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When comparing the size of this negative association with other predictors of cognitive decline, watching television for >3.5 hours a day had a greater sized negative association (standardised beta = −0.034) than being in the lowest wealth quintile (as compared with the median quintile: standardised beta −0.027), while watching television for >7 hours a day had a greater sized association (standardized beta = −0.048) as being in the highest wealth quintile (compared with the median quintile: standardised beta = 0.043) or having no educational qualifications (standardized beta = −0.058).

associations between television viewing and verbal memory remained even when considering a range of variables relating to sedentary behaviours, suggesting that it is not just the sedentary nature of television watching that is responsible for its relationship with cognition.

Television involves fast-paced changes in images, sounds and action and, unlike other screen-based activities such as internet use and gaming, television is the most passive way of receiving such stimuli

television leads to a more alert but less focused brain

In addition to any potential cognitive stress created through the alert-passive interaction while watching television, the content of the programme itself can be stressful, such as through the depiction of graphic scenes, violence or the creation of suspense. Analyses of UK television from 2001–2013 (covering the country and much of the period of the data collection for the study reported here) have shown between 2.1 and 11.5 violent scenes per hour in UK soap operas, with 40% of these being categorised as moderate or strong violence22. It has even been proposed that the vividness of such experiences is greater than real-world experiences of events such as violence, conflict or disasters, as the drama is enhanced for entertainment purposes23. Chronic stress is known to lead to increased levels of glucocorticoids, which can have a direct effect on the hippocampus due to the presence of glucocorticoid receptors in that region of the brain. Consequently, stress has been shown to lead to atrophy of the hippocampus and impaired neurogenesis24, alongside impairments in cognition25.

excessive television could be linked with verbal memory through displacing other, cognitively beneficial activities such as playing board games, reading and engaging with cultural activities11,26. This theory implies that the relationship between television viewing and memory is not entirely down to television having negative effects per se, but rather television reducing the amount of time that people spend on more activities that could contribute to cognitive preservation

This study is not suggesting that watching television in older adulthood confers no benefits. Indeed, research with adults has suggested that TV dramas in comparison with TV documentaries can increase performance in tests of theory of mind, suggesting that television can enhance understanding of others27. Educational television can be an efficient way of learning when programmes are designed appropriately28. Television has also been shown to be a form of escapism from difficult life circumstances29. Further, research investing the effects of television viewing in the context of people’s daily lives has found that adults routinely report television as a means of relaxing30 (although this should be considered in relation to the potentially stress-inducing effects of television viewing discussed earlier). Nevertheless, this study suggests that watching substantial amounts of television is longitudinally associated with poorer verbal memory in older adults.

it remains unclear whether television viewing might affect other components of executive function

YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism by combining two things: a business model that rewards provocative videos with exposure and advertising dollars, and an algorithm that guides users down personalized paths meant to keep them glued to their screens

“If I’m YouTube and I want you to watch more, I’m always going to steer you toward Crazytown.”

94 percent of Americans ages 18 to 24 use YouTube, a higher percentage than for any other online service

YouTube has been a godsend for hyper-partisans on all sides. It has allowed them to bypass traditional gatekeepers and broadcast their views to mainstream audiences, and has helped once-obscure commentators build lucrative media businesses

Many right-wing creators already made long video essays, or posted video versions of their podcasts. Their inflammatory messages were more engaging than milder fare. And now that they could earn money from their videos, they had a financial incentive to churn out as much material as possible.

The internet was an escape. Mr. Cain grew up in postindustrial Appalachia and was raised by his conservative Christian grandparents. He was smart, but shy and socially awkward, and he carved out an identity during high school as a countercultural punk. He went to community college, but dropped out after three semesters. Broke and depressed, he resolved to get his act together. He began looking for help in the same place he looked for everything: YouTube.

they rallied around issues like free speech and antifeminism, portraying themselves as truth-telling rebels doing battle against humorless “social justice warriors.” Their videos felt like episodes in a long-running soap opera, with a constant stream of new heroes and villains. To Mr. Cain, all of this felt like forbidden knowledge — as if, just by watching some YouTube videos, he had been let into an exclusive club. “When I found this stuff, I felt like I was chasing uncomfortable truths,” he told me. “I felt like it was giving me power and respect and authority.”

