If most ballots this fall are cast by mail, the results may not be known for days. That could plunge America into prolonged controversy and undermine confidence in the outcome and the democratic system, both something adversaries in Moscow, Beijing and Tehran would cheer.

It’s been going around for some time and now appears to be in danger of spreading widely. I refer not to Covid-19, but to Donald-20, or, to use its pseudoscientific name, Trump Derangement Syndrome. Research has shown that TDS appears in five stages, each of advanced intensity.

For many years I’ve lived in paradise—the Upper West Side. We have convivial neighbors, beautiful buildings, great subways, excellent theater and dance, fine libraries and bookstores, wonderful restaurants, pleasant markets. There were problems but we worked them out amicably.

In the 1980s, when I was a young professor of physics and astronomy at Yale, deconstructionism was in vogue in the English Department.

Gewalt gegen Polizisten gehört fast schon zum guten Ton in der westlichen Gesellschaft. In Deutschland wirkten das Beispiel Joschka Fischer und der Aufstieg von Grünen und Teilen der SPD aus extremen linken Zusammenhängen als symbolische Etablierung.

Wie lange hält die grosse Koalition? Die volle Legislatur? Eher unwahrscheinlich. Bis zur Bayern-Wahl am 14. Oktober dieses Jahres? Vermutlich ja.

The late 1960s were the heyday of modern American liberalism, which was then an ideology of hope. A bipartisan Congress passed landmark civil-rights legislation in 1964 and 1965. The precipitating event of the urban riots in 1968 was the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

The similarities between this week’s riots and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 are obvious. Both were occasioned by appalling video images, and both divided the nation along partisan and ideological lines. The differences between the two events, however, are more revealing.