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Shanto Iyengar, a Stanford political scientist whose 2012 paper, “Affect, Not Ideology: A Social Identity Perspective on Polarization” (written with Gaurav Sood and Yphtach Lelkes), is a seminal work in the study of partisan hostility, stressed in an email responding to my queries that one of the most significant dangers…

With a humility stemming from his party’s electoral disappointment, President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa was sworn in for a second term on Wednesday, conceding bluntly to the government’s failure to cure a nation that remains deeply divided and economically fraught in the three decades since the end of apartheid….

In the Senate, the term “U.C.” stands for “unanimous consent” — usually verbal shorthand for an agreement by all senators to quickly take up and pass a bill. But with the November elections just months away, it might as well stand for: “You see? Our political opponents are dead wrong…

Dozens of people have died amid scorching temperatures during the annual hajj pilgrimage to the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, according to reports from official media around the Middle East and Africa. With forecasts saying that temperatures would top 113 degrees Fahrenheit, or 45 degrees Celsius, on Tuesday,…

Today we celebrate Juneteenth, the day when word of the Emancipation Proclamation reached the farthest outpost in America. Many people do not realize that Emancipation did not legally end slavery in the United States, however. The 13th Amendment — the culmination of centuries of resistance by enslaved people, a lifetime…

For those looking for the hidden hand of politics in what the Supreme Court does, there’s plenty of reason for suspicion on Donald Trump’s as-yet-decided immunity case given its urgency. There are, of course, explanations that have nothing to do with politics for why a ruling still hasn’t been issued….

Humanitarian groups have thousands of tons of food, fuel and medicine ready to send to Gaza. That aid is sitting in Egypt, Jordan and Cyprus, just hours away, or less, from the people who need it. But much of it can’t get in. Why? Some problems are typical for a…

The center of Skopje, the capital of North Macedonia, a Balkan country born just 33 years ago as an independent state, is awash in history. A statue of Alexander the Great looms over the central square. One of his father, Philip II of Macedon, towers above a nearby piazza atop…

“Our economy has truly turned a corner,” Rishi Sunak, Britain’s prime minister, said last week as he introduced his party’s election manifesto, buoyed by recent data showing that Britain’s economy had exited from a recession more strongly than expected in the beginning of the year and that inflation had slowed…

The federal government has released a report that for the first time acknowledges the harms that dams in the Pacific Northwest have “inflicted and continue to inflict” on Native American tribes, it said. The report, released on Tuesday by the Interior Department, details the “historic, ongoing, and cumulative damage and…