Legal settlements, like the one announced on Thursday afternoon between the National Football League and some forty-five hundred of its retired players and families of those who have died, nearly always underwhelm. You start with a large number, or what sounds like one, at any rate—in this case, $765 million. Then you divide by the number of plaintiffs, and you consider the larger context that brought the two sides into conflict—in this case, traumatic brain injury and a corporate medical establishment that was, at best, slow to warn of its risks. (At worst? Think Big Tobacco.) The rough per-capita payout—given that all of the N.F.L.’s current retirees are eligible for compensation, and that it is estimated that there could be as many as twenty thousand of them—could come to less than forty thousand dollars, to be disbursed over a period of a couple decades. (And not all of the money is actually going to compensation—$75 million will be spent to pay for medical exams, and $10 million is earmarked for research and education. The $675 million that the players will receive won’t be distributed equally; some will get more, up to a maximum of $5 million—others, presumably, much less.) No, it’s not “chump change,” but neither is it much of a hit to the bottom line of the world’s most profitable sports league, an organization that was being sued by almost a quarter of its former athletes. The rights to televise “Monday Night Football” alone are worth one and a half billion dollars a year to the N.F.L., or about twice the size of the settlement. The league’s annual revenues approach ten billion dollars. What’s more, in settling early, the league escaped discovery and depositions that might have revealed more about what it knew, and when. The terms are explicitly agnostic on the subject of whether the plaintiffs’ injuries were caused by football; the N.F.L. admits no liability. What concussion crisis?

In the wake of what appears to have been the large-scale use of chemical weapons by forces loyal to the Syrian President Bashar Al Assad, the United States and its allies seem to be approaching sort of muscular intervention into Syria’s civil war. But the questions that have kept the West from substantive action thus far still apply: What would such an action require of the United States in the long term? Would getting involved stop Assad from using chemical weapons again? If the rebels prevail, who really wins? On this week’s Political Scene podcast, Dexter Filkins and George Packer join Dorothy Wickenden to discuss President Obama’s dilemma and the options he has now.

In two weeks, we will commemorate another anniversary—the twelfth—of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center. This particular anniversary is notable because a new building now stands on that long-empty site.

1 World Trade Center, the iconic Ground Zero skyscraper formerly known as the Freedom Tower, this summer became the tallest building in the Western Hemisphere by some measures. It’s not, however, the building that Daniel Libeskind, the site’s master planner, conceived of over a decade ago. In fact, there’s only one remnant of the original design—the building’s height, a symbolic 1,776 feet. Another architect transformed the original plans, and Libeskind has been cut almost entirely out of the process.

[Update: On Thursday evening, Parliament rejected military action in Syria by a vote of 285 to 272.]

Not before time, the public and its elected officials have taken a stand against the rush to bomb Syria—an action that could embroil the United States in a bloody civil war and lead us down a path to goodness knows where. The public in question turned out to be the British, but no matter. All popular movements have to start someplace. Now it’s up to the American people and their representatives to demand a similar pause for reflection and political debate.

After yesterday’s dramatic developments in London, which culminated in Prime Minister David Cameron delaying a parliamentary vote to authorize British participation in an American-led attack, President Obama faces the choice of putting off the bombing or going ahead without the support of America’s closest European ally. Should he choose to hold off for a few days, which seems likely, it will give Congress time to consider the matter, and to schedule a vote approving military action. Until now, the White House has resisted such a vote, and the Republican leadership has stopped short of demanding one. But now that Britain has allowed the people’s representatives to have a say, and also given the U.N. inspectors in Syria some time to complete their investigation of last week’s awful gas attack, the political dynamic in Washington may change.

For the entirety of his Presidential career, Barack Obama has attempted to reconcile the competing strains of “We Shall Overcome” and “Hail to the Chief.” At the outset of his Presidency—in ways that he spoke about explicitly on Wednesday, in his speech before the Lincoln Memorial—there was a causal relationship between those ideals: his election was the ultimate validation of the audacity at the heart of the simple creed that drove the civil-rights movement. Yet Obama’s speech, marking the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington, also laid bare the contradictions in those two themes and raised a dispiriting question: Has a black Presidency moved us closer to the ideal of King’s dream, or reflected its exhaustion as a real possibility?

