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A $1,000 increase in student loan debt, researchers found, lowered the odds of marriage by 2 percent a month among female bachelor’s degree recipients in the first four years after graduation. That finding has been bolstered by more recent research showing a similar trend.

Student loan debt is hampering the growth of small businesses

a significant and economically meaningful negative correlation” between rising student loan debt and falling small-business formation. The mechanism isn’t hard to grasp: If you’re paying off a student loan, you’re less able to pull together the cash needed to start a business.

The authors note that small businesses are responsible for “approximately 60 percent of net employment activity in the U.S.”

Student loan debt is delaying marriage and family formation

This year, the Federal Reserve issued a report showing that student loan debt prevented about 400,000 young families from purchasing homes, accounting for about a quarter of the drop in home-ownership rates in this demographic from 2005 to 2014

Student loan debt makes it harder to weather financial crises

From 2007 to 2009, households with student loans saw 12.4 percent of their total net worth evaporate, while the net worth of those without such loans fell by 9.3 percent

Student loan debt is preventing young people from saving for retirement

Student loan debt can cause graduates to give up on their dreams

The returns on higher education aren’t what they once were

Cornflowers are always the first to bloom in the pollinator meadow of Marsha P. Johnson State Park, a welcome sign to bees and people that things are beginning to thaw.

If New York City has a warm spring, the cornflowers may open up by late April, eventually followed by orange frills of butterfly milkweed, purple spindly bee balm and yolk-yellow, black-eyed Susans that also inhabit the meadow — hardy species that can weather the salty spray that confronts life on the waterfront.

Not all of these flowers are native to New York, or even North America, but they have sustained themselves long enough to become naturalized

These species pose little threat to native wildlife, unlike more domineering introduced species such as mugwort, an herb with an intrepid rhizome system.

A wildflower can refer to any flowering plant that was not cultivated, intentionally planted or given human aid, yet it still managed to grow and bloom.

This is one of several definitions offered by the plant ecologist Donald J. Leopold in Andrew Garn’s new photo book “Wildflowers of New York City,” and one that feels particularly suited to the city and its many transplants.

Scarlet bee balm.

Ms. Lopez, who grew up on the Upper West Side near a sooty smokestack, has always longed for more green spaces in the city.

In February of 2020, Gov. Andrew Cuomo renamed the park after the activist Marsha P. Johnson, one of the central figures of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries with the activist Sylvia Rivera. Ms. Johnson, who died in 1992 of undetermined causes, would have turned 75 in August 2020.

Mr. Garn did not intend for “Wildflowers of New York City” to be a traditional field guide for identifying flowers. Rather, his reverent portraits invite us to delight in the beauty of flowers that we more often encounter in a sidewalk crack than in a bouquet.

Marsha P. Johnson, a central figure of the Stonewall riots and a co-founder of Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries

Ms. Johnson was known for wearing crowns of fresh flowers that she would arrange from leftover blooms and discarded daffodils from the flower district in Manhattan, where she often slept.

In one photo, Ms. Johnson wears a crown of roses, carnations, chrysanthemums, frilly tulips, statice and baby’s breath.

Although cumulous clusters of baby’s breath are now a staple of floral arrangements, the species is a wildflower native to central and Eastern Europe.

Ms. Lopez and STARR have criticized a proposal for a new $70 million beach scheduled to be built on Gansevoort Peninsula, near waterfronts where Ms. Rivera once lived and Ms. Johnson died. In its place, she suggests a memorial garden for Ms. Johnson, Ms. Rivera and other transgender people

“We will never feed enough people, we will never plant enough flowers, never be good enough to honor Sylvia and Marsha,” Ms. Lopez said. “They cared too much, even when no one cared for them.”

“I have candles lit always for Marsha and Sylvia, but I’m praying especially hard now that we get a plan that includes lots of flowers,” said Mariah Lopez, the executive director of Strategic Trans Alliance for Radical Reform, or STARR, an advocacy group.

Her dream of the park includes a range of verdant and functional spaces: a paved area where people can vogue and hold rallies, a flower garden in tribute to Ms. Johnson, a greenhouse and an apiary for bees.

Tansy.

The redesign of the park will add a new fence around the meadow, as well as interpretive signs about the pollinators who depend on its wildflowers. “What would happen if there were no bees in the world?”

“We have to protect them. That’s what the function of this sweet little meadow is.”

Kaitlyn Greenidge learned about the first Black woman to become a doctor in New York. “I filed it away and thought, if I ever got a chance to write a novel, I would want it to be about this,” she said.

Libertie, the rebellious heroine of Kaitlyn Greenidge’s new novel, comes from an extraordinary family, but longs to be ordinary.

