‘It wasn’t quite clear what it was that got 52% of the vote’: Amartya Sen in London, January 2017.Photograph: Richard Saker for the Observer A martya Sen is one of the world’s greatest living economists. Scarred by witnessing at first hand the life-and-death choices confronting so many poor Hindus…

http://qz.com/635002/teaching-kids-philosophy-makes-them-smarter-in-math-and-english/

https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-logic

Naomi Savage, Emeshed Man, 1966. Francis M. Naumann Fine Art This is the tenth in a series of dialogues with philosophers and critical theorists on the question of violence. This conversation is with Cary Wolfe, who is the director of the Center for Critical and Cultural Theory at Rice University…

Credit Illustration by Tom Bachtell On December 6th, less than a month after the election, Vice-President Joe Biden, who was in New York to receive the Robert F. Kennedy Ripple of Hope Award, for his decades of public service, used the occasion to urge Americans not to despair. “I remind people, ’68…

Credit Illustration by Tom Bachtell On April 8, 1968, Representative John Conyers, from Detroit, marched through downtown Memphis with Coretta Scott King, Ralph Abernathy, Harry Belafonte, and thousands of people who had come to that city from across the country. Four days earlier, Martin Luther…

Illustration by Cristiana Couceiro, photograph by Nigel Dickson/Getty Images On Jan. 20, Michelle Obama will hand her home over to a man who rose to power in part by spreading lies about her husband and intends to pulverize much of his work. If presidential tradition and her own recent conduct are…

Leigh Wells The secret to happiness in almost any relationship is knowing what not to say. Ask your new love about her old loves and you’ll learn more than you want to know, and hear things you’ll never be able to unhear. Start telling your teacher that your dog ate your homework while your grandma…

I f the government ends up approving the $85 billion AT&T-Time Warner merger, credit won’t necessarily belong to the executives, bankers, lawyers, and lobbyists pushing for the deal. More likely, it will be due to the professors. A serial acquirer, AT&T must persuade the government to allow every…

On 9 November, my first thought upon waking was, ‘I can’t.’ I couldn’t bear to listen to the stuttering attempts of newscasters making digestible our new terrifying reality. I couldn’t bear to hear our president elect’s voice piping through the tinny speaker of my radio alarm clock. I couldn’t get…

The president-elect continues to employ a battalion of retired cops and FBI agents to protect him and clamp down on protesters. GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — President-elect Donald Trump has continued employing a private security and intelligence team at his victory rallies, and he is expected to keep at…

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/02/michelle-obama-and-us

Pro-choice and anti-abortion advocates facing off outside the Supreme Court in March. Drew Angerer/Getty Images Half slave and half free. The last time the United States split into two countries, it didn’t work out at all well. If that sounds like a hyperbolic reaction to the yawning red state, blue…

The American media, over the past year, has been trying to work out something of a mystery: Why is the Republican electorate supporting a far-right, orange-toned populist with no real political experience, who espouses extreme and often bizarre views? How has Donald Trump , seemingly out of nowhere,…

North Carolina residents waiting outside the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library to vote on Oct. 24 in Charlotte. Brian Blanco/Getty Images Tomorrow, and the early voting leading up to it, mark the first presidential election since the Supreme Court clipped the protective wings of the Voting Rights Act.…

Kevin McCarthy, as Dr. Miles Bennell, poking a pod in the 1956 film “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.” Allied Artists/Getty Images “At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn’t. Something evil had taken possession of the town.” Those lines are from the opening voice-over in a great…

The President-elect’s cabinet appointments speak to a harsh reality: this is an anti-science Administration. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY TIMOTHY FADEK / BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY Last week, the Space, Science, and Technology subcommittee of the House of Representatives tweeted a misleading story from Breitbart…

L ast May, Poland’s ruling Law and Justice Party, a right-wing nationalist party committed to upending Poland’s established liberal order, convened an “audit” of the previous government in the high-Modernist Parliament building in Warsaw. Since winning a decisive electoral victory in October 2015,…

