New York Times: February 14

A Succession Drama, Chinese Style, Starring Xi Jinping As a party congress approaches, it’s increasingly clear that Xi Jinping plans another five-year term. But if he has ideas about a successor, he has hidden them well. ......... Chinese legislators abolished a term limit on the presidency in 2018, clearing the way for Mr. Xi, 68, to hold onto all his major posts indefinitely: president, party leader and military chairman. ........ They see themselves as guarding China’s rise and one-party power in an often hostile world. ....... Mr. Xi and the premier, Li Keqiang, vaulted into the Standing Committee in 2007, confirming them as the two leaders-in-waiting at the time. ....... China’s history of botched succession plans stands as a warning to Mr. Xi. Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping both had an unhappy record of choosing, then turning on, political heirs. ......... Mr. Xi became top leader in 2012 after a year of lurid strife in ruling circles. He has argued that the fall of the Soviet Union resulted from installing weak, unworthy leaders who betrayed the Communist cause. ........ Mr. Xi was 59 when he became leader at a congress in 2012. .

The Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker Peter Thiel, one of Donald J. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016, has re-emerged as a prime financier of the Make America Great Again movement. ......... the venture capitalist this year is backing 16 Senate and House candidates, many of whom have embraced the lie that Mr. Trump won the election. ........ To get these candidates into office, Mr. Thiel has given more than $20.4 million. That essentially puts him and Kenneth Griffin, the chief executive of the hedge fund Citadel, in a tie as the largest individual donors to Republican politics this election cycle .......... While the investor has been something of a cipher, he is currently driven by a worldview that the establishment and globalization have failed, that current immigration policy pillages the middle class and that the country must dismantle federal institutions. ....... he criticized the Chinese Communist Party and big tech companies and questioned climate science ......... he spoke about the “deranged society” that “a completely deranged government” had created ........ “My somewhat apocalyptic, somewhat hopeful thought is that we are finally at a point where things are breaking,” Mr. Thiel said. ...... “I don’t think it’s just about flipping the Senate,” said Mr. Bannon, who has known Mr. Thiel since 2016. “I think Peter wants to change the direction of the country.” ...... In the past, many courted the billionaire Koch brothers or Sheldon Adelson, the late casino magnate. This year, they have clamored for invitations to Mr. Thiel’s Los Angeles and Miami Beach homes, or debated how to at least get on the phone with him, political strategists said. ......... Mr. Thiel has attracted the most attention for two $10 million donations to the Senate candidates Blake Masters in Arizona and J.D. Vance in Ohio. Like Mr. Thiel, the men are tech investors with pedigrees from elite universities who cast themselves as antagonists to the establishment. They have also worked for the billionaire and been financially dependent on him. Mr. Masters, the chief operating officer of Thiel Capital, the investor’s family office, has promised to leave that job before Arizona’s August primary. .......... Born in West Germany and raised in South Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area, Mr. Thiel showed his provocative side at Stanford in the late 1980s. Classmates recalled Mr. Thiel, who studied philosophy and law,

describing South Africa’s apartheid as a sound economic system.

................ In 1995, he co-wrote a book, “The Diversity Myth,” arguing that “the extreme focus on racism” had caused greater societal tension and acrimony. Rape, he and his co-author, David Sacks, wrote, sometimes included “seductions that are later regretted.” ......... Forbes puts his fortune at $2.6 billion. .......... Thiel branded himself as a contrarian. He published philosophical essays, often dark musings on politics, technology, Christianity and globalization. ........ he had come to “no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” arguing that American politics would always be hostile to free-market ideals, and that politics was about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. Since then, he has hosted and attended events with white nationalists and alt-right figures. ............ Mr. Thiel, who had donated to Mr. Cruz’s 2012 campaign, replied, “It’s relatively safe to support Cruz (for me) because he threatens the Republican establishment.” ........ At a meeting with tech leaders at Trump Tower in Manhattan in December 2016, Mr. Trump told Mr. Thiel, “You’re a very special guy.” ........ A month later, Mr. Thiel, a naturalized American, was revealed to have also obtained citizenship in New Zealand. That prompted a furor, especially after Mr. Trump had urged people to pledge “total allegiance to the United States.” ...... During Mr. Trump’s presidency, Mr. Thiel became frustrated with the administration. “There are all these ways that things have fallen short,” he told The Times in 2018. .........

“I will take QAnon and Pizzagate conspiracy theories any day over a Ministry of Truth,” he said.

............ some Republicans worry that Mr. Thiel is arming candidates who are too extreme with financial firepower, fueling what could be politically detrimental primary races. ........ he said nationalism was “a corrective” to the “brain-dead, one-world state” of globalism. .

The ‘Zen Mayor’: How Eric Adams Mixes Tough Talk With Spinach Smoothies Mr. Adams has tied his interest in nutrition, meditation and fitness to his views on how to lead New York at a challenging time. ....... He is a vegan cookbook author and self-identified Virgo who is conversant with astrology ....... Mayor Eric Adams sat in his workout room at City Hall last week, demonstrating how deep-breathing exercises can help combat adversity. ............ “We all breathe incorrectly because we were never taught breathing,” Mr. Adams declared ....... alternate-nostril breathing. .......... “My health routine helped me for this moment,” he said of his crisis-laden first weeks in office. “It’s a balance of my physical and emotional stability.” ...... New York City is now run by a man who at once sternly warns against “disorder in my city” and invokes his life coach, delights in cooking demonstrations and cites the “healing powers” of spices. ........ Type 2 diabetes impaired his vision and threatened his health before he embraced a plant-based diet in 2016 that he says reversed the disease. ........ For personal fuel, Mr. Adams keeps a NutriBullet blender in his small City Hall kitchen. Last Monday he whipped up a purplish-brown concoction; typical recipes involve “either kale, spinach, blueberries and a few superfood powders,” he said, adding that the search for a plant-based Gracie Mansion chef is ongoing. ...... he has called himself a “Zen mayor” who will “bring the calmness” to the city. .......... In a book released ahead of his mayoral run, “Healthy at Last,” he also urged Black Americans to rethink soul food, casting it as an unhealthy relic of slavery. ........ Just don’t get him going on olive oil, which he said he avoids because of its fat content, though respected major studies show it is associated with significant positive health benefits. (“The olive oil companies wrote that,” he inaccurately claimed.) ....... he was still a “big believer that if you’re born at a certain time when the sun and the stars line up, that it could have some impact on your personality.” ...... “I am constantly evolving,” he said, preparing his smoothie. “Who I am today is not who I am tomorrow.” .

How Democrats’ New Maps Could Shape N.Y. Politics for Years to Come Democrats could potentially expand the veto-proof majorities they already have in both the Assembly and Senate, further solidifying New York’s leftward shift. ........ Few areas on the current maps inspired as much frustration as Richmond Hill and South Ozone Park in Queens, where South Asian residents mounted a concerted campaign to try to get lawmakers to reunite an area split among seven different Assembly districts. The new maps offers a modest improvement, with most of the area contained in three districts, but local Democratic leaders were not satisfied. .

After Pak and Beeple, What’s Next for NFT Collectors? Art Made With a Paintbrush Now crypto collectors are investing in something more tangible, and traditional, like paintings and sculpture. And art dealers are rushing to woo them. ........ catering to the tastes of the crypto nouveau riche has become the frantic obsession of the commercial art world, which is reshaping itself around these new collectors nearly a year after artists like Beeple and Pak sold NFTs, or nonfungible tokens, for tens of millions of dollars, inspiring the typically technophobic art industry to head into the metaverse .

In Mexico, Ornately Painted Churches Enshrine Years of Indigenous Resilience As Michoacán’s centuries-old chapels undergo restorations, the buildings raise new questions about how architectural conservation should work — and whom such projects are really for. ........ As Mass ended on the afternoon of March 7, 2021, a fire, reportedly sparked by either a short circuit under the roof or a firecracker blown off course, caught among the church’s thin oyamel fir tejamanil, or ceiling shingles. March is the height of the dry season in central Mexico, and the tejamanil, dehydrated by years of winter sun, lit like tissue paper. A chain of 200 people formed across Nurio’s central plaza, dousing the flames with hoses and passing buckets of water from their homes to a group of 20 men who’d climbed onto the roof to choke the fire. ....... state and federal institutions were still negotiating funding when the church caught fire. The community saw the disaster as a direct result of bureaucratic stagnation .......... the Indigenous dyes and pigments they likely used connect them to a previous world, turning every panel into a document of a culture in the midst of devastating change.......... Conceived to erase a civilization, the churches of the Meseta and the paintings they contain stand today as priceless artworks and historical records but also as sacred spaces through which a long-suppressed culture can retell its story on its own terms — a restoration of another kind. ....... When the first Europeans set foot in the lakeside capital of Tzintzuntzan, they found a mighty empire, second only to the rival Aztecs in size and power, laid low by a plague of smallpox brought by the Spanish. ....... Though most early missionaries learned the local tongue, a linguistic isolate, language proved incapable of transmitting their complicated theology. As in other religious spaces, from the Buddhist cave temples of classical India to the Gothic cathedrals of Northern Europe, paintings became powerful visual aids. ........ In the earliest convents, monastic orders painted fortresslike walls in somber grisaille, often filling the chapels where Indigenous initiates gathered for Mass with brutal images of the Last Judgment, a violent inducement to conversion. ...... Gilded pomegranates and avocados — today, the Meseta’s most lucrative crop and thus one of the central drivers of violence in the region — decorate the gilded altarpiece. ...... Having never been conquered by the Aztecs, whom they declined to aid in their fight against the Spanish, the Purépecha stood outside that lineage. ....... When restorers stripped away the grime a few years later, they revealed the Litany of the Blessed Virgin spelled out in resplendent shades of azure and rose. Inclusive and direct, these paintings were “an invitation to prayer — not of punishment or penalty or sadness but rather of happiness,” Sigaut says, “of a community living in permanent joy.” ....... Like so much of rural Mexico, the region struggles with the crushing poverty that, for decades, has driven immigration to Mexico’s largest cities and to the United States. ...... “Our problem,” he says, “is that people aren’t curious about coming here. They don’t even know this place exists.” For many of his neighbors, restoration has little to do with the Venice Charter’s lofty unity of human values. It’s a hedge against disappearance. ...... While the children play, the women talk and laugh, glancing down occasionally at the Spanish-language Bibles open in their laps to read passages that speak of love for nature and neighbor, ideas central to the ancient society that the crown, the church and the successive governments of an independent Mexico all failed to eradicate. .

