1: Vivek Ramaswamy

Rupert Murdoch Turned Passion and Grievance Into Money and Power The retiring Fox leader built a noise-and-propaganda machine by giving his people what they wanted — and sometimes by teaching them what to want.

‘Germany 1923’: When Democracy Held Nazism at Bay In his latest book, the German historian Volker Ullrich describes a nation buffeted by poverty, hyperinflation and political extremism, but managing — for the moment — to thwart Hitler’s ascent......... the psychological and political effects of hyperinflation were profound. Reality seemed to be breaking down. Suffering deepened, along with inequality. Industrialists and those with access to foreign currency got richer, while swaths of the middle class had to barter family heirlooms in exchange for food. Germans turned on one another. Conspiracy theories proliferated. Foreigners and Jews were targeted. Old people who had to live on worthless pensions resented the young; the young, in turn, resented the old for owning homes purchased when the value of money stayed put long enough so that saving some was possible. ......... The government also issued a new currency — Rentenmarks, each of which was worth a trillion marks — and announced a fixed exchange rate at 4.2 trillion marks to the dollar. ........... trust in Rentenmarks took. “When you offered them in payment for the first time, you waited in suspense to see what would happen,” recalled the historian Sebastian Haffner. “They were actually accepted, and you were handed your goods — goods worth a billion marks. The same thing happened the next day and the day after. Incredible.” ............ When Hitler and the other putschist conspirators were put on trial, he used the courtroom to grandstand and rail against the Weimar Republic. In prison, he spent “a few quite comfortable months” biding his time and writing “Mein Kampf.” He also learned something from his failed uprising. “If he wanted to take power,” Ullrich explains, “he needed to follow a different path: not that of a putsch but of ostensible legality in concert with conservative economic, military and administrative elites.” ........... Conservatives believed that they could invite Hitler into their governing coalition and benefit accordingly. Such opportunism was breathtakingly cynical — and horrifically naïve. As Ullrich puts it at the end of his book, “The notion that they could harness the Nazi leader for their own reactionary interests and control the dynamic of his movement would be revealed as a tragic illusion.”

