Finally reading Stephen Hawking’s “A Brief History of Time” helped me understand American politics today.

Over the past week - indeed, over the past year - U.S. President Donald Trump has broken one political rule after another. "When I signed up to be a conservative," an eminent Washington think-tanker said to me on Thursday, "I thought conservatism stood for free trade, fiscal responsibility and personal character." He might have added some firmness towards dictators.

The age of the Internet has given rise to a kind of ideological polarization that is set to get worse, says the historian.

On German television in July 2015, Merkel had reduced a young Palestinian refugee to tears by explaining that her family might have to face deportation. “There are thousands and thousands of people in Palestinian refugee camps,” the chancellor explained. “If we now say, ‘You can all come’ . . . . we just cannot manage that.” The waterworks worked. Six weeks later, Merkel had opened the gates of Germany and declared: “We can manage that.”

Is the world turning pinker? Is all for the best (as Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss claims in “Candide”) in the best of all possible worlds — or at least, better than in any previous state of the world?

Or is the world turning a darker shade — blood red rather than pink? In the wake of yet another massacre at yet another American school by yet another political extremist with yet another screw loose and yet another assault rifle, it is hard to swallow the pinker thesis. I refer, of course, to my friend and Harvard colleague Steven Pinker, whose latest book makes the (almost) Panglossian case that things have never been better.

Are we living through the re-mystification of the world?

Much that goes on around us is baffling these days. Financial market movements, for example, seem increasingly mysterious. Why, after close to a decade of sustained recovery from the nadir of early 2009, did global stock markets sell off so sharply this month?

Two forces are now at work, both of which hurt the Democrats. The first is the slow, far-from-steady but nevertheless perceptible stabilization of Trump’s administration as chief of staff John Kelly has tightened his grip on the post-Bannon White House. The second is the economy. The employment report last week seemed to vindicate Trump’s tub-thumping: Not only were 200,000 new jobs created in January, but average hourly wages were 2.9 percent higher than a year before, the strongest number since the financial crisis struck in 2009.

Facebook is weathering a storm: The dominant global player in social networks has witnessed increasingly worrisome revelations about its role in the 2016 U.S. elections, raising concerns about the company’s power. This has coincided with a revival of interest in antitrust policies on the left and a growing suspicion of Facebook’s liberal politics on the right. Meanwhile, a growing body of research points to the psychological harm caused, especially to young people, by the addictive qualities of Facebook’s mobile app. All of this has made Facebook the least loved of the biggest American technology companies — and led founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg to pledge to “fix” Facebook. And who better to do that, he says, than Facebook itself?

The most interesting man at Davos was not He Who Must Not Be Named. (In the style of the Harry Potter books, I’m going to omit the name of the Dark Lord, otherwise known as the president of the United States. To be frank, I’m bored of him.) No, the most interesting man at this year’s World Economic Forum was a rather scrawny 53-year-old former English teacher from Hangzhou in eastern China whose business is poised to take over the world economy: Jack Ma, the founder and chairman of Alibaba.

Two years ago, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, it seemed inconceivable that Donald Trump would be elected president of the United States. One year ago, it seemed inconceivable that he would ever come to Davos in that role. This week, the worst nightmare of Davos Man is coming true. President Trump — the personification of all that the “globalists” fear and loathe — is coming to town.