agenda, the administration has projected an image of reactive drift and lost public confidence.

other victims include the Democratic senators in red states. Winning in a state that the other party dominates is a personal enterprise. It requires an ineffable individual connection with voters. It requires an idiosyncratic approach to issues. By eclipsing individual quirks with generic messages, the data-driven style deprives outnumbered candidates of precisely what they need to survive.

It puts the spotlight on slight differences across the socio-economic spectrum and takes the spotlight off the power of events to reframe the whole mood and landscape.

In the midst of this scuffling economy, voters are thinking as Americans and not as members of a niche. They’re asking: What can be done to kick-start America? They’re not asking: How can I guarantee affordable contraception?

The more you look at political history, the more you see that political imagination is the rarest and most valuable of qualities. Voters don’t always know what they want, but they look to leaders to jump ahead of the current moment and provide visions they haven’t thought of.

Some politicians, like F.D.R. or Ronald Reagan, can reframe debates and envision coalitions that don’t exist. Their visions emerge out of unique life experiences, which are unusual but have broad appeal. They build trust not through a few targeted messages but by fully embodying a moment and a people. They often don’t pander to existing identities but arouse different identities.

Data-driven candidates sacrifice their own souls. Instead of being inner-directed leaders driven by their own beliefs, they become outer-directed pleasers driven by incomplete numbers.

But the companies, saying they are responding to demand from their users, show no signs of backing down. Recently the chief executive of Apple, Tim Cook, said governments that want data should deal with the users of the technology, not with the providers of the hardware and services.

Mr. Hannigan, in an opinion article on Tuesday in The Financial Times, singled out the Islamic State, the radical group also known as ISIS and ISIL, as one “whose members have grown up on the Internet” and are “exploiting the power of the web to create a jihadi threat with near-global reach.”

Increasingly encrypted products and services are “a challenge,” Admiral Rogers said. “And we’ll deal with it.”But he also pushed for better sharing of data between the intelligence community and private technology companies. Moves to set up a formal information-sharing system have stalled in Congress in the face of objections from the private sector.

But Mr. Hannigan’s comments, calling for “a new deal between democratic governments and the technology companies in the area of protecting our citizens,” seemed to urge a further review of the balance between civil liberties and national security. Britain, like other European nations, has been increasingly concerned about online recruitment of potential fighters from within its borders by radical groups.

Facebook said in a company blog post that requests by governments for user information were rising steadily, by about a quarter in the first half of the year over the second half of last year.“In the first six months of 2014, governments around the world made 34,946 requests for data,” the post said. “During the same time, the amount of content restricted because of local laws increased about 19 percent.”

Twitter received more than 2,000 requests for information about user accounts from roughly 50 countries in the first six months of 2014, according to a company statement. The number of requests represented a 46 percent increase compared with the same period last year, and more than 60 percent of the requests came from the United States government.

In the past, Al Qaeda and its affiliates, which have broken with the Islamic State, “saw the Internet as a place to disseminate material anonymously or meet in ‘dark spaces,’ ” Mr. Hannigan wrote, while the Islamic State “has embraced the web as a noisy channel in which to promote itself, intimidate people and radicalize new recruits.”The opinion article by Mr. Hannigan referred specifically to messaging and social media sites and apps such as Twitter, Facebook and WhatsApp.“There is no need for today’s would-be jihadis to seek out restricted websites with secret passwords: They can follow other young people posting their adventures in Syria as they would anywhere else,” he wrote.

“Before Uber was a thing, I would rarely go to Hollywood,” said Drew Heitzler, an artist who lives in Venice, a potentially treacherous drive away. “The prospect of going to Hollywood on a weekend night, if I was invited to a party or an art event, it just wouldn’t happen. I would just stay home.”

Taxis here were often unreliable, he added, but ride shares are always just a swipe away.

“There’s a lot of New Yorkers here, and they’re saying it’s almost like New York.”

Once, only the privileged few, the studio bosses and pampered starlets, could afford to have a chauffeur and a waiting car to transport them around sprawling Los Angeles. Now anyone with a credit card can enjoy that freedom.

“Uber and Lyft have made it much more affordable, and encouraged people to venture out of their neighborhoods, and to explore.”

That is especially true of downtown Los Angeles, which is enjoying the double whammy of a recent cultural resurgence — partly bolstered by the Ace, which opened its hotel and performance space in a historic 1920s movie palace in January — and the car services that deliver once-reluctant visitors. Along with Santa Monica and West Hollywood, it is the area with the highest ridership, according to an Uber representative, though the company refused to release specific figures.

A night out in Los Angeles used to involve negotiating parking, beating traffic and picking a designated driver. Excursions from one end to the other — say, from the oceanfront city of Santa Monica to the trendy Silver Lake neighborhood on the eastern side — had to be planned and timed with military precision, lest they spiral into a three-hour commute. More often than not, they were simply avoided.

