The New York Times: When China Met Iran

Leaked news this month that China and Iran had come to the verge of signing a 25-year trade and military partnership agreement struck like a geopolitical storm in Washington — a rising rival of America and a longtime foe joining forces to threaten the United States’s predominant position in the Middle East. [...]

Yet in Iran and China themselves, the reaction was hardly ebullient. Critics of Iran’s beleaguered president, Hassan Rouhani, called the deal a new Treaty of Turkmenchay, after the notorious 1828 accord under which a weakened Persia ceded much of the South Caucasus to the Russian Empire. In Beijing, a government spokesman who was asked about the deal dodged rather than criticize Washington, insisting blandly that Iran is merely one of many countries with which China is “developing normal friendly relations,” and claiming not to have further information about the reported deal. [...]

In recent years, as the United States has been bogged down in unrewarding conflicts in the Middle East, China has been quietly expanding its economic, diplomatic and even military activities in the region. Beijing’s motives are straightforward but varied: It seeks to advance its interests, such as a pressing need for energy imports and for destinations for surplus capital and labor. In practice, it tries to advance President Xi Jinping’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, which is aimed at reshaping regional economic topographies in China’s favor and counters what Beijing sees as an American effort to contain it. In short, China seeks to establish itself in the eyes of the world — and its own people — as a great power capable of contending with the United States.

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The New York Times: This Is How Scandinavia Got Great

But Nordic nations were ethnically homogeneous in 1800, when they were dirt poor. Their economic growth took off just after 1870, way before their welfare states were established. What really launched the Nordic nations was generations of phenomenal educational policy.

The 19th-century Nordic elites did something we haven’t been able to do in this country recently. They realized that if their countries were to prosper they had to create truly successful “folk schools” for the least educated among them. They realized that they were going to have to make lifelong learning a part of the natural fabric of society. [...]

Today, Americans often think of schooling as the transmission of specialized skill sets — can the student read, do math, recite the facts of biology. Bildung is devised to change the way students see the world. It is devised to help them understand complex systems and see the relations between things — between self and society, between a community of relationships in a family and a town. [...]

When you look at the Nordic bildung model, you realize our problem is not only that we don’t train people with the right job skills. It’s that we don’t have the right lifelong development model to instill the mode of consciousness people need to thrive in a complex pluralistic society.

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The New York Times: A New Secularism Is Appearing in Islam

The rise of Islamism, a highly politicized interpretation of Islam, since the 1970s only seemed to confirm the same view: that “Islam is resistant to secularization,” as Shadi Hamid, a prominent thinker on religion and politics, observed in his 2016 book, Islamic Exceptionalism. [...]

Some of those signs are captured by Arab Barometer, a research network based at Princeton and the University of Michigan whose opinion surveys map a drift away from Islamism — and even Islam itself. The network’s pollsters recently found that in the last five years, in six pivotal Arab countries, “trust in Islamist parties” and “trust in religious leaders” have declined, as well as attendance in mosques.

Granted, the trend isn’t huge. Arabs who describe themselves as “not religious” were 8 percent of those polled in 2013, and have risen to only 13 percent in 2018. So some experts on the region, like Hisham A. Hellyer, an Egyptian-British scholar, advises caution.[...]

The disillusionment is often only with Islamism as a political instrument, but it can turn against Islam, the religion, itself. In Turkey, the latter is manifested in a social trend among its youth that has become the talk of the day: the rise of “deism,” or belief in a God, but not religion. Pro-Erdogan Islamists are worried about this “big threat to Islam,” but perceive it, tragicomically, as yet another Western conspiracy, rather than their own accomplishment.

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The New York Times: Afghan Town’s First Female Mayor Awaits Her Assassination

Ms. Ghafari is not the first woman to take over a traditionally male job in Afghanistan’s patriarchal society. But she has one of the toughest imaginable positions.

Women have been appointed as governors of Daikundi and Bamiyan Provinces, which are culturally tolerant areas by Afghanistan’s standards. For two years, Nili, a town in Daikundi, had a female mayor. She eventually moved to the United States.

But Wardak is a particularly conservative province, where support for the Taliban is so widespread that many major highways are not safe for civilians.