A week from Sunday, it will be five years since Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy, sparking the biggest financial crisis since the nineteen-thirties and a seven-hundred-billion-dollar bank bailout. In a recent interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, of the Times and CNBC, Hank Paulson, the man who, as Treasury Secretary, was primarily responsible for the rescue of Wall Street, expressed outrage—or at least misgivings—about the fact that many of the bankers whom the taxpayers rescued promptly turned around and gave themselves huge bonuses. “To say I was disappointed is an understatement,” Paulson said. “My view has nothing to do with legality and everything to do with what was right, and everything to do with just a colossal lack of self-awareness as to how they were viewed by the American public.”

Whom should President Obama ask before he bombs Syria? One of the answers being bandied about is nobody but his own conscience, and some generals who will tell him how to do it. An Op-Ed in today’s Times tells him not to mind various laws and treaties, or rather the lack of applicable ones. Maybe the awful pictures from Ghouta are telling him the same thing; not getting anyone outside White House meeting rooms, or at the other end of a secure phone line, to put his or her name down might be natural, even instinctive, but it is not what the moment demands. There have been calls for the President to reconvene Congress and put this one before them, and such calls are right. It might even help the Administration figure out what, exactly, it hopes to accomplish by shooting missiles in the general direction of Damascus.

China’s farmers, and the land they tilled, were once seen as a sacred symbol of the nation’s ambitious plans for a self-sufficient economy. Over the past several years, though, industrial complexes and housing have encroached on the country’s farmland—even as middle-class people, the beneficiaries of industrial growth, demand more meat, milk, and other farm-grown food. In order to feed a population of nearly one and a half billion, Chinese companies began a global hunt for food—buying farmland in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere, and snapping up companies that manufacture grain, sugar, spirits, and milk.

Still, for years, Chinese companies avoided the U.S. food and agriculture market, partly out of fear that they wouldn’t be welcome. Now, that is changing. China’s largest state-run food company, known as COFCO, has said that it hopes to invest in American food and farming businesses. And in May, China’s largest hog processor, Shuanghui International Holdings Ltd., announced plans to buy the American processor Smithfield Foods, Inc. for nearly five billion dollars.

Thirteen years ago, the Chippendales, the male burlesque group, set up a New York shop in a cavernous clubhouse on the West Side Highway. It was summertime, and girlfriends assembled with cocktails to watch well-oiled men gyrate under strobe lights. But, a few months later, the attacks of September 11, 2001, darkened New Yorkers’ mood; people stopped coming to performances, and the show shuttered. So Kevin Denberg, the company’s managing partner, rented a tour bus and sent his dancers on a drive across the country, performing at casinos along the way in Ohio, Iowa, South Dakota, and Nebraska. “We just started heading west,” Denberg told me. “We had to find work for the guys.” Eventually, the pilgrimage found a Mecca in Las Vegas: the home of all-you-can-eat-buffets and Cirque du Soleil warmly welcomed the Chippendales. The company “took off when we went there,” Denberg recalled.

On August 28th, 1963, Calvin Trillin reported from the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Today, we’re republishing “The March,” the story he wrote about the experience.

We flew to Washington the day before the march and, early the next morning, walked from Pennsylvania Avenue past the side entrance of the White House and toward the lawn of the Washington Monument, where the marchers were gathering. It was eight o’clock—three and a half hours before the march was scheduled to move from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial—and around the Ellipse, the huge plot of grass between the White House grounds and the lawn of the Washington Monument, there were only about half a dozen buses. Most of them had red-white-and-blue signs saying “Erie, Pa., Branch, N.A.A.C.P.,” or “Inter-Church Delegation, Sponsored by National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Commission on Religion and Race,” or “District 26, United Steelworkers of America, Greater Youngstown A.F.L.-C.I.O. Council, Youngstown, Ohio.” On a baseball field on the Ellipse, three men were setting up a refreshment stand, and on the sidewalk nearby a man wearing an N.A.A.C.P. cap was arranging pennants that said “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Let the World Know We Want Freedom.” Most of the buses were nearly full, and many of the occupants were dozing. Sitting on a bench in front of one of the buses, some teen-agers were singing, “Everybody wants freedom—free-ee-dom.”