Grand Central Market, a food hall from 1917, has lately turned Smorgasburg-y; on weekends, preppily dressed crowds wait patiently for sandwiches from Eggslut. Outside, the street is blocked off for pedestrians, with cafe tables and umbrellas, and nearby is a linger-worthy bookstore and a retro barbershop with shuffleboard. Along Broadway, between discount stores and pupusa stands, are boutiques like OAK NYC and Acne Studios, the Swedish fashion label that opened a giant store there this fall.

“I find myself going down there a lot and taking friends that are coming to visit, because there’s so much cool stuff to do,” s

Ride sharing, some analysts say, has become a viable alternative to owning a car: between the cost of gas, insurance, garages and valet tips, it’s often more economical to get a lift in a professional’s Toyota than to drive solo in your own, and that’s without factoring in the mental cost of sitting in gridlock on Interstate 405.

A short ride through downtown in UberX, the company’s lower-priced service, introduced here last spring, can cost as little as $4, while parking lots charge $5 for 15 minutes.

In a nod to the city’s continued obsession with the status ride, the company recently implemented, in Los Angeles and Orange County only, UberPlus, with a fleet of BMWs and other luxury vehicles. Even with ride shares, what you pull up in matters.

This shoe falling in the public psyche – a sense that we are in a deep structural impasse for the middle class, rather than a temporary recessionary hit – means a profound disillusionment with the future. And the fact that neither party seems to have a workable answer to this problem intensifies the sense of drift.

The emergence of ISIS has dimmed that hope as well. It does two things at once: it calls into question whether our departure from Iraq can be sustained, and it presents the threat of Jihadist terror as once again real and imminent. So ISIS is a reminder of the worst of 9/11 and the worst of Iraq.

The last great triumph of the US – the end of the Cold War, the liberation of Central Europe, the emergence of a democratic Russia – is now revealed as something more complicated. If Americans thought that the days were long gone that they had to worry about Russian military power, they’ve been disabused of that fact this past year.

the other recent success: getting out of Iraq and defeating al Qaeda. For many of us, this was one of Obama’s greatest achievements: to cauterize the catastrophe of the Iraq War, to decimate al Qaeda’s forces in Af-Pak, and to enable us to move forward toward a more normal world.

Events overseas have had another, deeply depressing effect.

So the core narrative of the Obama presidency – rescuing us from a second Great Depression and extricating us from a doomed strategy in response to Jihadism – has been eclipsed by events. And that’s why Obama has lost the thread. He has lost the clear story-line that defined his presidency.

You can argue, and I would, that Obama is not really responsible for the events behind this narrative-collapse.

But most Americans are not going to parse these trends and events and come to some nuanced view. They see the economy as still punishing, Jihadist terror just as frightening, and they are increasingly unable to avoid the fact that we lost – repeat, lost – the Iraq War. They’re also aware that the US, after Iraq, simply has historically low leverage and power in the world at large, as the near-uselessness of our massive military in shaping the world as we would like has been exposed in the deserts of Iraq and mountains of Afghanistan. Now throw in a big bucket of Ebola, and what on earth is there to be cheerful about?

And who else do you hold responsible if not the president?

They want to create a Carter-like narrative that can bring down the Democrats and turn the Obama presidency into an asterisk. But the difference between now and the late 1970s is that Obama is not a Carter and the GOP have no Reagan, or, more importantly, no persuasive critique of Obama that is supplemented by a viable alternative policy agenda that isn’t just a warmed-over version of the 1980s.

The future as yet seems to contain no new or rallying figure to chart a different course. Ever-greater gridlock seems the likeliest result of the mid-terms; polarization continues to deepen geographically and on-line

the Democrats have only an exhausted, conventional dynasty to offer in 2016; and the Republicans either have dangerous demagogues, like Christie or Cruz, or lightweights, like Walker or Rubio or Paul, or, even another fricking Bush.

it is not too late for Obama to lead the way, to construct a new narrative that is as honest and as realist as it is, beneath it all, optimistic. It’s a hard task – but since his likeliest successors are failing to do so, he has as good a shot as any. In these circumstances, treating the last two years of a presidency as irrelevant could not be more wrong. They could, with the right policies and the right message, be the most relevant of them all.

Mr. Erdogan offered an assessment appealing to his religious Sunni Muslim base — and echoed by militants with the Islamic State — that the Middle East crisis stems from the actions of the British and French after World War I, and the borders drawn between Iraq and Syria under the Sykes-Picot pact. Mr. Erdogan invoked Sykes-Picot saying, “each conflict in this region has been designed a century ago.” He suggested a new plot was underway, and that “journalists, religious men, writers and terrorists” were the collective reincarnation of T.E. Lawrence, the British diplomat and spy immortalized in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia.”

Mr. Erdogan has partly consolidated his power by purging thousands of police officers, prosecutors and judges who he believed were behind the corruption probe. He accused those people of being followers of the Muslim preacher Fethullah Gulen, who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania and who once was an important ally to Mr. Erdogan. His victory over Mr. Gulen in the power struggle that ensued has largely erased a moderate, Western-leaning Islamic voice from the Turkish governing elite

“For Tayyip Erdogan, like the Muslim Brotherhood and Muslim movements everywhere, the problems of the Muslim world are because of the West,” said Rusen Cakir, a scholar of Islamist movements who lives in Istanbul.For Mr. Gulen, he said, “the problems for the Muslim world are because of Muslims themselves.”