New York Times: February 11

What Makes Iceland So Great? Ask Its First Lady.
I’m a First Lady, and It’s an Incredibly Weird Job Yet I still resent the occasions when my presence is assumed rather than requested. I am not my husband’s handbag, to be snatched as he runs out the door and displayed silently by his side during public appearances........... And it’s uncomfortable to have strangers tell me I now look much nicer with my hair longer, that I should more often wear blazers that flatter my figure or that I should not wear green again because it’s not my color. On virtually every solo trip I make as first lady, I am asked who is looking after our four young children, as if their devoted father has no parental obligations. If I am ever asked about my professional background, it is always in the past tense, although I still continue much of my paid work. (Why should I get a new job because my husband was elected to one?) ....... Individually, these are petty quibbles; sometimes, though, it can feel like the stifling of my identity by a thousand paper cuts. ....... when “off duty” at home in Iceland, I am almost always left alone to go about my business. ...... I am extremely proud of my husband and his achievements — but no one wants to be judged as her partner’s accessory. .

Biden’s Hidden Health Care Triumph .

“Over 70% of Americans who died with Covid, died on Medicare, and some people want #MedicareForAll?”

...... To belabor a point that should be obvious, Medicare recipients have been especially vulnerable to Covid because they generally suffer from a serious pre-existing condition: advanced age. ........ whatever its intellectual merits, as a practical political matter Medicare for All isn’t coming to America any time soon. What’s actually at stake in the political arena are more incremental policy changes. ........ Health care is one of the huge but hidden successes of Biden’s first year. ...... The story so far: Obamacare, which was enacted in 2010 but didn’t go fully into effect until 2014, was and is a bit of a Rube Goldberg device. Instead of simply paying Americans’ medical bills, it expanded Medicaid while using regulations and subsidies to encourage an expansion of private insurance. It fell far short of universally guaranteed coverage, but it nonetheless led to a large decline in the percentage of nonelderly Americans without health coverage. ......... And if Republicans get unified control in 2024, they’ll surely send us back to the era when health insurance was available only to people who had either jobs providing good benefits or impeccable medical histories that made them attractive to private insurers.

We Know the Real Cause of the Crisis in Our Hospitals. It’s Greed. Nurses would like to set the record straight on the hospital staffing crisis. ....... We’re entering our third year of Covid, and America’s nurses — who we celebrated as heroes during the early days of lockdown — are now leaving the bedside. The pandemic arrived with many people having great hope for reform on many fronts, including the nursing industry, but much of that optimism seems to have faded. ........ They also tear down the common misconception that there’s a shortage of nurses. In fact, there are more qualified nurses today in America than ever before. ........ To keep patients safe and protect our health care workers, lawmakers could regulate nurse-patient ratios, which California put in place in 2004, with positive results. Similar legislation was proposed and defeated in Massachusetts several years ago (with help from a $25 million “no” campaign funded by the hospital lobby), but it is currently on the table in Illinois and Pennsylvania. These laws could save patient lives and create a more just work environment for a vulnerable generation of nurses, the ones we pledged to honor and protect at the start of the pandemic.

My Husband and I Don’t Speak the Same Love Language . There are five of them — the five languages of love. .......

It would make me feel deeply loved if the Christmas tree were not there in the morning.

America 2022: Where Everyone Has Rights and No One Has Responsibilities . This pervasive claim that “I have my rights” but “I don’t have responsibilities” is unraveling our country today. ......... First, unvaccinated adults 18 years and older are 16 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than fully vaccinated adults. Second: Adults 65 and older who are not vaccinated are around 50 times more likely to be hospitalized for Covid than those who have received a full vaccine course and a booster. Third: Unvaccinated people are 20 times more likely to die of Covid than people who are vaccinated and boosted. ............. the emotional toll and other work conditions brought on by the pandemic contributed to some two-thirds of nurses giving thought to leaving the profession. .......... many hospitals today are experiencing an unprecedented 20 percent annual turnover rate of nurses — more than double the historical baseline. The more nurses leave, the more those left behind have had to work overtime.

Putin to Ukraine: ‘Marry Me or I’ll Kill You’ . Why is Vladimir Putin threatening to take another bite out of Ukraine, after devouring Crimea in 2014? That is not an easy question to answer because Putin is a one-man psychodrama, with a giant inferiority complex toward America that leaves him always stalking the world with a chip on his shoulder so big it’s amazing he can fit through any door. .......... Let’s see: Putin is a modern-day Peter the Great out to restore the glory of Mother Russia. He’s a retired K.G.B. agent who simply refuses to come in from the cold and still sees the C.I.A. under every rock and behind every opponent. He’s America’s ex-boyfriend-from-hell, who refuses to let us ignore him and date other countries, like China — because he always measures his status in the world in relation to us. And he’s a politician trying to make sure he wins (or rigs) Russia’s 2024 election — and becomes president for life — because when you’ve siphoned off as many rubles as Putin has, you can never be sure that your successor won’t lock you up and take them all. For him, it’s rule or die. ............ China is watching — and Taiwan is sweating — everything we do in reaction to Vlad right now. .......... when Putin came to power at the end of 1999, he was able to benefit from the restructuring of the Russian economy by Boris Yeltsin; from significant foreign investment; from rising oil, gas and mineral prices; and from improved political stability. ...... beginning in 2011 and stretching all the way to 2019, Russia’s economy stagnated because of lower energy prices and, most of all, institutional impediments to growth: Putin’s preference to tap Russia’s natural resources, not its human resources. No Silicon Valleys for him — except cyberhackers. That would require real rule of law, secure property rights and the unleashing of talented people, who ask too many questions like, “Vlad, where did your money come from?” ......... “Putin concluded that if he was going to be a president for life, he had to be a wartime president for life.” ........ The degree of military-patriotic hysteria [in] Russia today brings to mind the U.S.S.R. of the 1930s ....... This is classic wag-the-dog politics. Putin is a thug, but he’s a thug with an authentic Russian cultural soul that resonates with his people. His obsession with the Soviet Union and his nostalgia for the power, glory and dignity it gave him and his generation of Russians run deep. ............. “Putin looks at Ukraine and Belarus as part of Russia’s civilizational and cultural space. He thinks the Ukrainian state is totally artificial and that Ukrainian nationalism is not authentic.” ......... “Putin is inviting the West to a funeral for the post-Cold War order.” ........ Putin’s troop buildup says to the West: Either we negotiate a new post-Cold War order or I will start a post-post-Cold War confrontation. ........ I was a vigorous opponent of NATO expansion after the Cold War. It is one of the stupidest things we ever did — focusing on “NATOizing” Poland and Hungary rather than building on an amazing, largely nonviolent, democratic revolution in Russia and locking it into the West. ......... one of the oldest Russian fables: A Russian peasant pleads to God for aid after he sees that his better-off neighbor has just obtained a cow. When God asks the peasant how he can help, the peasant says, “Kill my neighbor’s cow.” ........

The last thing that Putin wants is a thriving Ukraine that joins the European Union and develops its people and economy beyond Putin’s underperforming, autocratic Russia. He wants Ukraine to fail, the E.U. to fracture and America to have Donald Trump as president for life so we’ll be in permanent chaos.

.......... Putin would rather see our cow die than do what it takes to raise a healthy cow of his own. He’s always looking for dignity in all the wrong places. He’s rather pathetic — but also armed and dangerous.

New York Times: February 2

Enormous Winter Storm Sweeps Across U.S. Heavy snow was falling across much of the Midwest as forecasters warned of the possibility of freezing rain and ice.
Over a Million Flee as Afghanistan’s Economy Collapses Thousands of Afghans are trying to sneak into Iran and Pakistan each day, as incomes have dried up and life-threatening hunger has become widespread.
The Lessons of Brooklyn Tech
So, You Think the Republican Party No Longer Represents the People
One Day in the ‘Parallel Universe’ of a London I.C.U. Britain’s government may have lifted coronavirus restrictions, but hospital workers say the return to a normal rhythm of work is still a long way off. “You know, in Wave 1, we were heroes,” said Ms. Jenkins, the leader of the nursing team. “By Wave 2, we were the enemy. And that’s hard.”