YouTube’s executives announced that the recommendation algorithm would give more weight to watch time, rather than views. That way, creators would be encouraged to make videos that users would finish, users would be more satisfied and YouTube would be able to show them more ads.

A month after its algorithm tweak, YouTube changed its rules to allow all video creators to run ads alongside their videos and earn a portion of the revenue they generated.

Bellingcat, an investigative news site, analyzed messages from far-right chat rooms and found that YouTube was cited as the most frequent cause of members’ “red-pilling” — an internet slang term for converting to far-right beliefs

Several current and former YouTube employees, who would speak only on the condition of anonymity because they had signed confidentiality agreements, said company leaders were obsessed with increasing engagement during those years. The executives, the people said, rarely considered whether the company’s algorithms were fueling the spread of extreme and hateful political content.

Google Brain’s researchers wondered if they could keep YouTube users engaged for longer by steering them into different parts of YouTube, rather than feeding their existing interests. And they began testing a new algorithm that incorporated a different type of A.I., called reinforcement learning. The new A.I., known as Reinforce, was a kind of long-term addiction machine. It was designed to maximize users’ engagement over time by predicting which recommendations would expand their tastes and get them to watch not just one more video but many more.

YouTube’s recommendations system is not set in stone. The company makes many small changes every year, and has already introduced a version of its algorithm that is switched on after major news events to promote videos from “authoritative sources” over conspiracy theories and partisan content. This past week, the company announced that it would expand that approach, so that a person who had watched a series of conspiracy theory videos would be nudged toward videos from more authoritative news sources. It also said that a January change to its algorithm to reduce the spread of so-called “borderline” videos had resulted in significantly less traffic to those videos.

the bulk of his media diet came from far-right channels. And after the election, he began exploring a part of YouTube with a darker, more radical group of creators. These people didn’t couch their racist and anti-Semitic views in sarcastic memes, and they didn’t speak in dog whistles. One channel run by Jared Taylor, the editor of the white nationalist magazine American Renaissance, posted videos with titles like “‘Refugee’ Invasion Is European Suicide.” Others posted clips of interviews with white supremacists like Richard Spencer and David Duke.

As Mr. Molyneux promoted white nationalists, his YouTube channel kept growing. He now has more than 900,000 subscribers, and his videos have been watched nearly 300 million times. Last year, he and Ms. Southern — Mr. Cain’s “fashy bae” — went on a joint speaking tour in Australia and New Zealand, where they criticized Islam and discussed what they saw as the dangers of nonwhite immigration. In March, after a white nationalist gunman killed 50 Muslims in a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, Mr. Molyneux and Ms. Southern distanced themselves from the violence, calling the killer a left-wing “eco-terrorist” and saying that linking the shooting to far-right speech was “utter insanity.” Neither Mr. Molyneux nor Ms. Southern replied to a request for comment. The day after my request, Mr. Molyneux uploaded a video titled “An Open Letter to Corporate Reporters,” in which he denied promoting hatred or violence and said labeling him an extremist was “just a way of slandering ideas without having to engage with the content of those ideas.”

Unlike most progressives Mr. Cain had seen take on the right, Mr. Bonnell and Ms. Wynn were funny and engaging. They spoke the native language of YouTube, and they didn’t get outraged by far-right ideas. Instead, they rolled their eyes at them, and made them seem shallow and unsophisticated.

“I noticed that right-wing people were taking these old-fashioned, knee-jerk, reactionary politics and packing them as edgy punk rock,” Ms. Wynn told me. “One of my goals was to take the excitement out of it.”

Ms. Wynn and Mr. Bonnell are part of a new group of YouTubers who are trying to build a counterweight to YouTube’s far-right flank. This group calls itself BreadTube, a reference to the left-wing anarchist Peter Kropotkin’s 1892 book, “The Conquest of Bread.” It also includes people like Oliver Thorn, a British philosopher who hosts the channel PhilosophyTube, where he posts videos about topics like transphobia, racism and Marxist economics.

