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At 6:03 P.M. on Monday, right on time, air-raid sirens sounded over Jerusalem. Hamas’s normally secretive military head, Mohammed Deif, abetted by a spokesman for the Qassam Brigades, which Deif commands, had issued a warning. If, by 6 P.M., Israel did not remove its forces from the al-Aqsa Mosque, and, notably, the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood, in East Jerusalem, where Jewish settlers are trying to evict Palestinian families, Israel would pay a “heavy price.” His only means to exact a price were rockets, launched from Gaza. Deif had inserted himself into a troubled moment. Last Friday,...

Save this story for later. When the sociologist Diane Vaughan came up with the term “the normalization of deviance,” she was referring to NASA administrators’ disregard of the flaw that caused the Challenger space shuttle to explode, in 1986. The idea was that people in an organization can become so accepting of a problem that they no longer consider it to be problematic. (In the case of the Challenger, NASA had been warned that the shuttle’s O-rings were likely to fail in cold temperatures.) Consider Facebook: for years, its leadership has known that the social network has abetted ...

Save this story for later. Since 1975, Cuba’s ruling Communist Party has periodically convened a congress at which, in keeping with the arcane rituals of socialist states during the Soviet era, the Party makes public official policy guidelines. This year, the eighth congress ended after a four-day session that was arguably its most momentous: it coincided not only with the sixtieth anniversary of the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which led to the breakdown in relations with the United States and helped to precipitate the Cuban Missile Crisis a year later, but also with a historic curtain call ...

There were complaints that the pause would undermine confidence in vaccines. But it would have been more disastrous for the F.D.A. to be seen as ignoring or covering up the issue.

Save this story for later. In June of 1975, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, of India, declared what became known as the Emergency; she suspended elections and jailed thousands of political opponents. That same year, Indira Jaising, a lawyer in Mumbai, formed the Workers Law Center, to represent the striking railway workers whose agitation had helped provoke Gandhi. “I belonged to the ‘Midnight’s Children’ generation,” Jaising recalled recently, referring to Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel about the birth of independent India, in 1947. Jaising was six years old at the...