How Benjamin Netanyahu Pushed Israel Into Chaos The nation’s current crisis can be traced back, in ways large and small, to the outsize personality of its longest-serving prime minister. ................ Israel has no written constitution. Its Parliament is largely toothless as a check on power: The governing coalition has the majority and the means to impose its decisions there. Now it was proposing to neutralize the only curb to executive overreach: the country’s Supreme Court. ....... The energy and breadth of the protest movement has been staggering. To see this human wave surge through blocked highways shouting “Democracy!” is to glimpse Israeli society in all its variety: There are white-coat groups (doctors) and black robes (lawyers), Brothers and Sisters in Arms (military reservists), Handmaids (women’s groups), students, teachers, young people, academics, anti-occupation activists, “religious Zionist democrats,” high-tech workers and civil servants.......... “If it were up to Bibi, the overhaul would simply disappear ............ “Netanyahu has become a puppet on a string of messianic extremists.” .......... Netanyahu has pushed Israel to the brink, gradually and then suddenly. .......... These days, his gait is halting; his shoulders are hunched. His eyes sag. Try as his aides might, they have no way to spin this: The man looks exhausted. ............. Netanyahu is “in a Job-like state” ............. His coalition members embarrass him on a daily basis. .......... “He can’t travel to the White House, and it’s killing him.” .......... His status is such that his personal base of supporters is far greater than that of his party. ............. a once-in-a-generation leader, suave and polished, speaking a refined American English, and also a bare-knuckled sabra who has shown no qualms about taking on Barack Obama, the Palestinian leadership and the U. N. Security Council. ........... One of Netanyahu’s main achievements in office has been overseeing Israel’s transformation into a country with one of the highest per-capita investments in start-ups in the world; a second has been forging relations with the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco. ............ Admirers credit Netanyahu with “changing the paradigm” around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict .......... the Abraham Accords, are the diplomatic end result of an arms deal in which Israel would provide nearly all signatories with licenses to its powerful cybersurveillance technology Pegasus .......... The Likud electorate has historically been the Mizrahi (Jews of Middle Eastern and North African descent), the religiously observant, the noncollege-educated and the poor. But it has expanded to include Israelis who support his conservative economic agenda and others who cite his reluctance to go to needless wars and his international connections ........... Netanyahu has refashioned Likud from a hawkish yet liberal party into a populist party wholly in his thrall. ......... Under Netanyahu, the Israeli left has not only diminished but is regarded by much of Israeli society as illegitimate: not Jewish enough, not patriotic enough. .............. If the various components of the judicial overhaul pass, Israeli democracy will be in peril: The courts will be powerless, a government-appointed authority will be tasked with overseeing broadcast media, a parallel system will be set up for the ultra-Orthodox, who will be exempt from military conscription and whose children will receive only minimal education in core subjects such as math and science. The experiment of finding a balance between the Jewish and the democratic aspects of the state will be tipped toward the former. .............. a leader who has fallen prey to the idea that, in the words of his wife, “Without Bibi the country is lost.” .......... In “Bibi: My Story,” his 2022 memoir, which he wrote longhand in English, Netanyahu underplays his privilege: military service in the elite Matkal Unit; university studies at M.I.T.; a job at the prestigious Boston Consulting Group. “I had taken all these decisions with an attitude of ‘What the hell, let’s give it a try and see what happens,’” he writes. .............. Iddo, his younger brother, was on the line from Jerusalem. Yoni, their older brother, had been killed in the raid. ............. “Netanyahu presents this impressive combination of a strongman who’s also a victim,” Barnea says. It’s a paradox typical of right-wing leaders in the West ............ The night in 1976 when he heard of Yoni’s death, Bibi drove seven hours to Ithaca, N.Y., to break the news to his parents. Benzion greeted him with a surprised smile, but “when he saw my face, he instantly understood,” Netanyahu writes in his memoir. “He let out a terrible cry like a wounded animal.” The Netanyahu family founded a think tank in Yoni’s name, the Jonathan Institute, for the study of terrorism. The institute would lend Netanyahu gravitas and connections; it would also help start his political career. People who knew Netanyahu at the time say that were it not for Yoni’s death, they doubt whether he or his parents would even have returned to live in Israel. ................ “It is not the Jews who usurp the land from the Arabs, but the Arabs who usurp the land from the Jews,” he writes in his memoir, adding, “The Jews are the original natives, the Arabs the colonialists.” ........... In 1984, Netanyahu was named as Israel’s permanent representative to the United Nations, and he later threw himself into defending the right-wing policies of Yitzhak Shamir, the prime minister, with gusto and skill. He became a fixture on “Nightline” and U.S. news, learning to present his best side to the camera: the one that hid the scar on his lip (a result of a childhood game involving an electric socket). During one memorable appearance, at the height of the gulf war, air-raid sirens sounded while he was on the air from Jerusalem. Rather than cut the interview short, Netanyahu — ever attuned to ratings — suggested that they keep rolling with gas masks on. Larry King told Vanity Fair that women used to stop by the studio to inquire about his dashing guest from Israel............ “He was a person who walked around without a wallet.” ............... He showed little reverence for party seniority. “His innovation was that he moved from the outside in .............. and he tells me: ‘Listen, there are only two people who can run this country. Me and you. Let’s make a deal. I don’t need more than one term. I’ll take a term, and you take a term.’ .............. A few days later, Olmert says, he recounted that conversation to Meridor. Meridor told Olmert: “He told me that there were only two people who could run this country. Him and me.” Later, Olmert ran into Benny Begin, who said: “He told me that it was him and me.” .............. Netanyahu presented himself as a bellicose alternative to the left-wing government’s concessions. He installed himself at the sites of the attacks, lambasting Rabin. ......... For the left, there was no recovering from the bloodied circumstances that brought about his rule. ............. an exasperated Bill Clinton came out of their first meeting in 1996 fuming to aides: “Who the [expletive] does he think he is? Who’s the [expletive] superpower here?” Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright, used to describe Netanyahu unfavorably as an “Israeli Newt Gingrich” and felt condescended to, Miller, who worked for her, has written. In 2011, President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was caught on mic complaining to President Barack Obama, “I cannot bear Netanyahu, he’s a liar.” Obama responded, “You’re fed up with him, but I have to deal with him even more often than you.” ................. “Bibi,” he recalled Obama saying. “I meant what I said. I expect you to immediately freeze all construction in the areas beyond the 1967 borders. Not one brick!” .............. “Iran is the big issue for him. His thinking is, Everything else I have to navigate to thwart that danger; if I’m not here, then I can’t deal with this big issue. Saudi Arabia is also very big for him right now. Principles are big issues, and the rest is pragmatism.” ............. At least three former Mossad chiefs have called Netanyahu’s actions on Iran dangerous. ................ Iran now has enough enriched uranium to produce “several” bombs, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency warned earlier this year. Iran’s enrichment is “100 percent the result of the U.S. pulling out of the agreement,” Tamir Hayman, a former Israel military intelligence chief and the managing director of the Institute for National Security Studies, told me. Hayman called the pullout from the deal a “grave mistake,” adding, “We retreated from Plan A without having a Plan B in place.” .............. “He began with a worldview that said, ‘I’m the best leader for Israel at this time,’” Elkin says. “Slowly it morphed into a worldview that said, ‘The worst thing that can happen to Israel is if I stop leading it, and therefore my survival justifies anything.’ From there, you quickly reach a worldview of ‘The state is me.’ He believes in it wholeheartedly.” .............. He met Sara Ben-Artzi in 1988 on a layover at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. She was 30 and a flight attendant; he was 39 and Israel’s deputy foreign minister. ............ The state prosecution claims that from 2011 to 2016, Netanyahu accepted a steady supply of cigars, cases of Champagne and jewelry from Arnon Milchan, an Israeli film producer in Hollywood, and James Packer, an Australian billionaire. In exchange for these presents, estimated to have been worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, the prosecution says that Netanyahu lobbied U.S. officials to help Milchan renew his U.S. visa and tried to lighten his tax burden in Israel. .......... A former Netanyahu spokesman who turned state witness in 2018 told prosecutors that he had learned of “a method, let’s say, in which, on every visit abroad, the Netanyahu family was attached to a walking credit card on two legs” — meaning to local benefactors. ............... He said, ‘If I don’t call an election now, I won’t get to nominate the next state prosecutor.’ He was willing to risk everything just to save his own skin.” ............ Long before the invention of Trumpism, there was Bibism. ............ With Trump, in general, “Netanyahu got everything he wanted,” Amit Segal, a political reporter for Channel 12, told me in 2021. Israel got a pass on settlement construction in the West Bank and signed normalization accords with four Arab states; the United States withdrew from the Iran agreement and moved its embassy to Jerusalem. “Our years together were the best ever for the Israeli-American alliance,” Netanyahu writes in his memoir. .............. In recent years, he has shunned Israeli mainstream media, opting instead for Facebook Live videos and frequent “exclusive” interviews with Channel 14, a media outlet that he has personally helped elevate into one of the most-watched news programs in the country. ............ In July, as the judicial overhaul resurfaced, Netanyahu fainted. Several days later, he was fitted with a pacemaker. ........... For years, liberal Israelis were afraid that a right-wing coalition would come along and annex West Bank settlements. “Then came the twist,” the author Etgar Keret wrote earlier this year. “Instead, the settlers annexed the country.”