The core of BreadTube’s strategy is a kind of algorithmic hijacking. By talking about many of the same topics that far-right creators do — and, in some cases, by responding directly to their videos — left-wing YouTubers are able to get their videos recommended to the same audience.

What is most surprising about Mr. Cain’s new life, on the surface, is how similar it feels to his old one. He still watches dozens of YouTube videos every day and hangs on the words of his favorite creators. It is still difficult, at times, to tell where the YouTube algorithm stops and his personality begins.

It’s possible that vulnerable young men like Mr. Cain will drift away from radical groups as they grow up and find stability elsewhere. It’s also possible that this kind of whiplash polarization is here to stay as political factions gain and lose traction online.

I’ve learned now that you can’t go to YouTube and think that you’re getting some kind of education, because you’re not.

a kleptocracy

the first openly kleptocratic president moving into the White House marked the consummation of its decay, not its initial conception

Born from theft, built on slavery, held together by self-deception, the United States has grown to become the richest poor country

The only industrialised nation on the planet without universal healthcare, any real social welfare system or decent retirement provisions. The only free nation where 1 in 40 adults are behind bars

he only western economy where the richest three inhabitants hold more wealth than the poorest half of the entire population.

a country without a social contract

the Republican party is no longer a political party at all – it’s become a sectarian movement

It takes millions and millions of dollars to even run for president in the first place, and candidates need at least half a billion dollars

almost nowhere in the world is the gap between the political preferences of ordinary voters and the priorities of the elite

Nearly half of eligible voters do not take part in the elections. This isn’t just because of political apathy; it is also caused by deliberate voter suppression.

the US lacks nearly all the elements of a functioning democracy: a social contract, a representative electoral system, free and fair elections, political parties that follow democratic practices, and universal suffrage.

A country without any sense of the common good, grown fat on exploitation, held together by fundamental falsehoods will ultimately get a leader who suits that setting perfectly: a leader without a coherent ideology, driven by greed and self-enrichment, owing no fealty to fact.

Meanwhile, Trump cut $6bn from the federal budget

The US justice department is currently moving to shield the president from prosecution for rape, a level of political intervention in the judicial process that is unprecedented even by US standards.

signals point in only one direction: the US is rapidly becoming an authoritarian state.

Those who warn of the impending autocracy can only ever be alarmist. Either we’re proven wrong, or our warnings are already too late. For a democracy doesn’t fall, it slides into decline. Its demise cannot be predicted, only revealed in retrospect.

left-wing and right-wing media are talking differently about the same things. Crazy, sensational, unusual, bad things that happened today. Current affairs plus absurdity times outrage.

Masha Gessen, Russian-American journalist and one of the world’s leading experts on how authoritarian regimes work, argues in Surviving Autocracy that the media should cover “Trumpism not as news, but as a system.”

Many news media outlets are still operating on default settings, covering a democracy rather than reporting on an emergent authoritarian regime. Even now, they’re still attending the daily White House press briefings as if they were normal press conferences rather than a vehicle for systematically disseminating lies and misinformation

they are still broadcasting Trump’s campaign rallies live, although they know full well those rallies will contain incitements to violence, showcase conspiracy theories and pose a genuine hazard to public health.

An emergent autocracy demands fundamentally different journalistic standards and practices.

we need a journalism in which news media are united not in their shared obsession with breaking news, but in their joint defence of democracy

the Austrian political elite has to ask itself how it sees the future of Muslims, who constitute nine percent of the population, in the country. While most political parties have been either silent or supportive  of anti-Muslim policies, the infamous Operation Luxor is a welcoming occasion to rethink the approach of the past years.