Clues to the Next Variant Are All Around Us But there are places to look that may help scientists find new variants even faster: sewage and the air. People can shed the coronavirus in their feces and their exhaled breath. As a result, the virus can be spotted before people have been tested or developed symptoms.

What America Would Look Like in 2025 Under Trump “Call it ‘soft fascism’ ” ....... a political system that aims to stamp out dissent and seize control of every major aspect of a country’s political and social life, without needing to resort to “hard” measures like banning elections and building up a police state. One of the most disconcerting parts of observing Hungarian soft fascism up close is that it’s easy to imagine the model being exported. While the Orban regime grew out of Hungary’s unique history and political culture, its playbook for subtle repression could in theory be run in any democratic country whose leaders have had enough of the political opposition......... “Orban consolidated power through tactics that were procedurally legal but, in substance, undercut the rule of law. He stacked the courts with partisans and pressured, captured or shut down independent media.” ....... “Orban’s open assault on academic freedom — including banning gender studies and evicting the Central European University from Hungary — finds analogies in current right-wing efforts in Republican-controlled states to ban the teaching of critical race theory and target liberal and left-wing academics.” .....

Hungary is becoming what Denmark is for the left: part real-life model, part idealized dreamscape.

........ Trump will push the United States in a broadly similar direction: toward neopatrimonial governance. During his first term, Trump treated the presidency as his own personal property — something that was his to use to punish enemies, reward loyalists and enhance his family’s wealth. If he wins in 2024, we’re likely to see this on steroids ......... The U.S. is a large federation with a lot of capacity for private violence, a major international footprint and a multitrillion-dollar economy. Hungary is a minor player in a confederation dominated by democratic regimes............. Orban’s appeal to the right flank of the Republican Party, in Cooley’s view, lies in an ideology — which rests on redefining the meaning of “the West” away from liberal principles and toward ethnonational ideals and conservative values — and his strategy for consolidating power is to close or take over media, stack the courts, divide and stigmatize the opposition, reject commitments to constraining liberal ideals and institutions and publicly target the most vulnerable groups in society — e.g., refugees............

Orban has described Hungary under his rule as an “illiberal democracy.”

........ would be fueled by increased moral panic about white America’s decline ....... there is an active plan to reshape the political system so that elections are not winnable by Democrats, and the state be run without the foundation of a democracy......... The use of citizens as informants to enforce intrusions of this sort is, to put it mildly, inconsistent with democratic norms — reminiscent of East Germany, where the Stasi made use of an estimated 189,000 citizen informers. ...... A critical issue for Senate Republicans and a second Trump administration would be whether to eliminate the filibuster to prevent Democratic senators from blocking their wilder legislative plans. ...... The politics of a populist Republican administration will aim at undermining American democracy and changing the level playing field in favor of a party-penetrated state apparatus.

In Responses to Russia, U.S. Stands Firm on Who Can Join NATO In responses to Moscow’s security demands, the U.S. and NATO rejected a demand that Ukraine never join the alliance but offered more transparency on missile deployments in Eastern Europe. the Biden administration proposes a reciprocal “transparency mechanism” under which Russia could verify the absence of offensive missiles at the sites in Romania and Poland, while the United States would do the same at two missile-launching bases of its choice in Russian territory; one would likely include Kaliningrad, the slice of Russia bordering two Eastern European NATO members, Lithuania and Poland....... The flurry of diplomacy on the Ukraine crisis is proceeding along two broad tracks, one between Russia and the United States and NATO that included the exchange of published demands and written replies, the other a preparation for a summit of the leaders of France, Germany, Russia and Ukraine.

"I Don't Want To Be A Mother To A Man"

What It’s Like to Be a Black Student at an Elite Boarding School We spoke with Kendra James, the author of “Admissions: A Memoir of Surviving Boarding School.” When James first arrived as a freshman, she was determined to make friends with white students — but nothing really worked out. She was the girl who was all but ignored by her white roommate. She was the girl who never got a “crush can,” a school tradition, from an admirer. It didn’t matter that her father also went to Taft, James couldn’t seem to fit in........ At some point in my senior year, the boys in one of the dorms decided to start peeing in bottles and dumping it out the dorm windows. I just remember one day, during English class, we all ran over to the window, because I think one of the bottles had landed on someone, or very close to someone, on the sidewalk. ......... I just would never send my child away to a place that I cannot get to within 15 to 20 minutes. ....... How can a white adult be in loco parentis to a Black child if that white adult does not have the tools, or the instincts, that are often necessary when it comes to being the parent of a Black child in America? That just stays with me. That’s simply something that you can’t change.

How It Feels to Be an Asian Student in an Elite Public School Stuyvesant, Brooklyn Tech and other schools across the country are under pressure to end entrance exams. Students have complicated feelings about that.......... Brooklyn Technical High School — Bengali and Tibetan, Egyptian and Chinese, Sinhalese and Russian, Dominican and Puerto Rican, West Indian and African American. ....... Fully 63 percent of Brooklyn Tech’s students are classified as economically disadvantaged. Census data shows that Asians have the lowest median income in the city and that a majority speak a language other than English at home. ........ Brooklyn Tech, which sits in the haute brownstone neighborhood of Fort Greene, is regarded as a diamond in the city’s educational crown, along with the Bronx High School of Science and Stuyvesant High School. ....... Nearly all balked, however, at describing it as segregated, not least because the descriptor “Asian” encompasses disparate ethnicities, cultures, languages and skin colors. ...... Those who champion specialized high schools point to alumni who became top scientists, among them 14 Nobel Prize laureates. With few exceptions these were the children of working-class and immigrant families. The best students, they argue, should press as far ahead as brains and curiosity might take them. .......

There is a Dong and a Doogan, a Goyer and a Huynh, a Subah and a Wai.

............ “I became aware of internalized shame at not being white and wealthy,” she said. “I learned kids did not sit at home in summer: They went to ‘camp.’” ....... She got in and the local Bengali newspaper ran her photograph and those of other Bengali teenagers who gained admittance to specialized high schools. “Family honor is tied to it,” she said. “It’s kind of embarrassing.” ........ There were Bengalis and Pakistanis and Indians, the Brown Squad. There was a Latino Squad, a Russian Squad, a Black Squad, similar in their yearnings. She stayed up past midnight doing homework, one advanced course piled atop another. ............ He applied to the highly competitive Mark Twain Middle School and scored in the 97th percentile. The test cutoff was the 98th percentile. ..... “Bring grades or class rank into it if you need to; we should strive for a world where we don’t need Brooklyn Tech,” said Ayaan Ali, a senior whose parents emigrated from Pakistan. “But abolishing the test is like putting a Band-Aid over a gunshot wound.”

‘A Beginner’s Guide to America’ Review: Welcome to a New World Newcomers encounter pleasing surprises, troubling flaws—and, not least, the suspicions of previous newcomers. ........

Immigrants to America quickly learn that you don’t bargain when shopping. If a fishmonger prices something at $7.50 a pound, you don’t offer to buy it for $4.50, telling him that a fish that’s been dead longer than your grandfather (God rest his soul) can’t be worth what he asks.

A fixed price, says Roya Hakakian, can be depressing to immigrants for whom haggling was once “the most satisfying aspect of any shopping experience.” And yet, with its immense and disarming cultural genius, America offers the recent arrival something in lieu of the pleasure (now lost) of being able to beat a vendor down: the right to return a purchased product.

News: October 12

We Are Republicans. There’s Only One Way to Save Our Party From Pro-Trump Extremists. political extremists maintain a viselike grip on the national G.O.P., the state parties and the process for fielding and championing House and Senate candidates in next year’s elections. ........

Rational Republicans are losing the G.O.P. civil war.

........ Breaking away from the G.O.P. and starting a new center-right party may prove in time to be the last resort if Trump-backed candidates continue to win Republican primaries. ...... Unfortunately, history is littered with examples of failed attempts at breaking the two-party system, and in most states today the laws do not lend themselves easily to the creation and success of third parties. ........ So for now, the best hope for the rational remnants of the G.O.P. is for us to form an alliance with Democrats to defend American institutions, defeat far-right candidates, and elect honorable representatives next year — including a strong contingent of moderate Democrats. ........ Mr. Trump lost re-election in large part because Republicans nationwide defected, with 7 percent who voted for Mr. Trump in 2016 flipping to support Joe Biden ......... we agree on something more foundational — democracy. We cannot tolerate the continued hijacking of a major U.S. political party by those who seek to tear down our Republic’s guardrails or who are willing to put one man’s interests ahead of the country. We cannot tolerate the leaders of the G.O.P. — in 2022 or in the presidential election in 2024 — refusing to accept the results of elections or undermining the certification of those results should they lose. ........ concerned conservatives must join forces with Democrats on the most essential near-term imperative: blocking Republican leaders from regaining control of the U.S. House of Representatives ...... we will endorse and support bipartisan-oriented moderate Democrats in difficult races ...... And we will defend a small nucleus of courageous Republicans, such as Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Peter Meijer and others who are unafraid to speak the truth. ....... and will release a slate of nearly two dozen Democratic, independent and Republican candidates we will support in 2022. ........