Want to Attend an Indian Wedding? Now You Can Pay To. Join My Wedding allows tourists to purchase tickets to Indian weddings. Some say it’s resulted in meaningful cultural exchange. Others believe selling the experience can be cultural fetishism.......... “Indian weddings are world famous,” she said, pointing to Bollywood as what drew her attention to them. “It’s like a music festival,” she said. .......... “Every cultural element is right there at a wedding,” she said. “If I had just one day in any country in the world, I would want to just go to a wedding.” ............. Around 250 people attended Yamini and Aditya Sharma’s opulent wedding in January, which took place at a venue in Jaipur called R Chandra’s Palace. The entire wedding cost about 30 million rupees, said Mr. Sharma, 27, who runs a construction equipment business, which is roughly equivalent to $360,000 ............... “A non-Indian, particularly white person, attending one’s wedding is seen as a status symbol,” she added. “It communicates that the couple or their family have social networks beyond their country and by that token, demonstrates a sort of cosmopolitanism and ‘success.’” ............... “I’m never the only white person in a room,” Ms. Lord said. “That’s only happened to me maybe twice in my entire life.” .......... When it came to food, there were moments where other guests “would laugh at me and be like, ‘No, you can’t dip that in there.’ And I’m like, ‘It tastes good, try it,’” Ms. Lord said. “It felt like if someone came here and put ketchup and applesauce on their hot dog.” ........... “We tried to buy saris, but when we were in our rooms trying to put them on, we couldn’t make it work. It’s a bit complicated. So we wore flowy skirts and pants that had some decorative, Indian-style embellishments.” ............. In interviews, some travelers referred to traditional clothing as “costumes” and religious ceremonies as “Bollywood performances.” ............. “it’s a very big country, and weddings aren’t held in the same way everywhere.” She added, “For example, where I’m from in Bengal, people typically don’t dance in their weddings, and yet now you have a standard model of what an Indian wedding is, and it looks very much like watching Bollywood.”