The way we talk about social media is central to narratives that blame the oppressed for their own oppression. Online bigotry, abuse and trolling are often framed as problems of the unwashed masses, who need to be regulated by ‘benign’ institutions such as global data corporations or the police. In reality, whilst racism, Islamophobia, misogyny, anti-immigrant hysteria and other forms of bigotry feature up and down the social spectrum, their recent mobilization is part of a different story. It has been led and co-ordinated by elite networks, seeking to reshape the world at the dusk of neoliberalism. And they are often in direct collaboration with these supposedly respectable institutions, from Facebook to the FBI.

the decade since the financial crisis has accelerated the emergence of a new global oligarch class. With growing wealth has come growing power and a growing ability to shape political debate through the dominant communications technology of the era: TV and the internet. As has long happened with right-wing movements, they have done so in close collaboration with military and security networks. Because the era is neoliberalism, those networks are largely privatised, made up of mercenary firms with names like Palantir, Arcanum, SCL, AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica.

Leave.EU, associated with the further-right UK Independence Party, fronted by iconic blazered bigot Nigel Farage and primarily funded by an insurance man called Arron Banks. (Banks, by my sums, claims to have funnelled about £15m into the group

We know that the person who introduced the UKIP frontman, Nigel Farage, to the supposed money man, Arron Banks, is the Isle of Man-based Brexit-backing billionaire Jim Mellon, who made millions from mass privatisations after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. And we know that Arron Banks lied about meetings with the Russian embassy, to which it now turns out he was a regular visitor, discussing various business opportunities.

The Commission has concluded that it has ‘reasonable grounds to suspect that Mr Banks was not the true source’ of the millions he poured into the Brexit campaign. After London’s Metropolitan Police didn’t bother to pick up the relevant files for months, Banks is now at last being investigated by the UK’s National Crime Agency.

How Banks’s millions were spent is, largely, a mystery. Under the referendum rules, Leave.EU could spend only £700,000 in the last ten weeks of the campaign, but spending before that period isn’t restricted and doesn’t have to be declared. When I compared the declared donations to Banks’s various groups and the amounts they said they spent in that limited period, there was a gap of £11m.We don’t know how that was spent. However, the most likely destination of the missing millions is online adverts

Northern Ireland was the only part of the UK where political donations aren’t public: a provision that the main parties had managed to smuggle into law during the peace process, in theory as a way to protect donors from reprisals. Someone was using this loophole to flood cash into the referendum campaign.

We now know that the donation was £435,000 – around 20 times what the DUP spent in the general election in June 2017. We forced the DUP to reveal that the money had come via a previously unknown group in Glasgow called the Constitutional Research Council, chaired by the former vice-chair of the Scottish Conservatives, Richard Cook.We discovered that Richard Cook set up a company in 2013 with Nawwaf bin Abdulaziz al Saud, the former head of the Saudi Arabian intelligence service, and with a man called Peter Haestrup, who admitted to us that he was involved in running hundreds of Kalashnikovs to Hindu terrorists in West Bengal in 1995 – though he hinted at intelligence service links, telling my colleague Peter Geoghegan that he was ‘on the right side – that time’.

Cook’s group, the Constitutional Research Council, also provided a route for cash to be funnelled into the key organisation of Brexit-backing Tory MPs, the European Research Group.

Ruling classes have always sought to blame bigotry on the working classes

Vote Leave was eventually fined by the regulators over a different affair, where it got round referendum spending limits by giving £675,000 to a small campaign run by a fashion student in his early twenties called Darren Grimes

Vote Leave gave £100,000 to another group, Veterans for Britain, which in many ways represents the core of the part of the establishment which brought Brexit to Britain.Veterans for Britain is more than the hobby of a few ex-squaddies. Its advisory board includes a collection of very senior retired military figures. Most senior of them all is Field-Marshal Lord Guthrie, the former head of British armed forces and chief of defence staff.

There is no evidence that Palantir was involved in the Brexit referendum. However, another mercenary surveillance/propaganda firm sat at the very centre of the Brexit solar system, arguably the star around which both campaigns orbited. And that company was Cambridge Analytica.

Vote Leave’s online operation was run by people who learnt their skills as mercenary military propagandists

while the supposedly respectable official Leave campaign had focussed on the economy in the traditional media, its targeted Facebook adverts, seen by millions of people across the country, focussed very heavily on immigration and on Islam

During the referendum, the ideas – often straight lies – promoted in these adverts took hold in the minds of many voters; particularly effective was the fiction that Turkey is on the verge of joining the EU. This social media campaign didn’t exist in a vacuum, of course – it acted in concert with the oligarch-owned tabloid press.