Maidan Shar’s only high school for girls had just 13 graduates last year. Before Ms. Ghafari became mayor, the only woman in town to have held a government job other than teacher was the head of Wardak’s women’s ministry, and she did not dare live in the city, instead residing in Kabul, the country’s capital. Ms. Ghafari also commutes from Kabul for safety reasons. [...]

After she arrived for work that July day, her office was mobbed by angry men brandishing sticks and rocks. She had to be escorted out by Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, the National Directorate for Security, which sent a squad of paramilitary officers to her rescue.

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The New York Times: Boris Johnson Finds His Party Loyalists Aren’t as Loyal as Trump’s

The uprising in Westminster came even though British political parties enforce discipline far more strictly than their American counterparts. Mr. Johnson punished the 21 renegades by throwing them out of the party. Mr. Trump can ostracize Republican dissidents and dry up their funding, but he cannot expunge them from the party rolls. [...]

But Mr. Johnson offers little to supporters beyond a promise to leave the European Union next month. His other policies — tax cuts, more money for the police, tighter immigration rules — are standard-issue Conservative fare. Several of his rivals for the party leadership this spring ran on substantively similar platforms. [...]

While Mr. Johnson’s flamboyant image and populist appeals bear a surface similarity to Mr. Trump, he has not mobilized a grass-roots political movement anywhere near that of the president. Nor does he enjoy the prerogatives of a presidential system with a fixed four-year term. This past week, he wasn’t even able to call an election without the assent of the opposition Labor Party. [...]

American Republicans vote against their party far more regularly than British Conservatives. Senator Jim Jeffords of Vermont made a career of voting against fellow Republicans on issues like tax cuts, arms control and the impeachment of President Bill Clinton before leaving the party in 2001 and starting to caucus with the Democrats.

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Vox: The New York Times 1619 Project is reshaping the conversation on slavery. Conservatives hate it.

At the heart of both men’s criticism is that the New York Times’ focus on race is part of what they and other conservatives see as a broader decline at the newspaper. It’s the type of criticism the institution often hears from President Donald Trump, who has referred to the newspaper as the “failing New York Times.”[...]

The 1619 Project, as it appears online, is sprawling and interactive. Matthew Desmond writes about how slavery shaped modern capitalism and workplace management norms. Jamelle Bouie connects the early 19th century political efforts to preserve slavery to current conservative political movements like the Tea Party and its efforts to nullify federal authority. Kevin Kruse explains how the country’s history of racism contributes to Atlanta traffic. [...]

This represents a shift in race coverage as the country heads toward the 2020 election. The media faced blowback — including from reporters of color — for not talking enough about race in the 2016 election, and outlets are now framing more of the political debates in this country around the topic of race.

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The New York Times: The Nuns Who Bought and Sold Human Beings

Historians say that nearly all of the orders of Catholic sisters established by the late 1820s owned slaves. Today, many Catholic sisters are outspoken champions of social justice and some are grappling with this painful history even as lawmakers in Congress and presidential candidates debate whether reparations should be paid to the descendants of enslaved people. [...]

And while she would like to see the order’s history of slaveholding incorporated into the curriculum of the schools they founded, few of those schools have publicly acknowledged their origins, she said, despite the extensive research that has been done.

“Not one of the school websites has anything about enslavement,” said Sister Dillard, who was also a member of the society’s committee on slavery, accountability and reconciliation. “We’ve whitewashed our history.” [...]

The Jesuit priests, who founded and ran Georgetown, for instance, were among the largest slaveholders in Maryland. And as women began to enter the first Catholic convents in the late-18th and early-19th centuries, some brought their human property with them as part of their dowries, historians say. (I stumbled across this history during my reporting on Georgetown.)

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The New York Times: Why America Is Just Okay

America is the greatest country on earth. It’s a phrase, a slogan, a dogma for patriots. And as we stare down the barrel of an upcoming election, we’re prepared to hear this refrain echo.

In the video Op-Ed above, we argue that the myth of America as the greatest nation on earth is at best outdated and at worst, wildly inaccurate. Comparing the United States of America on global indicators reveals we have fallen well behind Europe — and share more in common with “developing countries” than we’d like to admit.

The New York Times: How Should Christians Have Sex?