To defeat the extremist insurgency in our political system and pressure the Republican Party to reform, voters and candidates must be willing to form nontraditional alliances.

........ when push comes to shove, patriotic conservatives should put country over party. .......... additional independent-minded leaders are considering entering the fray in places like Texas, Arizona and North Carolina, targeting seats that Trumpist Republicans think are secure. ......... this experiment in “coalition campaigning” — uniting concerned conservatives and patriotic progressives — could remake American politics and serve as an antidote to hyper-partisanship and federal gridlock.

Our constitutional crisis is already here

The United States is heading into its greatest political and constitutional crisis since the Civil War, with a reasonable chance over the next three to four years of incidents of mass violence, a breakdown of federal authority, and the division of the country into warring red and blue enclaves.

.......... about these things there should be no doubt: ...... First, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for president in 2024. ....... the amateurish “stop the steal” efforts of 2020 have given way to an organized nationwide campaign to ensure that Trump and his supporters will have the control over state and local election officials that they lacked in 2020. Those recalcitrant Republican state officials who effectively saved the country from calamity by refusing to falsely declare fraud or to “find” more votes for Trump are being systematically removed or hounded from office. .........

The stage is thus being set for chaos.

........ Imagine weeks of competing mass protests across multiple states as lawmakers from both parties claim victory and charge the other with unconstitutional efforts to take power. Partisans on both sides are likely to be better armed and more willing to inflict harm than they were in 2020. Would governors call out the National Guard? Would President Biden nationalize the Guard and place it under his control, invoke the Insurrection Act, and send troops into Pennsylvania or Texas or Wisconsin to quell violent protests? Deploying federal power in the states would be decried as tyranny. ............ Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy. .........

As has so often been the case in other countries where fascist leaders arise, their would-be opponents are paralyzed in confusion and amazement at this charismatic authoritarian.

............... The Founders did not foresee the Trump phenomenon, in part because they did not foresee national parties. ......... party loyalty has superseded branch loyalty, and never more so than in the Trump era. .............

Critics and supporters alike have consistently failed to recognize what a unique figure Trump is in American history.

......... the passions that animate the Trump movement are as old as the republic and have found a home in both parties at one time or another. ............ Suspicion of and hostility toward the federal government; racial hatred and fear; a concern that modern, secular society undermines religion and traditional morality; economic anxiety in an age of rapid technological change; class tensions, with subtle condescension on one side and resentment on the other; distrust of the broader world, especially Europe, and its insidious influence in subverting American freedom — such views and attitudes have been part of the fabric of U.S. politics since the anti-Federalists, the Whiskey Rebellion and Thomas Jefferson................ What makes the Trump movement historically unique is not its passions and paranoias. It is the fact that

for millions of Americans, Trump himself is the response to their fears and resentments.

This is a stronger bond between leader and followers than anything seen before in U.S. political movements. ........... Trump is different, which is one reason the political system has struggled to understand, much less contain, him. The American liberal worldview tends to search for material and economic explanations for everything, and no doubt a good number of Trump supporters have grounds to complain about their lot in life. But their bond with Trump has little to do with economics or other material concerns. They believe the U.S. government and society have been captured by socialists, minority groups and sexual deviants. They see the Republican Party establishment as corrupt and weak — “losers,” to use Trump’s word, unable to challenge the reigning liberal hegemony. They view Trump as strong and defiant, willing to take on the establishment, Democrats, RINOs, liberal media, antifa, the Squad, Big Tech and the “Mitch McConnell Republicans.” ............

His charismatic leadership has given millions of Americans a feeling of purpose and empowerment, a new sense of identity.

While Trump’s critics see him as too narcissistic to be any kind of leader, his supporters admire his unapologetic, militant selfishness. Unlike establishment Republicans, Trump speaks without embarrassment on behalf of an aggrieved segment of Americans, not exclusively White, who feel they have been taking it on the chin for too long. And that is all he needs to do. ................ There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But

the most important thing Trump delivers is himself

. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites,” his followers see their own victimization. ................

millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity

: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. ........... While the defeat of a sitting president normally leads to a struggle to claim the party’s mantle, so far no Republican has been able to challenge Trump’s grip on Republican voters ......... “We weren’t there to steal things. We weren’t there to do damage. We were just there to overthrow the government.” .......... Most Trump supporters are good parents, good neighbors and solid members of their communities. Their bigotry, for the most part, is typical white American bigotry, perhaps with an added measure of resentment and a less filtered mode of expression since Trump arrived on the scene. .......... Although zealous in defense of their own rights and freedoms, they are less concerned about the rights and freedoms of those who are not like them. ............. Europeans who joined fascist movements in the 1920s and 1930s were also from the middle classes. No doubt many of them were good parents and neighbors, too. ......... Trump has returned to the explosive rhetoric of that day, insisting that he won in a “landslide,” that

the “radical left Democrat communist party” stole the presidency in the “most corrupt, dishonest, and unfair election in the history of our country”

and that they have to give it back. ........

Already, there have been threats to bomb polling sites, kidnap officials and attack state capitols.

............. Nor can one assume that the Three Percenters and Oath Keepers would again play a subordinate role when the next riot unfolds. Veterans who assaulted the Capitol told police officers that they had fought for their country before and were fighting for it again. ............... Just as “generations of patriots” gave “their sweat, their blood and even their very lives” to build America, Trump tells them, so today “we have no choice. We have to fight” to restore “our American birthright.” ........... Trump’s grip on his supporters left no room for an alternative power center in the party. One by one, the “adults” resigned or were run off. .............. elected officials feared taking on the Trump movement and that Republican job seekers either kept silent about their views or

made show-trial-like apologies for past criticism

............ German conservatives accommodated Adolf Hitler in large part because they opposed the socialists more than they opposed the Nazis, who, after all, shared many of their basic prejudices. .......... since Trump took over their party, many conservatives have revealed a hostility to core American beliefs. ......... The Republican Party today is a zombie party. ....... the party’s main if not sole purpose today is as the willing enabler of Trump’s efforts to game the electoral system to ensure his return to power. ......... Reps. Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik, in their roles as party leaders, run interference for the Trump movement in the sphere of legitimate politics, while Republicans in lesser positions cheer on the Jan. 6 perpetrators, turning them into martyrs and heroes, and encouraging illegal acts in the future. ............ Republicans focus on China and critical race theory and avoid any mention of Trump, even as the party works to fix the next election in his favor. The left hand professes to know nothing of what the right hand is doing. .......... even these anti-Trump Republicans are enabling the insurrection. Revolutionary movements usually operate outside a society’s power structures. But the Trump movement also enjoys unprecedented influence within those structures. ......... The world will look very different in 14 months if, as seems likely, the Republican zombie party wins control of the House. At that point, with the political winds clearly blowing in his favor, Trump is all but certain to announce his candidacy, and social media constraints on his speech are likely to be lifted, since Facebook and Twitter would have a hard time justifying censoring his campaign. With his megaphone back, Trump would once again dominate news coverage, as outlets prove unable to resist covering him around the clock if only for financial reasons. ............... And he will have the Trump movement, including many who are armed and ready to be activated, again. Who is going to stop him then? ......... they have refused to work with Democrats to pass legislation limiting state legislatures’ ability to overturn the results of future elections, to ensure that the federal government continues to have some say when states try to limit voting rights, to provide federal protection to state and local election workers who face threats, and in general to make clear to the nation that a bipartisan majority in the Senate opposes the subversion of the popular will .............. A Trump victory is likely to mean at least the temporary suspension of American democracy as we have known it. ......... In a little more than a year, it may become impossible to pass legislation to protect the electoral process in 2024. Now it is impossible only because anti-Trump Republicans, and even some Democrats, refuse to tinker with the filibuster. .........

Democrats need to give anti-Trump Republicans a chance to do the right thing.

Wonking Out: Biden Should Ignore the Debt Limit and Mint a $1 Trillion Coin U.S. government securities are the bedrock of the global financial system, used for collateral in many transactions. Threatening federal cash flows could therefore provoke a worldwide meltdown. ........... The Republican Party has become both radical and ruthless; let’s not forget that most G.O.P. legislators refused to certify President Biden’s election. .......... this radicalized party cheerfully authorizes trillions in borrowing whenever it holds the White House, it weaponizes the debt limit whenever a Democrat is president. .......... Democrats control both houses of Congress, but Republicans are using the filibuster to block an increase in the debt ceiling with only weeks to go before we hit a wall and default on payments — and

they aren’t even making specific demands. They simply don’t want to share any responsibility for governing

. .............. Republicans have learned a terrible truth: Voters don’t know or care about process; they only react to how things are going.