The idea that powerful groups would spread racist messages through the dominant media is nothing new. In the UK, we’ve had tabloid newspapers for decades. In Italy, similar ideas are promoted on TV by the Berlusconi-owned media, and across the western world powerful groups have always used the dominant communications technology of the era to shape political debate.

Online communications technology is sometimes described as though it’s some kind of voodoo – able to hypnotise audiences into doing anything. This is a mistake. But it’s also a mistake to discount it entirely: companies pay for advertising because it works.

like the traditional rightwing press, far-right groups tap into the neuroses of the societies in which they operate. They jump on reactionary backlashes to egalitarian movements, they pump up latent ideas of racism and sexism that exist throughout society. Brexit, Trump, Orbán, Salvini, Bolsonaro and Le Pen all tap into deep social and cultural crises in their countries

encouraging people to blame anyone but those with real power

Neoliberalism in general, and the asset-stripping of the former Soviet Union in particular, produced a new generation of oligarchs, expert in hiding money from the prying eyes of state officials. Traditional authoritarianism emerges from alliances between the very wealthy and military and police networks. But neoliberalism has also delivered a largely privatised military, and it is to them that this rising class has turned when it wishes to secure power.

trans people, like many minority groups, remain economically and socially disenfranchised in the UK. Excluding fraud, trans people are twice as likely to be a victim of crime in England and Wales in the year ending March 2020, according to the Office for National Statistics. They also face years-long waits to receive gender-affirming care at NHS gender identity clinics and are more likely to report healthcare discrimination, domestic violence and homelessness.

UK's government has leaned into the culture wars debate in a bid to appeal to its traditional Conservative Party base and new working-class voters in northern England

Similar to some US Republican Party lawmakers' critiques of critical race theory, "war on woke" has turned into a catchall to describe what Conservatives don't like: be it the perceived excesses of the left, conversations around racial equality, or social justice initiatives like trans rights.

While "there are perfectly reasonably concerns of what the implication of trans women might be for women's rights, a lot of that anxiety is based on wildly exaggerated theoretical positions rather than practical ones," Blunt told CNN. "While [trans people] have to cope with the practical reality that it is bloody tough being trans."

A 2019 study by linguist Paul Baker, a professor at Lancaster University, found the British press wrote more than 6,000 articles about trans people between 2018-19, many of them written "in order to be critical of trans people" and painted "trans people as unreasonable and aggressive," the report wrote.

Despite those supportive words, the trans-critical dial in the media is up at full blast.

Despite there never having been a "trans member of Parliament (MP)," and close to zero trans editors or staff writers at [British] newspapers an idea has stuck that there is an influential trans "lobby behind the scene ... and that is very much characteristic of a moral panic,"

At the end of September, the Council of Europe's Committee on Equality and Non-Discrimination likened the UK's record on LGBTQ rights to Russia, Turkey, Hungary and Poland -- countries with appalling track records on minority issues. The report pointed out that in England and Wales "trans rights organisations have faced vitriolic media campaigns, in which trans women especially are vilified and misrepresented."

Problems can arise when supportive cisgender people, or corporate entities, make poor linguistic and aesthetic choices when attempting to use inclusive language for non-binary, transgender and intersex people, Faye said. This happened at the end of September, when British medical journal The Lancet featured the words "bodies with vaginas" on the cover of its latest issue. The journal later apologized for conveying "the impression that we have dehumanized and marginalized women," after the wording was widely criticized.

These constructions are instead blamed by trans-critical commentators on trans people

"Nick, you could be asking me about climate change. You could be asking me about mental health. You could be asking me about education. You could be asking me about health. You deliberately are asking me about an issue that you know does not come up on the doorstep," Lammy replied. "[You] are choosing to land on this subject that most British people are not talking about in a fuel crisis," Lammy added. "And spend minutes on this, because it keeps Labour talking about identity issues and not about the substantive policies."