Suat Kiniklioglu, a former lawmaker with Mr. Erdogan’s party who is now an outspoken critic, said the speech referring to Sykes-Picot demonstrated “how much Erdogan detests Western powers operating in the region.”Omer Taspinar, a scholar on Turkey at the Brookings Institution, said: “The Lawrence of Arabia speech was a part of this act — to show how the borders of the Middle East were drawn up by imperialists and how we are face to face with a new Western agenda.”

This deep-seated view that the problems of the Middle East can be explained by Western actions over the past century, combined with a measure of ambivalence among Turkish religious conservatives who form the core of his constituency about joining the West in a fight against Sunnis, help explain Mr. Erdogan’s reluctance to take a stronger role in the United States-led military coalition.

This artificial intelligence breakthrough, he argues, is being driven by cheap parallel computation technologies, big data collection and better algorithms. The upshot is clear, “The business plans of the next 10,000 start-ups are easy to forecast: Take X and add A.I.”

Advances in artificial intelligence will accelerate this centralizing trend. That’s because A.I. companies will be able to reap the rewards of network effects. The bigger their network and the more data they collect, the more effective and attractive they become.

The Internet has created a long tail, but almost all the revenue and power is among the small elite at the head.

in 2001, the top 10 websites accounted for 31 percent of all U.S. page views, but, by 2010, they accounted for 75 percent of them.

As a result, our A.I. future is likely to be ruled by an oligarchy of two or three large, general-purpose cloud-based commercial intelligences.”

In the age of smart machines, we’re not human because we have big brains. We’re human because we have social skills, emotional capacities and moral intuitions.

The second implication is philosophical. A.I. will redefine what it means to be human. Our identity as humans is shaped by what machines and other animals can’t do

For the last few centuries, reason was seen as the ultimate human faculty. But now machines are better at many of the tasks we associate with thinking — like playing chess, winning at Jeopardy, and doing math.

On the other hand, machines cannot beat us at the things we do without conscious thinking: developing tastes and affections, mimicking each other and building emotional attachments, experiencing imaginative breakthroughs, forming moral sentiments.

engineers at a few gigantic companies will have vast-though-hidden power to shape how data are collected and framed, to harvest huge amounts of information, to build the frameworks through which the rest of us make decisions and to steer our choices. If you think this power will be used for entirely benign ends, then you have not read enough history.

I could paint two divergent A.I. futures, one deeply humanistic, and one soullessly utilitarian.

In the humanistic one, machines liberate us from mental drudgery so we can focus on higher and happier things. In this future, differences in innate I.Q. are less important. Everybody has Google on their phones so having a great memory or the ability to calculate with big numbers doesn’t help as much.

In this future, there is increasing emphasis on personal and moral faculties: being likable, industrious, trustworthy and affectionate. People are evaluated more on these traits, which supplement machine thinking, and not the rote ones that duplicate it

In the cold, utilitarian future, on the other hand, people become less idiosyncratic. If the choice architecture behind many decisions is based on big data from vast crowds, everybody follows the prompts and chooses to be like each other. The machine prompts us to consume what is popular, the things that are easy and mentally undemanding.

More recently, the government has grown skeptical of the argument that some banks are simply too big to charge, an argument that Sullivan & Cromwell often employs for its clients

The investigations, the people said, also unearthed emails showing that PricewaterhouseCoopers changed the report not only at the suggestion of the bank, but also at the behest of lawyers working on the bank’s behalf. Like many banks caught in the government’s cross hairs, the Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi turned to Sullivan & Cromwell, an elite law firm as woven into the fabric of Wall Street as the banks it represents.

When punishing banks, prosecutors have favored so-called deferred-prosecution agreements, which suspend charges in exchange for the bank’s paying a fine and promising to behave. Several giant banks have reached multiple deferred or nonprosecution agreements in a short span, fueling concerns that the deals amount to little more than a slap on the wrist and enable a pattern of Wall Street recidivism.

Not every bank will have to plead guilty in future cases. Prosecutors still see benefits from deferred-prosecution agreements, which can require banks to install independent monitors and more broadly overhaul their practices than in the event of a guilty plea.

Since 2001, at least eight big banks have committed further offenses after receiving an initial deferred-prosecution agreement, according to data assembled by Brandon L. Garrett, a University of Virginia law school professor and author of the book, “Too Big to Jail: How Prosecutors Compromise With Corporations.”

Regulators and prosecutors blame a culture that prioritizes profit over compliance. And as banks have grown larger, and more international, illegality can stop in one unit of a bank even as it flourishes in another.

It didn’t take long for concerns to arise. Just weeks after the bank settled in late 2012, its chairman appeared to violate a provision of the deal that forbade Standard Chartered executives from issuing “any public statement contradicting the acceptance of responsibility.” In a conference call, the chairman referred to the illicit transactions as “clerical errors” — comments he later retracted.