Perilous, Roadless Jungle Becomes a Path of Desperate Hope The recent surge at the Mexican border is likely to grow as more migrants, mostly Haitian, risk everything negotiating the notorious Darién Gap on their way to the United States. ........ “We very well could be on the precipice of

a historic displacement of people in the Americas toward the United States

,” said Dan Restrepo, the former national security adviser for Latin America under President Barack Obama. “When one of the most impenetrable stretches of jungle in the world is no longer stopping people, it underscores that political borders, however enforced, won’t either.” ........ The Darién, which forms part of the Isthmus of Panama, is a narrow swath of land dividing the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean Sea. Parts are so inaccessible that when engineers built the Pan-American Highway in the 1930s, linking Alaska to Argentina, only one section was left unfinished. That piece —

66 roadless miles of turbulent rivers, rugged mountains and venomous snakes — became known as the Darién Gap.

Today, the journey through the gap is made more perilous by a criminal group and human traffickers who control the region, often extorting and sometimes sexually assaulting migrants. ............... The number of migrants who have made the journey so far this year is more than triple the previous annual record set in 2016. ........ has transformed Necoclí. Sewers overflow in the street. Water has stopped flowing from some taps. Markets now sell kits made for crossing the Darién; they include boots, knives and baby slings. ....... Returning to Haiti was not an option, she said. The country is in tatters after a presidential assassination and an earthquake, its economy faltering and its streets haunted by gangs. The only choice, Ms. Alix said, was the road north. ....... Government officials are largely absent from the Darién. The area is controlled by a criminal group known as the Clan del Golfo, whose members view migrants much as they view drugs: goods they can tax and control.

Facebook Struggles to Quell Uproar Over Instagram’s Effect on Teens The social network has been all hands on deck as it grapples with revelations that it knew the harmful effects its Instagram photo-sharing app was having on teenagers. ............. teenage girls saying that Instagram made them feel worse about themselves ......... Inside Facebook, top executives have been engulfed by the crisis ........... Next to one slide in the research that said “teens who struggle with mental health say Instagram makes it worse,” the company added that the headline was imprecise. Instead, it wrote, “The headline should be clarified to be: ‘Teens who have lower life satisfaction more likely to say Instagram makes their mental health or the way they feel about themselves worse than teens who are satisfied with their lives.’”



Seth Meyers Muses on Trump’s Weekend Iowa Rally The host said that seeing the former president speak was like “watching an open-mic night at the senior center.” ........... “He treated supporters to an hour and 43 minutes of bitching about the election he lost and how he didn’t lose it, and how he didn’t concede because it was stolen from him, and all that stupid nonsense that runs on a loop in his brain.” — JIMMY KIMMEL ............. “He was never here, and yet, we named a whole city in Ohio after him.” — JIMMY KIMMEL

Philanthropy Is a Scam The superrich often claim their philanthropy is meant to “change the world.” But it’s really meant to keep it exactly the way it is. ......... If they can invent technologies that uproot the ways we work and live, the logic goes, they can figure out world hunger. ....... figures like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk have more recently managed to fly under the radar and give away comparatively minuscule sums ............. The ambitious “philanthropreneur” takes aim at the clunky, inconvenient elements of civic life and international governance and, in doing so, opens up new avenues for his business. ........... In the philanthropist’s view, the world is good — a world of growing wealth, a widening middle class, and lesser inequality — but suffers enduring problems which can, with enough money and the right approach, be solved at great scale. The governments and NGOs usually tasked with addressing these problems are beset by tradition, red tape, and bureaucratic sprawl. Their own brand of social justice, by contrast, follows only the imperative for ruthless innovation. While states often struggle to pursue long-term goals while responding to immediate crises, a billionaire’s foundation — far less regulated and with nearly infinite money — can easily do both. ..................... When it comes to the objectives of the giving, many state that it is not only a social obligation but potentially healthy for business (hence why profits never really suffer even when the billionaires give away large portions of their shares). That giving, therefore, has the explicit dual aim of maximizing social benefit and return on investment. .............. given that

philanthropic programs for change tend to center around lower-controversy issues like hunger, disease, and education access — while fair pay, labor rights, and affordable housing, which would meaningfully reduce poverty and are thus incompatible with the exploitative business models of large tech companies, sit more firmly within the remit of government

— philanthropists generally stand to gain a lot more than they lose. ................... Even when taking a category as large and broad as “the poor” as the desired recipient of their aid, it is clear that the philanthropic system depends upon them remaining splintered and isolated as subjects. It represents, at best, a capitalism generously willing to help alleviate the problems it causes. ............... In his foreword to Philanthrocapitalism, Bill Clinton states that, at the time of writing, members of his Clinton Global Initiative had made “more than 1,400 commitments valued at $46 billion that have already improved the lives of more than 200 million people in 150 countries.” ............ And while they duly acknowledge the potential dangers of the superrich circumventing democracy and buying seats at decision-making tables, they remain optimistic — in both the superior judgement of entrepreneurs and in the market’s ability to develop the best solutions to the world’s problems. ...................

a new window dressing for the creation of extreme wealth and the expansion of corporate influence over politics and private life

............ This self-fulfilling cycle —

capitalism creates wealth, and thereby inequality, and thereby the conditions for the rich to spend surplus money on helping the poor without ever alleviating poverty

— dates back (Bishop points out) to the Renaissance, when both capitalism and philanthropy were born. ................ In 2019, an agreement signed between the World Economic Forum and the United Nations cemented the privileged position afforded to corporations and entrepreneurs on the global stage. .............. either a promise of greater accountability for foundations or a reinvention of the concept of taxation

New York Times: September 24

The World Is at War With Covid. Covid Is Winning.

Residents of Troubled Supertall Tower Seek $125 Million in Damages The condo board at 432 Park Avenue is suing the developers for construction and design defects that have led to floods, faulty elevators, and electrical explosions.

Wonking Out: This Might Be China’s ‘Babaru’ Moment Some of us are old enough to remember when all the

Very Serious People

insisted that the fallout from the U.S. subprime debacle could be contained too. ........... Some of us still remember the Japanese bubble economy — or as the Japanese themselves called it, the “babaru economy” — of the late 1980s, when prices of many assets, above all commercial real estate, went completely crazy.

At one point it was widely claimed that the land under the Imperial Palace was worth more than the whole state of California. Then everything crashed.

............ the bursting of the Japanese bubble didn’t lead to a financial meltdown. But it

was followed by a prolonged period of economic weakness

............ Thanks to low fertility plus low immigration, Japan is a shrinking society. ........ Japan has been able to maintain more or less full employment only through constant economic stimulus: ultralow interest rates and persistent budget deficits that have pushed the national debt above 200 percent of G.D.P. ............ Negative population growth means that there’s little demand for new housing or new office buildings .........

Japan has become a country awash in savings with few places to go

......... China’s macroeconomic situation bears a striking resemblance to that of Japan around the time the Japanese bubble burst. ......... Chinese demography is looking remarkably Japanese. The working-age population peaked in 2015 .......... China, like Japan in the bubble years, has a highly unbalanced economy, with weak consumer spending and extremely high investment ........... Investment spending that exceeds 40 percent of G.D.P. perhaps make sense in an economy with a rapidly growing population — especially one in which millions of rural residents are moving to the cities — that is also catching up to wealthier nations in its technological advances. But China no longer has that kind of demography, and while it is still behind the West (and Japan) in overall technological prowess, productivity growth is slowing. .............. Evergrande may not be the moment of truth, but it is a sign that this moment is coming. And

what we don’t know is whether China has the kind of social cohesion that has allowed Japan to slow down gracefully without a social and political crisis.

Global Equity and the Covid Vaccine
Joe Manchin Got the Voting Bill He Wanted. Time to Pass It.
The Endless Catastrophe of Rikers Island
Meng Wanzhou agreed to the deal in a Brooklyn court hearing.

Trump Had a Mob. He Also Had a Plan.
Farewell, Angela Merkel. You Were Once the ‘Leader of the Free World.’ “Bye, bye, Mommy.” ........ Across the country, the departure of Ms. Merkel has brought out affectionate nostalgia, tinged with a drop of irony. Yet there’s also fatigue, verging on irritation, a twitchy restlessness to see her off and start afresh. As with most farewells, feelings are mixed. ......... The qualities that ensured her success — her caution and consistency, her firmness and diligence — are now, at the end of her tenure, leading some to regard her departure with relief. The Germany Ms. Merkel made, in nearly two decades of steady stewardship, is ready to move on. ...... She steered Germany through a series of crises — the financial crash in 2008, the euro debt crisis that followed, the migration crisis of 2015 and, of course, the pandemic. She brokered a truce, albeit a brittle one, between Russia and Ukraine, helped to negotiate Brexit and saw Donald Trump come and go. Each event had the potential to sunder the world. In part thanks to Ms. Merkel, none did. ............... Under great pressure, Ms. Merkel was a conservative in the best sense, retaining the country’s prosperity, cohesion and purpose.

Her great achievement was not what she built, but what she managed to keep.

.......... How will it navigate the increased rivalry between America and China? To what extent will it embark on a more autonomous defense strategy? And how will it combat the rise of the far right? ......... And though the share of renewable energy grew to 45 percent during her time in office, many experts agree that on its current trajectory, the country will not meet its goal of being carbon-neutral by 2045. Despite being seen abroad as the “climate chancellor,” Ms. Merkel has taken only very minor steps toward confronting the defining issue of our time. ............ Ursula Weidenfeld, an economics journalist and the author of a recent biography of the chancellor, has likened Ms. Merkel’s Germany to the Shire in J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings.”