The information that courses over these networks is increasingly produced by publications controlled by fellow billionaires and other wealthy dynasties, who have filled the void of the collapsing profit-making journalism market with varying combinations of self-interest and altruism. It is a situation that has alarmed policy experts at both ends of the increasingly vicious ideological and partisan divides.

Laurene Powell Jobs (#111) bought a majority stake in the Atlantic in 2017. Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff (#309) bought Time magazine in 2018.Others like Microsoft founder Bill Gates (#4) have spent tens of millions of dollars through his foundation to directly fund journalism at outlets such as NPR that cover issues he cares about, like health and the environment. Others have funded more narrow publishing efforts, including the wealthy Chinese exile Guo Wengui, who has worked on media ventures with Stephen K. Bannon, who was an adviser to President Donald Trump.

Activists on the left, who have a different vision of public square moderation, have scoffed at the notion that any individual — White men who dwell in bubbles of limitless luxury, no less — should be able to filter information for the country’s voters.

“Even if Elon Musk was the smartest person on earth, had the best heart, had been touched by God, I wouldn’t want him to have that much power,” said Robert McChesney, a professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who has advocated against concentration in media ownership. “It is antithetical to democratic political theory.”

Zuckerberg spent $419.5 million to fund election administrators during the 2020 elections, sparking outrage among Republicans and cheers among Democrats. “I agree with those who say that government should have provided these funds, not private citizens,” Zuckerberg said in a statement at the time.

Partisans find themselves celebrating the autonomy of the rich men who they see as serving their interests, while simultaneously objecting to the unchecked power of those who don’t.

Rupert Murdoch (#85) made his first purchase in the United States in 1976 when he bought the New York Post before launching Fox News and expanding to the Wall Street Journal, while Bloomberg created Bloomberg LP in 1981.

the tradition that emerged in the last century when wealthy families and scions, such as William Randolph Hearst and the Sulzberger family that owns the New York Times, came to dominate the largest newsgathering organizations

The role of social media networks, which have largely replaced print newspapers as the way most Americans get their information, has complicated the issue, in part because so few networks are so dominant. A 2019 poll by the Pew Research Center found 62 percent of Americans felt that social media companies have “too much control over the news people see.”

social media allows Zuckerberg and Musk to have “greater influence over the flow of information than has been possible in human history.”

In the European Union, lawmakers have been pushing forward laws that require social networks to crack down on speech illegal in Europe that is generally protected by the U.S. Constitution. The proposed laws also require algorithmic transparency and give consumers more control how their own information is used.

Ben Wizner, the director of the ACLU’s speech, privacy and technology project, said the key challenge presented by individual control social media and journalism is, at root, about scale.“We are talking about a small handful of people who now exercise extraordinary control over the boundaries of our discourse,” Wizner said. “The importance for media and journalism is that there be a diverse ecosystem that represents the interests of many, not just of the few.”

PayPal co-founder and early Facebook investor Peter Thiel (#552), who has given millions to GOP candidates this cycle, famously ran the gossip site Gawker out of business by secretly funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against the site

Corporate AI labs justify this posturing with pseudoscientific research reports that misdirect regulatory attention to such imaginary scenarios using fear-mongering terminology, such as “existential risk.”

the people selling this technology propose that text synthesis machines could fix various holes in our social fabric: the lack of teachers in K–12 education, the inaccessibility of health care for low-income people and the dearth of legal aid for people who cannot afford lawyers, just to name a few

Not only do we risk mistaking synthetic text for reliable information, but also that noninformation reflects and amplifies the biases encoded in its training data—in this case, every kind of bigotry exhibited on the Internet. Moreover the synthetic text sounds authoritative despite its lack of citations back to real sources. The longer this synthetic text spill continues, the worse off we are, because it gets harder to find trustworthy sources and harder to trust them when we do.

output can seem so plausible that without a clear indication of its synthetic origins, it becomes a noxious and insidious pollutant of our information ecosystem

the systems rely on enormous amounts of training data that are stolen without compensation from the artists and authors who created it in the first place

the task of labeling data to create “guardrails” that are intended to prevent an AI system’s most toxic output from seeping out is repetitive and often traumatic labor carried out by gig workers and contractors, people locked in a global race to the bottom for pay and working conditions.