As a young Black woman growing up in Reconstruction-era Brooklyn, Libertie is expected to follow in the footsteps of her trailblazing mother, a doctor who founded a women’s clinic.

“So much of Black history is focused on exceptional people,”

I wanted to explore is, what’s the emotional and psychological toll of being an exception, of being exceptional, and also, what about the people who just want to have a regular life and find freedom and achievement in being able to live in peace with their family — which is what Libertie wants?”

“If you come from a marginalized community, one of the ways you are marginalized is people telling you that you don’t have any history, or that your history is somehow diminished, or it’s very flat, or it’s not somehow as rich as the dominant history.”

“That idea of being the first and the only was a big piece of our experience,”

They are engaged in ongoing conversations about their writing, though they draw the line at reading and editing drafts of one another’s work.

Libertie

The novel has drawn praise from writers like Jacqueline Woodson, Mira Jacob and Garth Greenwell, who wrote in a blurb that Greenidge “adds an indelible new sound to American literature, and confirms her status as one of our most gifted young writers.”

raised by a single mother who struggled to support the family on her social worker’s salary,

“I’ve always been interested in the histories of things that are lesser known,”

“There’s a really powerful lyricism that feels new in this voice,”

Greenidge and her sisters developed a reverence for storytelling and history early on, when their parents and grandparents would tell stories about their ancestors and what life was like during the civil rights movement.

“That fracture was really formative for me,” she said. “It made me hyper aware of inequality and the doublespeak that goes on in America around the American dream and American exceptionalism, because that was proven to me not to be true.”

Greenidge was collecting stories from people whose ancestors had lived there, and tracked down a woman named Ellen Holly, who was the first Black actress to have a lead, recurring role on daytime TV, in “One Life to Live.”

Greenidge filed the family’s saga away in her mind, thinking she had the premise for a novel. When she got a writing fellowship, she was able to quit her side jobs and immerse herself in the research the novel required.

The resulting story feels both epic and intimate. As she reimagined the lives of the doctor and her daughter, Greenidge wove in other historical figures and events.

In one horrific scene, Libertie and her mother tend to Black families who fled Manhattan during the New York City draft riots.

Greenidge also drew on her own family history, and her experience of being a new mother.

Her daughter, Mavis, was born days after she finished a second draft of the book, and is now 18 months old. She finished revisions while living in a multigenerational household with her own mother and sisters.

“Mother-daughter relationships are like the central relationships in my life,”

“I cannot think of a greater freedom than raising you,”

Spring is the season of optimism. With it comes more natural light and warm weather, both great mood boosters

Yes, receiving your vaccine shot, daydreaming about intimate dinner parties or those first hugs with grandchildren may give you a jolt of joy, but euphoria, unfortunately, tends to be fleeting.

When good (or bad) things happen, we feel an initial surge or dip in our overall happiness levels.

Hedonic adaptation means that, over time, we settle back into wherever we were happiness-wise before that good or bad event happened.

ven if the good thing — like getting your dream job — is continuing.

To maintain those positive feelings, you are going to need to work on it a bit

Thank evolution.

“Our brains developed biologically for survival, not happiness,”

To start, it’s OK if you’re not OK.

While many Americans are beginning to exhale, many others are buried deep in grief.

If you’re not allowing yourself to feel happy because you worry you’ll be disappointed by future bad news, that’s OK too, Dr. Owens said.

This is called defensive pessimism, and it can help people feel more in control of a bad situation.

it’s understandable if you are just not ready to feel optimistic yet

Savor this (and everything).

Your first time hugging friends in a year is going to be so sweet, you’ll undoubtedly savor every moment of it. But there is joy in everyday things, too

ven the mundane things — like watching yet another youth soccer game — can feel special if you take a moment to remember the not-so-distant past when so much of our lives was put on hold.

Marvel as much as you can.

This feeling can come from a walk around the block, said Allen Klein, author of “The Awe Factor.” One of his favorite strategies for ensuring his daily dose of awe is heading out for an “awe walk.”

On these strolls, he’ll turn off his mental list of chores and things to remember, and instead focus on finding wonder in small things along the way.

Be grateful and kind.

Acts of kindness tend to increase people’s ratings of their happiness,

The boost you get may not be huge, however

University of California, Riverside, found reflecting on past kind deeds improved well-being at a rate similar to actually going out and doing new good deeds.

This isn’t clearance to never be kind again, though. But if you’re stuck at home and cannot get out to help a friend, try thinking back on a time when you did those things.

Realize happiness alone isn’t enough.

If you have been struggling with depression throughout the pandemic — as many Americans have — working to boost your own happiness may not be the cure you are hoping for

“The opposite of depression is not happiness,”

“The opposite of depression is no longer being depressed.”