Peaceful and prosperous, soothingly old-fashioned, self-satisfied to the point of delusion and naïve in a likable yet unnerving way

: The analogy is apt. .......... she fostered its peculiar detachment from the world and its unwillingness to change, innovate or even discuss different ways forward. ........... The chancellor also became stuck in her ways. Humble and unpretentious, she saw herself as a servant to her country. But in return for her service, dedication and competence, she came to expect — demand, even — blind trust. She has grown increasingly impatient with the forever chatter of Germany’s political class. .......... Ahead of one of the endless meetings with Germany’s 16 governors during the pandemic’s first wave in 2020, she reportedly complained about the “orgies of debates on reopening the country.” .......... Just a couple of years ago, Ms. Merkel was garlanded as the “leader of the free world.” Against the chaos and disruption of Mr. Trump, her sober, judicious style was widely envied.

14 Classic Recipes You Should Know by Heart Commit a few — or all — of these dishes to memory, and you’ll always have a delicious meal at the ready.

Can Macron Lead the European Union After Merkel Retires? Emmanuel Macron, the French president, would love to fill the German chancellor’s shoes. But a Europe with no single, central figure may be more likely.

For India’s Military, a Juggling Act on Two Hostile Fronts Tensions with China and Pakistan stretch a cash-starved military, while the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban removes a potential ally.

Hong Kong Is Holding Elections. It Wants Them to Look Real. China has already determined the outcome, but the government is pressuring opposition parties to participate to lend the vote legitimacy. ........ The legislative election, set for December, is the first since the Chinese government ordered sweeping changes to Hong Kong’s election system to ensure its favored candidates win. Some opposition groups have pledged to boycott in protest, and the largest of them, the Democratic Party, will decide this weekend whether to follow. But

Hong Kong officials have warned that a boycott could violate the city’s expansive national security law. After all, an election doesn’t look valid if the opposition doesn’t show up.

........... In late 2019, months of fierce antigovernment protests helped fuel an unprecedented landslide victory by pro-democracy candidates in local elections. ......... The Chinese Communist Party was determined not to see a repeat. After imposing the security law last summer to crush the protests, it quickly followed up with election changes that allowed only government-approved “patriots” to hold office. In addition,

the general public will now be allowed to choose just 20 of 90 legislators.

Most of the rest will be chosen by the electors picked last Sunday — all but one aligned with the authorities. ........... officials’ determination to make the elections look as credible as possible — even if that requires intimidating the opposition into running. .......... The purpose of the vote was to form an Election Committee, a group of 1,500 that under Beijing’s new rules will select many legislators, as well as Hong Kong’s next top leader. According to the government, the committee is a diverse microcosm of Hong Kong society. But

fewer than 8,000 residents — 0.1 percent of the population — were eligible to vote in the Election Committee poll, all drawn from a list approved by Beijing.

......... many of the opposition’s leaders have been arrested, are in exile or have been disqualified from holding government posts ........ At times, the authorities’ dedication to the veneer of public engagement verged on absurdism. The weekend before the Election Committee vote, the Central Liaison Office, Beijing’s official arm in Hong Kong,

ordered the ranks of the city’s billionaire tycoons to staff street booths and extol the virtues of the new election system

. .......... That was how Pansy Ho, the second-richest woman in Hong Kong, found herself hawking leaflets on a 92-degree day. Raymond Kwok, the billionaire chairman of one of Hong Kong’s largest developers, stayed only a few minutes, enough time to be photographed handing out fliers, before leaving. .....

There were more police deployed to guard polling stations — over 5,000 — than electors.

China Detains Business Chiefs as Its Corporate Crusade Expands The seizure of the top two leaders of HNA Group comes as speculation swirls over whether Beijing will bail out another troubled giant, Evergrande. ........ Those punishments are taking place against a broader backdrop of pressure on corporate practices that the Chinese Communist Party increasingly regards as dangerous to the economy and its own grip on power. ........... Severe troubles at HNA and Evergrande are taking place against a backdrop of broad measures by Beijing that are leaving the country’s once freewheeling private sector feeling increasingly besieged. ........ Xi Jinping, the country’s top leader, has ordered businesses to pay greater heed to the government. Legislation approved two years ago requires domestic and foreign companies alike to share extensive information about their operations in China with the government.

All but the smallest domestic and foreign companies must have Communist Party cells now.

............ The government has cracked down hard this year on the tech sector. On Friday, China stepped up its restraints on cryptocurrencies, labeling as illegal all financial transactions that involve them and issuing a nationwide ban on them. Antimonopoly measures are transforming online retailing. And days after the Didi Chuxing car-hailing service conducted an initial public offering in New York at the end of June, Chinese regulators pulled its apps from app stores and suspended new user registrations. .............. A goal of “common prosperity” has begun to supplant a previous tolerance for a private sector that grew rapidly but sometimes borrowed recklessly. .......... HNA became a symbol of the mercurial rise and profligate spending of China’s first wave of private conglomerates with strong political backing. It acquired large stakes in Hilton Hotels, Deutsche Bank, Virgin Australia and other businesses, and at its height employed 400,000 people around the world. HNA struck 123 deals in three years, only to begin running into trouble in 2017 in repaying the debt incurred to pay for its acquisitions. .......... HNA, Evergrande and other large, private Chinese companies that grew quickly only to face financial collapse in the last several years are often referred to in China as gray rhinos. The term refers to obvious dangers that are ignored until they suddenly become very dangerous, and had been taken up by Chinese officials. .........

Beijing has remained tight-lipped so far while emphasizing that no Chinese company is too big to fail.

............... The billionaire investor George Soros recently argued that an Evergrande collapse would set off a broader economic crash, while another billionaire investor, Ray Dalio, argued this week that an Evergrande default was “manageable.”

An Insider Details the ‘Black Box’ of Money and Power in China A memoir by a well-connected businessman offers insights into the Communist Party’s thinking as it tightens its grip on the private sector. ............ To build a logistics hub next to Beijing’s main airport, Desmond Shum spent three years collecting 150 official seals from the many-layered Chinese bureaucracy. To get these seals of approval, he curried favors with government officials. The airport customs chief, for example, demanded that he build the agency a new office building with indoor basketball and badminton courts, a 200-seat theater and a karaoke bar. “If you don’t give this to us,” the chief told Mr. Shum with a big grin over dinner, “we’re not going to let you build.” ................. how government officials keep the rules fuzzy and the threat of a crackdown ever-present, limiting their role in the country’s development. .......... He was once married to Duan Weihong, who was close to the family of Wen Jiabao, formerly China’s premier. Ms. Duan, also known as Whitney, was a central figure in a 2012 investigation by The New York Times into the enormous hidden wealth controlled by Mr. Wen’s relatives. Ms. Duan disappeared in September 2017, though Mr. Shum said she had reached out shortly before the book’s release to urge him to stop. ..................... Mr. Shum’s book has come out just as the future of China’s entrepreneurs is in doubt. The government has cracked down on the most successful private enterprises, including Alibaba Group, the e-commerce giant, and Didi, the ride-hailing company. It has sentenced business leaders who dared to criticize the government to lengthy prison terms. ............. “The party has an almost animal instinct toward repression and control,” Mr. Shum wrote in the book.

“It’s one of the foundational tenets of a Leninist system. Anytime the party can afford to swing toward repression, it will.”

...................... China’s business types have played an important role in lifting the country out of poverty and building it into the world’s second-largest economy — something the Communist Party is reluctant to admit. .......... “In China, power is everything, while wealth doesn’t amount to much,” Mr. Shum said in the interview.

“The entrepreneur class is a suppressed class under the party, too.”

.................. China’s Foreign Ministry said the book is full of smearing and baseless allegations about China. ......... Many businesspeople believed they could shape a liberalizing China. They sought protection of property, an independent judiciary system and a more transparent government decision-making process to better protect people — wealthy and otherwise — from the party’s power. Some raised serious issues during the government’s parliamentary sessions. Others backed nongovernment organizations, education institutions and investigative media outlets. That period was short-lived. ......... the tightening process started after the 2008 financial crisis but accelerated after Mr. Xi took the party’s helm in late 2012. ...........

“Economy used to be the first order of business,” he said. “Since Xi, there’s no doubt that politics became the driving force behind everything.”

........... Many businesspeople have managed to move at least part of their assets abroad, he said. Few make long-term investments because they are too risky and difficult. “Only idiots plan for the long term,” he said.

Ancient Footprints Push Back Date of Human Arrival in the Americas Human footprints found in New Mexico are about 23,000 years old, a study reported, suggesting that people may have arrived long before the Ice Age’s glaciers melted.

A Tour of China’s Future Tiangong Space Station
What a Fungus Reveals About the Space Program One thing’s for sure: Escaping the dung heap doesn’t come cheap.