employers are looking to cut costs by leveraging automation, laying off people from previously stable jobs and then hiring them back as lower-paid workers to correct the output of the automated systems. This can be seen most clearly in the current actors’ and writers’ strikes in Hollywood, where grotesquely overpaid moguls scheme to buy eternal rights to use AI replacements of actors for the price of a day’s work and, on a gig basis, hire writers piecemeal to revise the incoherent scripts churned out by AI.

too many AI publications come from corporate labs or from academic groups that receive disproportionate industry funding. Much is junk science—it is nonreproducible, hides behind trade secrecy, is full of hype and uses evaluation methods that lack construct validity

We urge policymakers to instead draw on solid scholarship that investigates the harms and risks of AI—and the harms caused by delegating authority to automated systems, which include the unregulated accumulation of data and computing power, climate costs of model training and inference, damage to the welfare state and the disempowerment of the poor, as well as the intensification of policing against Black and Indigenous families. Solid research in this domain—including social science and theory building—and solid policy based on that research will keep the focus on the people hurt by this technology.

France operates a highly centralized public education system, with the education ministry managing the nation’s schools from Paris. Ever since waves of immigrants arrived after World War II, during a period the French refer to as the “30 glorious years” of rebuilding and economic expansion, schools have been perceived as imparting certain ideals about French citizenship. Even slight changes to the curriculum may be put under the microscope. 

Ndiaye’s rapid elevation from the director of a humble national monument to the head of France’s education ministry marks a leap of faith by Macron, who described Ndiaye as an example of universalism and equal opportunity when they appeared together at an elementary school in Marseille last month. Having survived a recent reshuffling of the president’s cabinet, Ndiaye has moved from managing the Porte Dorée Palace, an institution with around 100 employees and an annual budget of 15 million euros, to leading the country’s largest public institution, with more than 1.2 million employees, an annual budget of more than 55 billion euros, and the responsibility of educating more than 12 million public school students

it wasn’t until living in the United States that he reflected upon what it meant to be Black

“When you have even the smallest commitment to the United States, they think you talk on behalf of Americans,” the Senegalese-born French politician said in a recent phone call. “The French are fascinated by America, but at the same time they are very careful about being under U.S. influence. They want to think that their culture is different from the community-oriented model of the United States.”

“What’s confusing is that you had in the previous government a line of assertive secularism that was very opposed to any conversation on race, which in the French context is very delicate,” Belin said. “Macron has demonstrated a willingness to tackle some of the most difficult elements of the French colonial period, moving the conversation forward on Algeria and Rwanda. He is a modernizer for France’s history, but not particularly avant-garde on racial justice and postcolonial matters.”

Nathalie Heinich, a French sociologist, said that she thought Ndiaye’s report for the Paris Opera demonstrated “a sociological misunderstanding of an actual problem” that should be addressed by reducing socioeconomic inequalities. She felt that Ndiaye’s analysis had been influenced by his time living in the United States, with its multicultural social model, “which tends to reduce individuals to their belonging to collective entities.”

Somewhat controversially, for France, he has referred to systemic racism in housing, employment, and in police relations with the Black and immigrant communities. But compared with U.S. academics plowing similar terrain, his views are relatively moderate

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a hard-left political figure who placed third in the presidential race in April, scorned the new cabinet when it was announced in May but singled out Ndiaye as an “audacious” choice—echoing the Revolution-era words of Georges Danton, who called for “audacity, more audacity, always audacity.”

Some role models whom Ndiaye has referenced over the years—Frantz Fanon, Césaire, and Léopold Sédar Senghor—were Black French colonial authors who in one way or another turned to politics.

a poorly regulated press prone to having ideological motivations at worst, or being straight-up gullible at best. The Sun can publish a far-right conspiracy about a “hard-left extremist network” at the heart of the Labour party, and then delete it before the day is out, with no explanation or, more crucially, much outrage. The same goes for discredited front-page stories about Muslims fostering Christian children, and faked “plots” to take over British schools.

entrenchment of a political culture in which dangerous untruths are rife and rarely challenged