If you have been struggling with symptoms of depression these past 12 months, you may feel your depression subside as the pandemic slowly wanes. It may not.

Clinical depression should be treated by a mental health professional.

Break out your calendar.

Perhaps it’s too early to set a date for that 15-person dinner party, but you certainly can crack open a cookbook to start planning the menu.

And when party day arrives, don’t forget to savor every last morsel and belly laugh, as you eat, drink and be more than just fleetingly merry.

Postman also recognised that technology was changing our mental processes and social habits.

Today corporations like Google and Amazon collect data on Internet users based on their browsing history, the things they purchase, and the apps they use

Yet all citizens are undergoing this same transformation. Our digital devices undermine social interactions by isolating us,

“Years from now, it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organisations, but have solved very little of importance to most people, and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved.”

“Television has by its power to control the time, attention, and cognitive habits of our youth gained the power to control their education.”

As a student of Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, Postman believed that the medium of information was critical to understanding its social and political effects. Every technology has its own agenda. Postman worried that the very nature of television undermined American democratic institutions.

Many Americans tuned in to the presidential debate looking for something substantial and meaty

It was simply another manifestation of the incoherence and vitriol of cable news

“When, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility,” warned Postman.

Technology Is Never Neutral

As for new problems, we have increased addictions (technological and pornographic); increased loneliness, anxiety, and distraction; and inhibited social and intellectual maturation.

The average length of a shot on network television is only 3.5 seconds, so that the eye never rests, always has something new to see. Moreover, television offers viewers a variety of subject matter, requires minimal skills to comprehend it, and is largely aimed at emotional gratification.

This is far truer of the Internet and social media, where more than a third of Americans, and almost half of young people, now get their news.

with smartphones now ubiquitous, the Internet has replaced television as the “background radiation of the social and intellectual universe.”

Is There Any Solution?

Reading news or commentary in print, in contrast, requires concentration, patience, and careful reflection, virtues that our digital age vitiates.

Politics as Entertainment

“How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged,” observed Postman. In the case of politics, television fashions public discourse into yet another form of entertainment

In America, the fundamental metaphor for political discourse is the television commercial. The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. … They tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might buy them.

The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and towards making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

Such is the case with the way politics is “advertised” to different subsets of the American electorate. The “consumer,” depending on his political leanings, may be manipulated by fears of either an impending white-nationalist, fascist dictatorship, or a radical, woke socialist takeover.

This paradigm is aggravated by the hypersiloing of media content, which explains why Americans who read left-leaning media view the Proud Boys as a legitimate, existential threat to national civil order, while those who read right-leaning media believe the real immediate enemies of our nation are Antifa

Regardless of whether either of these groups represents a real public menace, the loss of any national consensus over what constitutes objective news means that Americans effectively talk past one another: they use the Proud Boys or Antifa as rhetorical barbs to smear their ideological opponents as extremists.

Yet these technologies are far from neutral. They are, rather, “equipped with a program for social change.

Postman’s analysis of technology is prophetic and profound. He warned of the trivialising of our media, defined by “broken time and broken attention,” in which “facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation.” He warned of “a neighborhood of strangers and pointless quantity.”

does Postman offer any solutions to this seemingly uncontrollable technological juggernaut?

Postman’s suggestions regarding education are certainly relevant. He unequivocally condemned education that mimics entertainment, and urged a return to learning that is hierarchical, meaning that it first gives students a foundation of essential knowledge before teaching “critical thinking.”

Postman also argued that education must avoid a lowest-common-denominator approach in favor of complexity and the perplexing: the latter method elicits in the student a desire to make sense of what perplexes him.

Finally, Postman promoted education of vigorous exposition, logic, and rhetoric, all being necessary for citizenship

Another course of action is to understand what these media, by their very nature, do to us and to public discourse.

We must, as Postman exhorts us, “demystify the data” and dominate our technology, lest it dominate us. We must identify and resist how television, social media, and smartphones manipulate our emotions, infantilise us, and weaken our ability to rebuild what 2020 has ravaged.

It’s also a valuable tool when it comes to understanding those who are different from us. Global, national, and regional history books help us understand how other cultures affect our own.

3. History helps us learn to understand other people.

A large part of that is learning where you fit into the story of your country or the global community in the grand scheme of things. History tells you the story of how your nation, city, or community came to be everything that it is. It tells you where your ancestors came from and tells you who they were.

4. History teaches a working understanding of change.

. Each of us has a different experience with the rest of the world – an experience shaped by societal norms, cultural differences, personal experiences, and more. We know when we as individuals crave change and why. History helps us better understand how, when, and why change occurs (or should be sought) on a larger scale.

