History Readings

For two weeks, the mysteriously well-armed, professional gunmen known as “green men” have seized Ukrainian government sites in town after town, igniting a brush fire of separatist unrest across eastern Ukraine. Strenuous denials from the Kremlin have closely followed each accusation by Ukrainian officials that the world was witnessing a stealthy invasion by Russian forces.Now, photographs and descriptions from eastern Ukraine endorsed by the Obama administration on Sunday suggest that many of the green men are indeed Russian military and intelligence forces — equipped in the same fashion as Russian special operations troops involved in annexing the Crimea region in February.

The question of Russia’s role in eastern Ukraine has a critical bearing on the agreement reached Thursday in Geneva among Russian, Ukrainian, American and European diplomats to ease the crisis. American officials have said that Russia would be held responsible for ensuring that the Ukrainian government buildings were vacated, and that it could face new sanctions if the terms were not met.

The Kremlin insists that Russian forces are in no way involved, and that Mr. Strelkov does not even exist, at least not as a Russian operative sent to Ukraine with orders to stir up trouble. “It’s all nonsense,” President Vladimir V. Putin said Thursday during a four-hour question-and-answer session on Russian television. “There are no Russian units, special services or instructors in the east of Ukraine.” Pro-Russian activists who have seized government buildings in at least 10 towns across eastern Ukraine also deny getting help from professional Russian soldiers or intelligence agents.But masking the identity of its forces, and clouding the possibilities for international denunciation, is a central part of the Russian strategy, developed over years of conflict in the former Soviet sphere, Ukrainian and American officials say.

When John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin wanted to put Moses as a central figure on the Great Seal of the United States, they were not celebrating him as a liberator, but as a re-binder. It wasn’t just that he led the Israelites out of one set of unjust laws. It was that he re-bound them with another set of laws. Liberating to freedom is the easy part. Re-binding with just order and accepted compulsion is the hard part.

when you are creating a social order, the first people who need to be bound down are the leaders themselves.

Moses was to exemplify the quality of “anivut.” Anivut, Rabbi Norman Lamm once wrote, “means a soft answer to a harsh challenge; silence in the face of abuse; graciousness when receiving honor; dignity in response to humiliation; restraint in the presence of provocation; forbearance and quiet calm when confronted with calumny and carping criticism.”

A recent report on the suburb-dotted New York counties of Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk, based on United States census data, found that those young people seem to be lingering longer in New York City, sometimes forsaking suburban life entirely.

Since 2000, Westchester, Nassau and Suffolk have experienced a drop in the number of 25- to 44-year-olds, with the declines particularly sharp in more affluent communities. Between 2000 and 2011, Rye, for example, had a 63 percent decrease in 25- to 34-year-old residents and a 16 percent decrease in 35- to 44-year-olds.

The greatest population losses, he said, were in “the least diverse communities with the most expensive housing, which happen also to be those that have almost no affordable multifamily housing.”

“Blood has been spilled in Ukraine again,” wrote Mr. Medvedev, once favored in the West for playing good cop to the hard-boiled president, Vladimir V. Putin. “The threat of civil war looms.”

It is an extraordinary propaganda campaign that political analysts say reflects a new brazenness on the part of Russian officials. And in recent days, it has largely succeeded — at least for Russia’s domestic audience — in painting a picture of chaos and danger in eastern Ukraine, although it was pro-Russian forces themselves who created it by seizing public buildings and setting up roadblocks.

In a report released Tuesday, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said that threats to ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine, cited repeatedly by Russian officials and in the Russian news media as a potential rationale for Russian military action, were exaggerated and that some participants in the protests in the region came from Russia.

Even dual-income professional couples are being priced out of the walkable urban-core neighborhoods where many of them want to live. Stuart Kennedy, 29, a senior program officer at a nonprofit group, said he and his girlfriend, a lawyer, will be losing their $2,300 a month rental house in Buena Vista in June. Since they found the place a year ago, rents in the area have increased sharply.