The Magic Number: 32 Hours a Week The autoworkers picketing factories across America aren’t just seeking higher pay. They are also, audaciously, demanding the end of the standard 40-hour workweek. They want a full week’s pay for working 32 hours across four days. And we'll all benefit if they succeed........ Though the 40-hour week may feel like an immutable law of nature, it’s barely a century old. ......... American workers fought to establish the eight-hour workday around the turn of the last century, campaigning on the catchy slogan, “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what you will.” But the workweek then was six days long for almost everyone. .......... It took until 1940 for Congress to legislate a 40-hour week. The law said that hourly employees who worked longer got overtime pay. .......... In a famous 1930 essay, the British economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030, people would work only 15 hours a week because technological progress would reduce the amount of labor required to meet people’s wants and needs.

Corruption Is an Existential Threat to Ukraine, and Ukrainians Know It The Maidan revolution, which sent a pro-Russian president packing, wasn’t just about freeing Ukraine from Russian influence. It was also about breaking the stranglehold of oligarchs who — as in so many former Soviet republics — controlled everything from television stations to the politicians on ballots. The fight against corruption amounts to a second front in Ukraine’s war against Russia. ...........

it is still ranked the second most corrupt country in Europe, after Russia

........... Since the February 2022 Russian invasion, a host of characters — from arms dealers to suppliers of soldiers’ meals — has stood to reap big profits, creating vested interests in prolonging the conflict. ......... Ukrainians consider corruption the country’s second-most-serious problem, behind only the Russian invasion ............ Ukrainians are starting to resist corruption with the same can-do spirit that repelled the Russian invasion. ............ the Ukrainian Defense Ministry paying huge markups for supplies — 46 cents for eggs that should have cost five cents, $86 for winter coats that were worth just $29. ............... We didn’t fail in Afghanistan because we couldn’t stop corruption. We failed because we didn’t foster Afghan institutions that could withstand a U.S. withdrawal. Americans were so worried about stamping out corruption that they micromanaged everything, creating a shadow government — staffed by temporary, highly paid consultants that answered to Washington. They wrote beautiful reports but weren’t accountable to the people who mattered most: Afghans. ............ It would have been better to spend far less money in Afghanistan but in a way that empowered local leaders. Instead, we spent more than a trillion dollars on a war that ended disastrously. Does it matter that we had a special inspector general perfectly documenting the disaster? ..................... donor countries should work with local Ukrainian government entities to rebuild the country instead of using “vast armies” of foreign contractors and nongovernmental organizations.

Amazon Is the Apex Predator of Our Platform Era The Congress of 1890, which passed the first of those laws, could never have imagined the world we now inhabit. ........... Today’s tech barons at huge platforms like Amazon, Google and Meta can deploy anticompetitive, deceptive and unfair tactics with the agility and speed of a digital system. As in any shell game, the quickness of the hand deceives the eye. ........... Amazon is the apex predator of our platform era. Having first subsidized end-users, and then offered favorable terms to business customers, Amazon was able to exploit its digital flexibility to lock both in and raid them for an ever-increasing share of the value they created. ............. Amazon has become a vestigial place, a retail colossus barely hindered by either competition or regulation, where prices go up as quality goes down, and the undifferentiated slurry of products from obscure brands is wreathed in inauthentic reviews. ............. It became progressively harder not to shop there. ........... The more locked in we were, the less Amazon needed to offer us. ........... the company began to allow retailers to buy their way to the top of listings, and by 2021, ads generated $31 billion in revenue. ............ Its warehouse workers urinate in bottles to keep up with impossibly high fulfillment demands; its drivers are forced to defecate in bags. Amazon pioneered the “megacycle,” a 10.5-hour, mandatory graveyard shift at its warehouses, as well as a new kind of arm’s-length quasi entrepreneur who borrows small fortunes and hires legions of drivers kitted out in Amazon livery, only to be stuck with the bill for all those delivery vans ............ Now we are at the final stage of monopolistic decay. The nation’s dominant online retail marketplace not only claws away much of its sellers’ revenues but also now penalizes them if they sell their products for lower prices at other retail outlets (including at its archrivals Target and Walmart). Amazon gets the American consumer coming and going, providing worse goods at higher prices while receiving vast sums in subsidies from state and local governments. ............