WASHINGTON — Yascha Mounk is used to being the most pessimistic person in the room. Mr. Mounk, a lecturer in government at Harvard, has spent the past few years challenging one of the bedrock assumptions of Western politics: that once a country becomes a liberal democracy, it will stay that way. His…

In recent days, President-elect Donald J. Trump has rejected the C.I.A.’s conclusions that Russian hackers attempted to sway the American elections, and has accused unnamed officials within the agency of trying to undermine him. And he has rejected the tradition of receiving the intelligence…

Illustration by Javier Jaén Three years ago, I read “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” to my daughter. She smiled as she heard about Huck’s mischief, his jokes, his dress-up games, but it was his relationship with the runaway slave Jim that intrigued her most. Huck and Jim travel together as Jim seeks…

O ne of the strangest episodes in Donald Trump’s very weird campaign was the appearance of an Englishman looking rather pleased with himself at a rally on Aug. 24 in Jackson, Miss. The Englishman was Nigel Farage, introduced by Trump as “the Man Behind Brexit.” Most people in the crowd probably…

November 30, 2016 Authoritarianism and Post-Truth Politics In response to the bizarre politics of 2016, the Oxford Dictionaries have selected as the word of the year “post-truth,” a term that highlights how far we’ve come in the eleven years since Stephen Colbert coined “truthiness” for his comedic…

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/07/how-american-politics-went-insane/485570/

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/03/no-spanking-no-time-out-no-problems/475440/

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-12-08/google-makes-so-much-money-it-never-had-to-worry-about-financial-discipline

In a recent issue of Judicature , an academic journal for judges published by Duke University Law School, Timothy J. Corrigan, a federal district judge in Florida, reflected on “the most multifaceted, emotional, and challenging task a judge performs ” — sentencing convicted criminal defendants.…

Workers removed President George H.W. Bush’s desk from the Oval Office at noon on the day of President Bill Clinton’s inauguration, January 20, 1993. David Hume Kennerly/Getty Images The only presidential inauguration I’ve attended was Bill Clinton’s first, on Jan. 20, 1993. I took two spare tickets…

The zealous prosecution of national-security whistle-blowers is a stain on President Obama’s legacy. But it’s not the whole story. Credit PHOTOGRAPH BY PETE SOUZA / THE WHITE HOUSE Back in 2008, Senator Barack Obama promised that, if elected, he would run the most transparent Administration in…

Donald Trump speaking to supporters at a rally in November. Damon Winter/The New York Times WASHINGTON — On July 7, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Donald J. Trump, met privately with House Republicans near the Capitol. I was present as chief policy director of the House Republican…

Mark Pernice IN the wake of the presidential election, as Democrats realized that Republicans will soon control all three branches of the federal government, progressives disinclined to secede from the Union rediscovered another exit strategy: states’ rights. Mayors in several so-called sanctuary…

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/12/12/the-real-voting-scandal-of-2016

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-real-risk-behind-trumps-taiwan-call

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/obama-politely-asks-trump-to-wait-until-inauguration-before-destroying-world?intcid=mod-latest

https://aeon.co/essays/on-epigenetics-we-need-both-darwin-s-and-lamarck-s-theories

Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, at the Treasury in Washington. Alex Wong/Getty Images WASHINGTON — Mild-mannered, lawyerly and with a genius for trivia, Richard Cordray is not the sort of guy you picture at the center of Washington’s bitter partisan wars over…

In his 1962 essay “Letter From a Region in My Mind,” James Baldwin identified the largest obstacle to progress in this country as the undying belief in American greatness. This is a myth that would have to be abandoned, he argued, if the country were to see itself as it truly is and redress its…

Avalon Nuovo Tallahassee, Fla. — Richard B. Spencer is one of the main figures of the alt-right movement, a former doctoral student from Duke whose movement supports the creation of “an ethno-state” for white Europeans and “peaceful ethnic cleansing.” The Southern Poverty Law Center describes him as…