A majority of adults who came of age in evangelical churches in the 1990s and 2000s were exposed to “purity culture,” a term for teachings that stressed sexual abstinence before marriage. We had our own rituals, such as “purity balls,” and our own merchandise, such as “purity rings.” I had a “Wait for Me Journal” that I kept as a college freshman; created by a prominent Christian pop singer, the journal was designed to hold letters to my future husband. It held out the promise that if I remained pure, then God would reward good behavior with a husband — surely before I turned 30 so that we could have lots of children. [...]

In light of its damaging effects, several Christian leaders have recently suggested a more gracious sexual ethic. Joshua Harris, best known for his 1997 manifesto, “I Kissed Dating Goodbye,” in which he argued for a model of “courtship” supervised by parents, with no kissing before the wedding day, publicly apologized to people who were “misdirected or unhelpfully influenced by” his teachings. His thinking on sex and dating “has changed significantly in the past 20 years,” he wrote. He admitted that much of what he taught was not actually scriptural. The Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber, a Lutheran pastor in Denver, has proposed a “sexual reformation” in light of purity culture’s traumatic effects. In “Shameless,” Pastor Bolz-Weber writes, “It is time for us to grab some matches and haul our antiquated and harmful ideas about sex and bodies and gender into the yard,” “burn it” and “start over.” She proposes a sexual ethic grounded in the goodness of bodies and of sexual expression based in consent, mutuality and care. [...]

This is why a sexual ethic centered on consent, which is what those of us who’ve lost purity culture are left with, feels flimsy. To be sure, consent is a nonnegotiable baseline, one that Christian communities overlook. (I never once heard about consent in youth group.) But two people can consent to something that’s nonetheless damaging or selfish. Consent crucially protects against sexual assault and other forms of coercion. But it doesn’t necessarily protect against people using one another in quieter ways. I long for more robust categories of right and wrong besides consent — a baseline, but only that — and more than a general reminder not to be a jerk. I can get that from Dan Savage, but I also want to know what Jesus thinks.

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The New York Times: Trump Undercuts Bolton on North Korea and Iran

President Trump was grousing about John R. Bolton, his national security adviser, at his Florida club not long ago. Guests heard the president complaining about the advice he was getting and wondering if Mr. Bolton was taking him down a path he did not want to go. [...]

The disparity was on stark display during Mr. Trump’s four-day visit to Japan that ended Tuesday after he contradicted Mr. Bolton on high-stakes confrontations with both Iran and North Korea. The president declared that, unlike his national security adviser, he was not seeking regime change in Iran and he asserted that, contrary to what Mr. Bolton had said, recent North Korean missile tests did not violate United Nations resolutions. [...]

The president’s supporters, however, said too much was being made of the differences. Mr. Trump has often surrounded himself with advisers who do not agree and encourages the debate, they said. If the disparate messages keep Iran, North Korea and Venezuela uncertain of how far the United States will go, they added, that can work to Mr. Trump’s benefit. [...]

And in some fundamental ways, the two diverge sharply over their approach to the world. Mr. Trump came to office vowing to pull out of overseas wars and has made diplomacy with North Korea a signature initiative. Mr. Bolton has been an advocate of military action and an opponent of negotiations with North Korea.

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The New York Times: Will a Documentary Take Down the Polish Government?

The problem of pedophilia is well illustrated by the story of Father Pawel Kania, one of the subjects of the film. He was detained by church authorities in 2005 for attempting to seduce children and possessing child pornography. But instead of punishing him or turning him over to the authorities, the church relocated him to a parish in the city of Bydgoszcz — where he was, amazingly, tasked with working with children.

In 2010, a court found Father Pawel guilty of possessing child pornography. Two years later, the priest was found in a hotel room with a boy and arrested. In 2015, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for rape and child molestation. Earlier this year, the church finally expelled him from the priesthood. [...]

Law and Justice is also implicated in the abuse cover-ups. One of the party’s best-known figures, Stanislaw Piotrowicz, made his name in 2001, when as a prosecutor in the town of Krosno he dismissed a case against a priest accused of raping six girls. Mr. Piotrowicz argued, “The priest confirmed that he took children into his lap, children would run up to him during catechism, they would hug him, he, too, would hug them, caress them, he sometimes kissed them. The children were happy, they were content. There was no sexual subtext.” After the case was transferred to a different jurisdiction, the priest was convicted. [...]