But demand has shown no signs of slackening. And as long as there are plenty of upper-income renters looking for apartments, there is little incentive to build anything other than expensive units. As a result, there are in effect two separate rental markets that are so far apart in price that they have little impact on each other. In one extreme case, a glut of new luxury apartments in Washington has pushed high-end rents down, even while midrange rents continue to rise.

“Increasing the supply is not going to increase the number of affordable units; that is a complete and utter fallacy,” said Jaimie Ross, the president of the Florida Housing Coalition. “People say if there really was a great need, the market would provide it; the market would correct itself. Well, the market has never corrected itself and it’s only getting worse.”

society is devoting an ever-growing share of its resources to financial wheeling and dealing, while getting little or nothing in return.

How much waste are we talking about? A paper by Thomas Philippon of New York University puts it at several hundred billion dollars a year.

the share of G.D.P. accruing to bankers, traders, and so on has nearly doubled since 1980, when we started dismantling the system of financial regulation created as a response to the Great Depression.

y the end, nightly attendance at the 2,500-seat Civic Theater here — the opera did not have its own hall — had fallen below 70 percent, even with seats discounted to fill the house. Ticket sales dropped to 34,674 last year from 41,355 in 2010.

“Even if we sold out, the tickets are only covering 38 percent of the cost,” Ms. Cohn said. “Our donors are passing away; I don’t know if people are not being raised with opera in the United States any longer, but we are not selling out the operas anymore. Not even close.”

the times also called for a leader who could subdue the vast political and administrative forces arrayed against change—for someone with the strategic and tactical instincts to overcome the most-entrenched opponents, and the courage to decide instantly, in a moment of great uncertainty and doubt, to throw his full weight behind progress. The civil-rights movement had the extraordinary figure of Lyndon Johnson.

Days after Kennedy’s murder, Johnson displayed the type of leadership on civil rights that his predecessor lacked and that the other branches could not possibly match. He made the bold and exceedingly risky decision to champion the stalled civil-rights bill. It was a pivotal moment: without Johnson, a strong bill would not have passed. Caro writes that during a searching late-night conversation that lasted into the morning of November 27, when somebody tried to persuade Johnson not to waste his time or capital on the lost cause of civil rights, the president replied, “Well, what the hell’s the presidency for?” He grasped the unique possibilities of the moment and saw how to leverage the nation’s grief by tying Kennedy’s legacy to the fight against inequality.

The best hope of moving the civil-rights bill from the House Rules Committee—whose segregationist chairman, Howard Smith of Virginia, had no intention of relinquishing it—was a procedure called a “discharge petition.” If a majority of House members sign a discharge petition, a bill is taken from the committee, to the chagrin of its chairman. Johnson made the petition his own personal crusade

Mr. Muzychko’s family, friends and former comrades in Right Sector, a coalition of once-fringe Ukrainian nationalist groups, believe that he was killed in order to silence an uncompromising rebel who wanted to oust not only Mr. Yanukovych, but an entire class of politicians and civil servants he viewed as irredeemably corrupt.

“This is an unfinished revolution and he wanted to carry it through to its logical conclusion,” said Yuriy Shukhevych, a veteran Ukrainian nationalist leader whose father, Roman, commanded the Ukrainian Insurgent Army against the Polish and Soviet authorities in the 1930s and ’40s. Mr. Muzychko’s death, said Mr. Shukhevych, who spent more than three decades in Soviet prisons and labor camps, was a “pre-ordered hit” orchestrated by establishment forces fearful of a thorough break with the past and who were “afraid of him because he was so determined and so decisive.”

the most worrisome blow by far is a scathing verdict on Los Angeles’s civic health that was delivered in a one-two punch — the second on Wednesday — by a committee of lawyers, developers, labor leaders and former elected officials who make up something of the Old Guard here. The Los Angeles 2020 Commission presented a catalog of failings that it said were a unique burden to the city: widespread poverty and job stagnation, huge municipal pension obligations, a struggling port and tourism industry and paralyzing traffic that would not be eased even with a continuing multibillion-dollar mass transit initiative.