New York Times: August 26

It’s Finally Time to End American Hubris in Afghanistan use whatever shred of leverage America has left to encourage them to govern as inclusively and moderately as possible. If we care about the people of Afghanistan, we will try the latter — and do so with as little of

the hubris and heavy-handedness that helped get us into this mess in the first place

. ........... The sight of Afghan political and military leaders escaping in American planes is a betrayal, plentiful proof of whose bidding they had been doing all along. But not everyone caught a cargo plane out of town. The former Afghan president Hamid Karzai and the longtime leader and chairman of Afghanistan’s National Reconciliation Council, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, have been sitting down with Taliban leaders in an attempt to form a new and more inclusive government............ In a news conference last week, the Taliban spokesman Zabiullah Mujahid promised to protect the rights of women, minorities and the independent press — albeit in the context of Shariah. “There is a huge difference between us now and 20 years ago,” he pledged. ........

In 2001 the Taliban’s leader and co-founder Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar attempted to surrender to Mr. Karzai’s forces and demobilize, in exchange for allowing the Taliban spiritual leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to live in dignity in Kandahar.

The U.S. defense secretary at the time, Donald Rumsfeld, refused to accept that deal. At the insistence of Americans, the Taliban were bombed and locked up at Guantánamo Bay. It’s hard not to see today’s debacle as a repudiation of the hubris of that era. ............. The Biden administration has frozen the roughly $7 billion that belongs to Afghanistan that sits in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. The International Monetary Fund has refused to deliver funds that Afghanistan was due to receive to help the country weather Covid. Without international assistance, the salaries of low-level Afghan government workers — teachers, doctors and sanitation crews — will almost certainly not be paid. If the government runs out of funds, the price of food could skyrocket. Unrest will spread. ...........

The Taliban are listed as a terrorist group by the U.S. Treasury and as a “threat to international peace and security” by the United Nations Security Council.

...... This is the long game: to leverage money and international recognition to incentivize the Taliban to establish the most inclusive and moderate government possible. ......... For the past 20 years, the United States and its NATO allies have micromanaged the government in Kabul, engineering support for pro-Western policies and leaders. On the sidelines, Afghanistan’s neighbors have backed their own factions. Iran has armed and trained Hazaras, a Shiite minority, who fought in Syria. Pakistan has supported the Afghan Taliban, who have traditionally been Pashtun. ..............

In Afghanistan, there are no good options.

........ The occupation of Afghanistan was based on a flawed logic that people were either with us or against us, that the Islamic world was a swamp that we had to drain and that we had the moral authority and the power to remake an entire region to prevent another terrorist attack on our soil. In the process of all that draining and remaking, we created a whole crop of other terrorists and upended the lives of tens of millions of innocent people.

Yes, Marketing Is Still Sexist Despite women’s progress in many parts of society, advertisements still consistently cast women as secondary........

mansplaining, a term that refers to a man explaining things to a woman, unsolicited, and whether he is an expert on the topic or not

. .......... Over and over again, “We noticed how female customers were perceived in ways that were at best inaccurate and at worst diminishing and dismissive,” they wrote.......... Male characters also outnumbered female characters two-to-one and had twice as much screen time and speaking time. ........ Age-defying has turned into “ageless” and dieting has coded itself as “wellness.” ........ “sneaky sexism.” ....... the perception that women’s aim and ambition in life starts and stops with achieving male approval and patronage. ......... So for kids, marketing to girls is all about being kind, being sweet, being affectionate, looking after things. For young women, it’s all about your appearance, making sure you’re always as perfect as you possibly can be in order to seek and achieve male approval, and then of course you become the perfect mom, delighted and endlessly happy to have this baby. .......... But

when you actually talk to women, their aspirations are not, in fact, to be beautiful through the male lens; it’s to feel comfortable in their own skin

. It isn’t to be dependent; it’s to maintain their independence, particularly their financial independence. .......... Brands need to stop telling women how to be, and start being in service to them. ........ Once you’ve seen Frida Mom, a lot of the stuff that comes out of traditional brands starts to look really strange, really twisted and untrue. ......... Historically there weren’t channels available to women to talk to each other about how objectionable they found this stuff. Women were sort of forced to consume it. They didn’t really know whether everybody else was thinking, “wait a minute, this seems pretty punishing.”

But now social media, for all of its faults, has also been a brilliant way for women to discuss what they find really objectionable about brands, and it’s been galvanizing.

........... young women are consuming something like 10,000 messages a day from brands. Think about the collective impact that can have when the same things are being said over and over again, which are usually: Be thinner, be blonder, be more feminine, be hairless, be whiter. ................. Women have enough real problems that need to be solved by brands and products, you don’t need to make them up. ......... If they decide to target the male audience instead of doling out the usual slice-of-life formula that women get in marketing, out comes John Legend and hilarious jokes and brilliant high production values as if with men you have to be properly creative. ......... 20 percent of commercials depict a woman with her head thrown back laughing. .... and never being funny. Only 3 percent of ads are women being funny themselves. ............... the older woman completely disappears. Only one in 10 ads that feature a woman features a woman who’s over 50. ......... older women are fed up with looking at marketing that just features women under 30. ........... if you only watched ads, you’d think older women just have bladder issues.......... It’s not just older women who get overlooked. It’s women of color. Poor women. Massive swaths that just don’t get seen because of this narrow way that marketing has set its dials, which is around this good, white, slim, young, pleasing archetype. .......... The way that women can influence marketing is spending with the brands that are doing the right thing by women and refusing to buy from brands that are very evidently trying to keep women in their place, and/or the place they think women should be.

No Loans, No Credit, No Funding: Why More Women Aren’t Millionaires Rachel Rodgers, the author of “We Should All Be Millionaires,” blames systemic sexism and racism — and internalized beliefs — for holding women back. ....... Eighty-five percent of the world’s millionaires are men ....... One in seven white families in the U.S. have a net worth of $1 million or more, but only one in 50 Black families do. ........ between systemic racism and sexism and the internalized limiting beliefs many women of color have from operating within those systems ........ the workplace, where Black women make 62 cents for every dollar earned by a white man doing the same work ......... how

most financial advice excludes people of color

........... I started my business in 2010 with a $300 investment, which was everything in my savings account. Eleven years later, it is a $10 million business. I wasn’t broke by choice, I had to really figure it out. ........... The advice most get-rich books often share would not work for Black women or people of color. They say “invest in real estate.” ......... First, sexism and racism. Second, internalizing that sexism and racism. Part of why that happens is because it’s reinforced everywhere we look. It’s in marketing emails, Instagram feeds, commercials. It’s in movies. We’re told success and wealth are not for women of color. .......... The million dollar value is being crystal clear on answers to questions like: How am I adding value to this company? Be so clear about how you add value whether you’re in a corporate career or as an entrepreneur, so that you can charge accordingly. Then you’re back in your power instead of waiting for someone else to promote you. ........... Decades-old research finds that successful people are surrounded by other successful people. They have a powerful network. ......... I had to really create my network. ......... There’s this idea that women should cut out coupons and skip the lattes to build wealth. But I don’t believe in shaming people for wanting pleasure. Pleasure is something that we all deserve. I am about balance, I save and I invest. We need to change the narrative: Men invest, take risks and buy the suit, the watch, the yacht, the car to express their power. Women are called frivolous and are told to stop spending money on lipsticks and shoes. ............... I wanted a bigger house with a backyard for my kids. I also wanted to support my mother. I wanted to send my kids to extracurricular activities. Take vacations. Get a new car. I did the math on that, and I realized I needed to make three times what I was making. It took me two or three years from when I imagined that to when I had all of the things on that list.

A Triumphant Debut Novel on Black History and Coming of Age in the South W.E.B. Du Bois has been a part of my intellectual life for as long as I can remember. ........ the founding father of modern Black America ........ In Great Barrington, Du Bois was born into a community of free Black landowners whose heritage included African, Dutch and French ancestry. .......... the double consciousness of Black Americans that Du Bois so famously wrote about ........ “Out of the North the train thundered, and we woke to see the crimson soil of Georgia stretching away bare and monotonous right and left. Here and there lay straggling, unlovely villages, and lean men loafed leisurely at the depots; then again came the stretch of pines and clay. Yet we did not nod, nor weary of the scene; for this is historic ground.” ........ how one navigates gender in a Black body ..... an urban place known only as “the City” and Chicasetta, a rural town where she is known and loved and free. ..........

Class and colorism

are constant tensions in the novel, and Jeffers expertly renders a world of elite African Americans. ........... Ailey comes to see how her grandmother cloaks cruelty behind her Edith Wharton-style manners and mannerisms: “On Christmas morning, Nana arrived at our house by taxi looking fresh and blameless, wearing the Chanel suit she’d bought in Paris on a family trip overseas, back when my father and uncle were teenagers. She handed me her purse and a platter of Creole cookies, then plucked at the tips of her gloves, like an actress in an old movie, and criticized my outfit.” ............ Even W.E.B. Du Bois himself makes an appearance. “Love Songs” reminded me, at times, of a line from Beyoncé’s song “Black Parade”: “Ancestors on the wall. Let the ghosts chitchat.” .......... How does a young Black woman craft a life that is joyful and whole against the backdrop of the American South, where the land is a minefield of treasures and tragedy? ....... “The loss of stories sharpens the hunger for them.” “Love Songs” is so satisfying because it generously feeds a hunger that you might not have even realized you had....... in the very best novels, every important detail is so lovingly attended to that the novelist’s intention is as invisible and powerful as gravity. “The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois” is such a world. Long after you’ve read the last line, the universe of Ailey Pearl Garfield continues to spin.