The Law and Justice and Church faithful have every right to be disoriented. In today’s highly polarized Poland, elections are won thanks to large-scale voter mobilization. And that’s what is happening now — people are angry at both institutions. That may prove the deciding factor in whether or not the party retains power. The first poll since the documentary appeared shows that the opposition European Coalition ranks 10 percent above Law and Justice, 43.6 percent to 33 percent, a 6 percentage-point drop in a week for the ruling party.

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The New York Times: The Surprising Place Mueller Found Resistance to Trump

The strongest pushback against President Trump came instead from a source never contemplated by the founders: his own branch of the government. The F.B.I. and the intelligence agencies opened their investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 election even before Mr. Trump took the oath of office. The president thought that he could quash this inquiry by dismissing James Comey, the F.B.I. director, but as the president’s strategist Steve Bannon reportedly cautioned, “you can’t fire the F.B.I.” Mr. Trump’s appointee as deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, initiated the special counsel inquiry and appointed Mr. Mueller to lead it, while Attorney General Jeff Sessions — an early Trump backer — refused to “unrecuse” himself from the Russia investigation.

Even more surprising, resistance arose from key White House personnel. In June 2017, when Mr. Trump tried to remove Mr. Mueller, the White House counsel Donald McGahn refused to carry out the directive. The next month, when Trump tried to get Mr. Sessions to limit the special counsel’s jurisdiction, the White House deputy chief of staff, Rick Dearborn, declined to relay the order to the attorney general. Later in July 2017, when Mr. Trump told White House chief of staff Reince Priebus to demand Mr. Sessions’s resignation, Mr. Priebus refused. Mr. McGahn also disobeyed the president’s early 2018 directive to create a false paper trail obscuring an earlier effort by Mr. Trump to have the special counsel fired.

The resistance to the president from within the executive branch is not a new phenomenon. Clashes between the president and cabinet officials date back to George Washington’s conflicts with his first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson. President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, routinely disobeyed his boss’s instructions on matters ranging from press contacts to arms control talks. What makes the pushback to President Trump unique is that it has trumpeted its existence in the open.

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The New York Times: The Dying Art of Disagreement (Sept. 24, 2017)

Nor is this just an impression of the moment. Extensive survey data show that Republicans are much more right-leaning than they were twenty years ago, Democrats much more left-leaning, and both sides much more likely to see the other as a mortal threat to the nation’s welfare.[...]

The polarization is personal: Fully 50 percent of Republicans would not want their child to marry a Democrat, and nearly a third of Democrats return the sentiment. Interparty marriage has taken the place of interracial marriage as a family taboo. [...]

As I think about it, I’m not sure we were taught anything at all. What we did was read books that raised serious questions about the human condition, and which invited us to attempt to ask serious questions of our own. Education, in this sense, wasn’t a “teaching” with any fixed lesson. It was an exercise in interrogation.[...]

In other words, to disagree well you must first understand well. You have to read deeply, listen carefully, watch closely. You need to grant your adversary moral respect; give him the intellectual benefit of doubt; have sympathy for his motives and participate empathically with his line of reasoning. And you need to allow for the possibility that you might yet be persuaded of what he has to say. [...]

According to a new survey from the Brookings Institution, a plurality of college students today — fully 44 percent — do not believe the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution protects so-called “hate speech,” when of course it absolutely does. More shockingly, a narrow majority of students — 51 percent — think it is “acceptable” for a student group to shout down a speaker with whom they disagree. An astonishing 20 percent also agree that it’s acceptable to use violence to prevent a speaker from speaking.

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The New York Times: Sexual Abuse of Nuns: Longstanding Church Scandal Emerges From Shadows

The pope’s remarks on Tuesday, in response to a question posed on the papal plane about Ms. Scaraffia’s article, came after decades of persistent allegations of such abuses, and seeming Vatican inaction, which has now collided with the heightened awareness of the #MeToo era. They also came just ahead of an extraordinary conference of bishops on sexual abuse scheduled this month at the Vatican.[...]

Advocates for abused nuns were relieved the pope had at last put the issue on the church’s radar. But they also noted that it was a long time coming and that the pope’s other remarks Tuesday did not inspire confidence in a speedy solution. [...]

