If Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign was a lean, ad hoc operation that burned through three unlikely campaign managers — and it was — his re-election campaign shows how victory can transform a chaotic organization into a low-drama machine run by now-seasoned hands.

Such distant secondhand accounts are not enough, Dr Fanta concludes. To be deterred from placing themselves back in danger, people have to hear disaster tales from eye witnesses who can convey the visceral emotion of having lived through them. The group’s findings thus suggest that one way of teaching history more effectively might be to bring eye witnesses into the classroom. That approach will not work for ever, of course. Over time, witnesses’ own memories fade, and then the witnesses themselves expire.

Many progressives think that independence from religious belief is a crucial source of the power of human rights. According to many conservatives, the spurning of faith reflects a dangerous delusion inscribed in human rights doctrine. Amid the bad blood and casual vituperation that do daily damage to American politics, correcting the error common to the left and right that human rights are one thing and religion entirely another might contribute to rebuilding common ground.

On page after page, special counsel Robert Mueller detailed an elaborate, sophisticated Russian operation to sow division in the U.S. and interfere in the 2016 presidential election by using cyberattacks and social media as weapons. The Russians’ methods may have been new. But their goal was not. Since the Cold War, Russia has worked to create a fractious West that no longer poses an existential threat.