The New Chief Chaplain at Harvard? An Atheist. The elevation of Greg Epstein, author of “Good Without God,” reflects a broader trend of young people who increasingly identify as spiritual but religiously nonaffiliated. ........ The Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they were building: How would they ensure that the clergymen would be literate? Their answer was Harvard University, a school that was established to educate the ministry and adopted the motto “Truth for Christ and the Church.” It was named after a pastor, John Harvard, and it would be more than 70 years before the school had a president who was not a clergyman. ......... “There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life,” said Mr. Epstein, who was raised in a Jewish household and has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the progressive movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with God. ....... To Mr. Epstein’s fellow campus chaplains, at least, the notion of being led by an atheist is not as counterintuitive as it might sound; his election was unanimous. ......... Greg is known for wanting to keep lines of communication open between different faiths.” ........ a Harvard Crimson survey of the class of 2019 found that those students were two times more likely to identify as atheist or agnostic than 18-year-olds in the general population. .......... “We don’t look to a god for answers,” Mr. Epstein said. “We are each other’s answers.” ........... Mr. Epstein’s work includes hosting dinners for undergraduates where conversation goes deep: Does God exist? What is the meaning of life? ......... Mr. Epstein frequently meets individually with students who are struggling with issues both personal and theological, counseling them on managing anxiety about summer jobs, family feuds, the pressures of social media and the turbulence endemic to college life.......... Some of the students drawn to Mr. Epstein’s secular community are religious refugees, people raised in observant households who arrive at college seeking spiritual meaning in a less rigid form. ......... When she turned 19, she applied to Harvard in secret and fled the community............ she still yearned to find people wrestling with issues deeper than academic achievement ........ a secular rabbi ........ you can have the value-add religion has provided for centuries, which is that it’s there when things seem chaotic.” ..........

Nonreligiosity is on the rise far beyond the confines of Harvard; it is the fastest growing religious preference in the country

........... More than 20 percent of the country identifies as atheist, agnostic or nonreligious — called the “nones” — including four in 10 millennials. ....... “Being able to find values and rituals but not having to believe in magic, that’s a powerful thing,” said A.J. Kumar ......... “Greg was the first choice of a committee that was made up of a Lutheran, a Christian Scientist, an evangelical Christian and a Bahá’í,” said the Rev. Kathleen Reed, a Lutheran chaplain who chaired the nominating committee. “We’re presenting to the university a vision of how the world could work when diverse traditions focus on how to be good humans and neighbors.” ........... Ms. Nickerson grew up in a working-class Catholic household where she struggled to connect with rituals like Mass. But during her freshman year at Harvard, she found herself capable of long, lively conversations with her devout grandmother. Ms. Nickerson realized that her involvement with Harvard humanism had given her the language to understand her grandmother’s theology. ............ “We understood the idea of surrender in a similar way even though one of those explanations came with God and the other didn’t,” Ms. Nickerson said. “I find I’m more fluid in my spiritual conversations now.”

Conservative Reforms Worked Wonders in Blue Wisconsin Walker was the governor of Wisconsin from 2011 to 2019. ......... Before Act 10, most school district employees in the state paid little or nothing for their health insurance and retirement. Now they pay something, although still far less than the average citizen in Wisconsin. Previously, most school districts were required to provide health insurance from a plan affiliated with the teachers’ union. Now they can bid out, and districts have saved millions of dollars — money that can go into the classroom. ........ Wisconsin continues to have one of the highest high school graduation rates in the nation, and our ACT scores continue to be some of the highest among states where every student takes the exam. ....... the effects of our reforms that gave school districts in Wisconsin full autonomy to redesign teacher pay. The paper shows that “the introduction of flexible pay raised salaries of high-quality teachers, increased teacher quality (due to the arrival of high-quality teachers from other districts and increased effort) and improved student achievement.” ............ If Chicago were in Wisconsin, school officials would determine whether their school system was open and under what circumstances — not the union bosses.

In William Maxwell’s Fiction, a Vivid, Varied Tableau of Midwestern Life Though his novels and short stories — published over six decades, beginning in 1934 — are set in an older, more decorous America, he grapples with themes that feel shockingly contemporary. .......... a sober understanding of the consequences of gossip. The members of the bridge club, cataloging sins and casting stones, practice a local, predigital version of cancel culture. They deal in shame, singeing the reputations of people who, while perhaps not entirely blameless, are nowhere near as bad or as brazen as the scuttlebutt might suggest. .......... Starting his career under the influence of Virginia Woolf, he was a resolutely modern writer, attuned to the fine vibrations of individual and interpersonal psychology against the backdrop of everyday life. ......... “If you were to draw a diagonal line down the state of Illinois from Chicago to St. Louis,” Maxwell wrote, “the halfway point would be somewhere in Logan County. The county seat is Lincoln, which prides itself on being the only place named for the Great Emancipator before he became president.” ........ The people who live on Elm Street now belong to a different civilization. They can tell you nothing.” ........ that lost civilization, when houseguests measured their visits in weeks, not days, when the Civil War was still a living memory for many adults, when Chatauqua Season was a fixture of the calendar and when the towns threaded along the railroad lines of America’s farming regions were prosperous and dynamic places. ........ The fiction grew more factual. Draperville dropped its pseudonym. Maxwell’s father, brother, mother and younger self appeared as themselves. .........

Gossip is living history. History is petrified gossip.

........ Everyone in this world is to some degree a child, because everyone has to infer the rules in the middle of the game. And the rules are always changing. ....... The French are all inscrutable, but each one is baffling in a particular way, depending on gender, class, generation and temperament. They can be warm and confiding one moment, aloof and even hostile the next. Barbara and Harold are always trying to figure out what they might have done to provoke affection or give offense. ............. Motives may not be fully rational, and reasons may not be completely knowable, but even extreme or capricious varieties of human behavior have observable patterns and causes. ........ Everything happens for so many different reasons! ........ You don’t have to read between the lines to find inklings of sectional conflict, racial inequality, class stratification and cultural resentment in these pages. All of that is right there, in front of the narrator’s eye. What holds it all together isn’t his omniscience so much as his curiosity, his historian’s hunger to figure out why what happened happened. ............ Much as the setting may be an older, more decorous America, its people and the problems they face can feel almost

shockingly contemporary

. .......... The hectic plot, laid out over the course of a single day, spins toward the arrival of Jefferson Carter, a Black writer and traveling lecturer. His presence brings out the worst in everyone, proceeding through a welter of microaggressions toward a climactic shouting match that is both hilarious and sad. “If they weren’t all mad,” Jefferson thinks as the evening unravels, “then their conduct was inexcusable.” ...........

The racial neurosis of white people — not fragility so much as a defensive, anxious need to brush aside problems and talk about something else

— is something Maxwell returns to, notably in “The Chateau,” in which his alter ego, Harold Rhodes, challenges

the reflexive racism of some French acquaintances

. .............. “They are a wonderful people,” he says of Black Americans. “They have the virtues — the sensibility, the patience, the emotional richness — we lack. And if the distinction between the two races becomes blurred, as it has in Martinique, and they become one race, then America will be saved.” ........ a chronicle of Black upward mobility and white civic benevolence set at a time of discrimination, violence and segregation. ........ What goes on between the two young men is both obvious and mysterious, and Maxwell’s treatment of it shows a sophistication and sensitivity that 21st-century writers might envy and learn from. ......... The most timely of Maxwell’s books at the moment is surely “They Came Like Swallows,” one of a handful of enduring literary works about the influenza epidemic of 1918-20. Maxwell was 10 when his mother, Blossom, died of the flu, a trauma that he reconstructed 18 years later with devastating precision. The disease creeps into the story via newspaper headlines and local gossip, a tiny detail among the routines of Midwestern, middle-class family life. .......... And then she’s gone, leaving the world in a state of permanent imbalance. ............... The manly, capable, wounded older brother — sometimes missing an arm rather than a leg — is a recurring character, often contrasted with a more introverted, psychologically fragile younger sibling. The stoical widower, the satellite relatives, the shadowy ancestors passing silent judgment on the present — these are fixtures of Maxwell’s imagined world, plucked from the stream of his own experience. ............. He calls people mostly by their own names and presents their situations with what seems like minimal embellishment. “So Long, See You Tomorrow” tells the story of a homicide sparked by sexual jealousy, but its achievement is to render the crime in as unsensational a way as possible, to emphasize its profound ordinariness.......... His own gaze is characteristically backward, to the early days of the automobile, college life before the higher-ed boom, France before American travelers spoiled it. .......... Midwestern though he may have been by birth and temperament, Maxwell was by choice and professional commitment a New Yorker. A “New Yorker” New Yorker, employed at that magazine through much of its midcentury golden age. ....He’s the watchful, sensitive second child; the diffident husband; the attentive father; the awkward but devoted friend. The reliable narrator.

How to Stay Flexible While Traveling