“I was wondering when he said they were dealing with the problem for a long time, because we just don’t know what those actions are,” said Zuzanna Flisowska, the general manager of Voices of Faith, a group advocating for more participation by women in lay leadership positions inside the church. [...]

In 1994, Sister Maura O’Donohue sent the Vatican the results of a multiyear, 23-nation survey about such abuse, which was especially rampant in Africa where nuns were considered safe sexual partners for priests who feared infection by H.I.V.

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The New York Times: Too Ugly to Be Saved? Singapore Weighs Fate of Its Brutalist Buildings

Landmarks of so-called Brutalist architecture, like Golden Mile Tower, are emerging havens for the sort of gritty, artsy subcultures that are mostly absent in Singapore, a banking center known for its tidy streets and often-overbearing governance.

Others see them as important markers of national identity because they were designed by a generation of up-and-coming local architects just after the city-state’s founding in 1965, when the area’s growth was fueled by large-scale urban renewal projects. [...]

Brutalist buildings represent Singapore’s early “hopes and aspirations,” said Darren Soh, an architectural photographer. He said destroying them would add to a sense among many residents of this former British colony that buildings of all kinds are being demolished and replaced too quickly.[...]

The city-state is also known for its meticulously restored shophouses and other examples of British Colonial architecture, as well as contemporary green buildings that were designed to look stunning but also save energy in a tropical climate.

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The New York Times: Taiwan Asked Voters 10 Questions. It Got Some Unexpected Answers

“Saturday’s referendum furthers a long-held D.P.P. goal to get referendums institutionalized,” said Michael Fahey, a legal consultant based in Taipei. “Major sections of the D.P.P. always wanted to have some kind of referendum law in case there ever needs to be a referendum on self-determination, there will be a mechanism in place for doing that.”

One referendum question that did approach the issue of identity concerned what Taiwan should be called at the Olympic Games and other international sporting events. In a 1981 deal with the International Olympic Committee, Taiwan agreed to compete under the name “Chinese Taipei.” But in recent years the people of Taiwan have increasingly sought to assert their identity, and a referendum question asked if the island should compete as “Taiwan” instead.

That proposal failed after a campaign warning that doing so might lead to Taiwan’s being banned from Olympic competition under Chinese pressure. The referendum result could allow Beijing to argue that the people of Taiwan are quite happy to be identified as Chinese. [...]

The referendum questions on gay rights were the subject of a well-funded and highly organized campaign led by conservative Christians and other groups. The campaign was characterized by misinformation, the bulk of which was spread online, including messages warning of an AIDS epidemic and low birthrates, or that educating students about different sexual orientations would influence their sexual choices. [...]

The government has three months to present bills reflecting the referendum outcomes. While the vote against same-sex marriage does not affect the court ruling, it could make lawmakers more inclined to offer same-sex couples a separate civil union status rather than the same legal status that heterosexual married couples have.

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The New York Times: Rick Scott Wins Florida Senate Race After Recount

The win in Florida gives Republicans a 52-to-47 margin in the Senate. If the party also retains the Senate seat in Mississippi after a Nov. 27 runoff, it will have a 53-to-47 edge, a two-seat pickup for the 2018 cycle. [...]

For now, Republicans will savor another victory by Mr. Scott, who has mastered the ability to eke out wins. No politician in the state’s recent history has as enviable a record: Mr. Scott is unbeaten in three consecutive statewide contests, two for governor and one for senator.

His margin has shrunk with each victory — he beat Alex Sink by 1.2 percentage points in 2010, Charlie Crist by 1 point in 2014, and Mr. Nelson by 0.1 of a point. But this year, for the first time, he obtained a majority of the vote, 50.1 percent.

Behind Mr. Scott’s victories lies his vast personal wealth. He and his wife, Ann, put more than $70 million into his first campaign for governor and nearly $13 million into his second; this year, Mr. Scott spent more than $50 million on the Senate race. But as a candidate, Mr. Scott, who is not known for his charisma, did more than just open his checkbook: He campaigned incessantly and stayed relentlessly on message, casting Mr. Nelson as a do-nothing has-been who had to be retired. [...]

