Attention to the Unseen

Rana Dasgupta writes: What is happening to national politics? Every day in the US, events further exceed the imaginations of absurdist novelists and comedians; politics in the UK still shows few signs of recovery after the “national nervous breakdown” of Brexit. France “narrowly escaped a heart attack” in last year’s elections, but the country’s leading daily feels this has done little to alter the “accelerated decomposition” of the political system. In neighbouring Spain, El País goes so far as to…

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Gabriel Thompson writes: On a Saturday evening in April of 2017, Josh Damigo was home in Oxnard, California, about 50 miles up the coast from Los Angeles, when he received a text message from a friend. “Are you OK?” she asked. “Kinda,” he texted back. “Why do you ask?” “Um, your brother is all over Twitter right now.” Josh went online. “Oh shit,” he wrote back. That morning, a motley collection of people—from mainstream Donald Trump supporters to helmeted militia…

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Ann Hulbert writes: Anyone used to worrying about coddled young people, their backbone eroded by oversolicitous elders and smartphone addiction, was in for a surprisingly mature show of spine at last weekend’s March for Our Lives. The Parkland, Florida, survivors-turned-prodigy-activists and their followers—along with Dreamers and other youthful protesters lately—couldn’t possibly be denounced as out-of-control “bums,” President Nixon’s epithet for (older) student protesters half a century ago. Quite the contrary. These young people do grit and gumption with star-pupil poise…

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The New York Times reports: The Trump administration’s first year of immigration policy has relied on claims that immigrants bring crime into America. President Trump’s latest target is sanctuary cities. “Every day, sanctuary cities release illegal immigrants, drug dealers, traffickers, gang members back into our communities,” he said last week. “They’re safe havens for just some terrible people.” As of 2017, according to Gallup polls, almost half of Americans agreed that immigrants make crime worse. But is it true that…

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Mother Jones reports: The census is America’s largest civic event, the only one that involves everyone in the country, young and old, citizen and noncitizen, rich and poor—or at least it’s supposed to. It’s been conducted every 10 years since 1790, when US Marshals first swore an oath to undertake “a just and perfect enumeration” of the population. The census determines how $675 billion in federal funding is allocated to states and localities each year for things like health care,…

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Peter S Goodman writes: History was not supposed to turn out this way. In the aftermath of World War II, the victorious Western countries forged institutions — NATO, the European Union, and the World Trade Organization — that aimed to keep the peace through collective military might and shared prosperity. They promoted democratic ideals and international trade while investing in the notion that coalitions were the antidote to destructive nationalism. But now the model that has dominated geopolitical affairs for…

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