Their conclusions amounted to an indictment of a city and its culture, a place that the commission said was brimming with talent and resources but was nonetheless falling behind other major cities across the globe.

“Year by year, our city — which once was a beacon of innovation and opportunity to the world — is becoming less livable,”

Every American sees that leaders in foreign countries sometimes behave immorally. Yet we often seem averse to believing that our own leaders can be just as malign.

That's certainly my bias: Judging the character of U.S. officials, my gut impulse is to give them the benefit of the doubt.

But I know that my gut is sometimes wrong, that our institutions rather than anything intrinsic to our compatriots explains the comparative lack of corruption and tyranny in the United States, and that it's important to stay open to the possibility of malign or corrupt leaders—because otherwise, it's impossible to adequately guard against them. The Founders understood this. So did generations of traditional conservatives.

The acrimony between their political leaders centers on France’s role in the tragedy, which was thrust back into the open by sharp remarks from Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, on the eve of somber ceremonies to mark the 1994 genocide. France, he said, bore part of the responsibility for the carnage that killed more than 800,000 people, mostly members of the Tutsi minority.

In the years leading up to the genocide, the French government supported the government of Rwanda, which was then dominated by the Hutu majority, helping to equip, arm and, according to many, train the Rwandan military

Varying views have emerged on whether the French presence simply proved insufficient, or whether the French were actually countenancing or even supporting the Hutu attackers

Some Republican senators and a few Democrats as well are starving the federal courts of the trial judges they need to serve the basic legal need

One federal-trial seat in Texas has been vacant for 1,951 days, to give just one example. The absence of these judges, in one district after another around the country, has created a continuing vacuum of federal authority that is a kind of secession, because federal law without judges to impose it in a timely way is no federal law at all.

A recent study from the Center for American Progress identified a backlog of more than 12,000 federal cases exists in Texas alone because the two current senators there, both conservative Republicans and ardent foes of the Obama Administration's legal views, have slow-walked trial judge nominations.

I first began seriously considering the immortality of white supremacy after listening to Nell Irvin Painter.

 Here are a couple interviews on that point--one with Phoebe Judge at WUNC in the Research Triangle in North Carolina, the other with Jonathan Judaken before a lecture at Rhodes College in Memphis.

The two that really pushed me over were were Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom and Barbara and Karen Fields' Racecraft. Morgan is indispensable. There is no single book I've found myself reviewing more over the past five years. 

Every German resident must belong to a sickness fund, and in turn the funds must insure all comers. They’re also mandated to cover a standard set of benefits, which includes most procedures and medications. Workers pay half the cost of their sickness fund insurance, and employers pay the rest. The German government foots the bill for the unemployed and for children. There are also limits on out-of-pocket expenses, so it’s rare for a German to go into debt because of medical bills.

this is very similar to the health-insurance regime that Americans are now living under, now that the Affordable Care Act is four years old and a few days past its first enrollment deadline.

There are, of course, a few key differences. Co-pays in the German system are minuscule, about 10 euros per visit. Even those for hospital stays are laughably small by American standards: Sam payed 40 euro for a three-day stay for a minor operation a few years ago

Very high national fertility rates have not disappeared, but they are now mostly concentrated in a single region: sub-Saharan Africa. Last year, all five countries with estimated total fertility rates (the average number of births per woman) at six or higher — Niger, Mali, Somalia, Uganda and Burkina Faso — were there. So were nearly all of the 18 countries with fertility rates of five or more (the exceptions were Afghanistan and East Timor).

Sub-Saharan Africa also makes up a substantial portion of countries with estimated fertility rates between three and four: Notable exceptions include Iraq, Jordan, the Philippines and Guatemala

In reality, slower population growth creates enormous possibilities for human flourishing. In an era of irreversible climate change and the lingering threat from nuclear weapons, it is simply not the case that population equals power, as so many leaders have believed throughout history. Lower fertility isn’t entirely a function of rising prosperity and secularism; it is nearly universal.