During the campaign, Mr. Scott carefully distanced himself from Mr. Trump in an election that turned heavily on voters’ dislike for the president’s administration. Over the course of his eight years as governor, he also tempered his Tea Party conservatism somewhat, shifting to support more moderate measures on guns and immigration. But he embraced Mr. Trump’s bombastic style after Election Day, when it came to claiming rampant fraud nobody could prove.

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The New York Times: It's Time to Talk About the N.R.A.

The massacre of 11 people at a Pittsburgh synagogue on Saturday, allegedly by a man with 21 guns registered to his name, was terrifyingly predictable. Every day in America, about 104 people die from guns, while in Japan it takes about a decade for that many to die from gun violence.[...]

Why do we Americans kill each other, and ourselves, with guns at such rates? One answer as it relates to the Pittsburgh attack is a toxic brew of hate and bigotry, but the ubiquity of guns leverages hatred into murder. And let’s be blunt: One reason for our country’s paralysis on meaningful action on guns is the National Rifle Association. If we want to learn the lessons of this latest rampage, and try to prevent another one, then let’s understand that saving lives is not just about universal background checks and red flag laws, but also about defanging the N.R.A.[...]

In the 1920s and 1930s, the N.R.A. favored tighter gun laws, and its president, Karl Frederick, said that the carrying of weapons “should be sharply restricted and only under license.” In 1934, the United States helped pioneer modern gun laws with the National Firearms Act, with the blessings of the N.R.A., and came close to banning handguns. As recently as the 1960s, the N.R.A. supported — more grudgingly — some limits on guns.[...]

The group claims six million members, although many analysts believe that number is inflated. But even if membership is four million, that is still a huge number, and by all accounts the N.R.A. does an excellent job caring for its members and keeping them loyal; indeed, circulation appears to have risen for its magazines. Perhaps more important, there is nothing comparable on the other side; that’s why the N.R.A. wins.

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The New York Times: A Catholic Civil War?

As the liberal Vatican observer Robert Mickens writes, “There is no denying that homosexuality is a key component to the clergy sex abuse (and now sexual harassment) crisis.” James Alison, himself a gay priest, observes, “A far, far greater proportion of the clergy, particularly the senior clergy, is gay than anyone has been allowed to understand,” and many of those gay clergymen are sexually active. Father Alison describes the “absurd and pharisaical” rules of the clerical closet, which include “doesn’t matter what you do so long as you don’t say so in public or challenge the teaching.” [...]

After Monsignor Ricca’s sins were exposed, Francis chose to stand by him, famously saying, “Who am I to judge?” Msgr. Krzysztof Charamsa suffered a less happy fate. The priest, who worked at the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, announced in 2015 that he was gay and had a male partner, and asked the church to change its teaching. He was immediately fired. Both Monsignor Ricca and Monsignor Charamsa had sinned, but only one had stepped out of line.

The other rule of the clerical closet is not violating the civil law — or at least not getting caught. Francis defended Monsignor Ricca by distinguishing between sins and crimes: “They are not crimes, right? Crimes are something different.” This distinction provides cover for sex abuse. When countless priests are allowed to live double lives, it is hard to tell who is concealing crimes. Cardinal McCarrick was widely seen as “merely” preying on adult seminarians. Now he has been credibly accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

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The New York Times: I Stood Up in Mass and Confronted My Priest. You Should, Too.

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, I naturally turned to the church for solace. But on the following Sunday, to my surprise, none of the church leaders at Mass acknowledged what had just happened. I was deflated and left feeling empty. Soon after, the sexual abuse scandal erupted. [...]

It was the church’s own teachings that made me stand up on Sunday and question the priest. Catholics are taught that it’s imperative to help others. We are told to protect the innocent. The church has profoundly failed to abide by these basic principles by allowing the sins of sexual abuse to continue. [...]

Catholics cannot keep on filling the pews every Sunday. It is wrong to support the church.

At the end of last Sunday’s service, before the recessional, the priest stopped us and kindly told my son that he had a good dad. Then the father looked at me and said the most honest thing I’ve ever heard in a church: “You and I have no influence.”

He was right. And if congregants like me have no influence, and if parents like me no longer feel safe and comfortable bringing our sons and daughters to make Communion, then the Catholic Church is beyond redemption.

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