5. History gives us the tools we need to be decent citizens.

Good citizens are always informed citizens, and no one can consider himself to be an informed citizen without a working knowledge of history

6. History makes us better decision makers.

History gives us the opportunity to learn from past mistakes. It helps us understand the many reasons why people may behave the way they do.

Our judicial system is a perfect example of this concept at work.

7. History helps us develop a new level of appreciation for just about everything.  

History is more than just the living record of nations, leaders, and wars. It’s also the story of us. It’s packed with tales of how someone stood up for what they believed in, or died for love, or worked hard to make their dreams come true.

In a small way babies are learning to predict and anticipate the future.

You can see similar responses throughout the animal kingdom. Give a chimp a raisin and its reward neurons fire. Teach a chimp that pressing a button will bring a raisin, and the chimp’s brain starts to react to the button as if that were the reward. “The process of getting the reward itself becomes rewarding,”

Planning is key to our physical survival. It’s also central to our emotional wellbeing.

Daydreaming, or mind-wandering, as the wonks call it, is part of universal human experience. In 2008 one Harvard study found that people spent nearly half of their waking hours mind-wandering – often about good things.

Imagining a positive outcome is a popular technique to build resilience and confidence in everything from sport to job interviews. Teachers may tell pupils off for daydreaming in lessons but studies show a link between daydreaming and creative thought.

. That’s not the point. It’s our dreams that feed us. We are hardwired to anticipate the future and, with all due respect to the philosophers, to thrill to it.

. The pandemic has reminded us that the joy we take in planning is as valid as the event itself.

When the present is crushing – when lives and economies are being ruined – our imagination offers us a welcome escape. The mind, as Milton put it, is its own place: it can make a hell of heaven, or a heaven of hell. Perhaps we should let it

Argentina joins a small group of Latin American and Caribbean countries that have legalized elective abortion, including Uruguay, Cuba and Guyana.

"Today we are a better society that expands rights to women and guarantees public health," Fernández wrote after the legislation passed.

in mid-November. Fernández, who was elected in late 2019, has been vocal about legalizing abortion during his presidency and says he will sign the measure.

In 2018 and 2020, people backing the legalization have sported green clothing and often held or worn green bandannas — a visual that has become linked with the movement.

Despite being largely illegal throughout the region, about 5.4 million abortions occurred annually in Latin America and the Caribbean between 2015 and 2019, the Guttmacher Institute reported.

I find myself both agreeing with how technology giants have used their power in this case, and disturbed by just how awesome their power is.

But it’s dangerous to have a handful of callow young tech titans in charge of who has a megaphone and who does not.

In banning Trump, the big social media companies simply started treating him like everyone else.

There’s no First Amendment problem with taking these privileges away; Americans don’t have a constitutional right to have their speech disseminated by private companies.

Much of your brain’s activity happens outside your awareness. In every moment, your brain must figure out your body’s needs for the next moment and execute a plan to fill those needs in advance.

The budget for your body tracks resources

Each action that spends resources, such as standing up, running, and learning, is like a withdrawal from your account. Actions that replenish your resources, such as eating and sleeping, are like deposits.

Every thought you have, every feeling of happiness or anger or awe you experience, every kindness you extend and every insult you bear or sling is part of your brain’s calculations as it anticipates and budgets your metabolic needs.

This view of the brain has many implications for understanding human beings. So often, for example, we conceive of ourselves in mental terms, separate from the physical

There is no such thing as a purely mental cause, because every mental experience has roots in the physical budgeting of your body

When an unpleasant thought pops into your head, like “I can’t take this craziness anymore,” ask yourself body-budgeting questions. “Did I get enough sleep last night? Am I dehydrated? Should I take a walk? Call a friend? Because I could use a deposit or two in my body budget.”

I’m suggesting that it’s possible to acknowledge what your brain is actually doing and take some comfort from it. Your brain is not for thinking. Everything that it conjures, from thoughts to emotions to dreams, is in the service of body budgeting. This perspective, adopted judiciously, can be a source of resilience in challenging times.

Upon getting bumped on the head by a falling apple, Newton airily dreams up the laws of gravity and the rest, as they say, is history

When the black plague closed Cambridge University, where he was a student, for two years starting in 1665, he spent the long months locked up at home studying complex mathematics, physics and optics.

It was during this fruitful time that Newton, with the help of a crystal prism, became the first to discover that white light is made up a spectrum of colors

He also developed the concept of infinite-series calculus, the kind of scary math studied today by engineering and statistics scholars.

By 1666, Newton had even laid the blueprints for his three laws of motion, still recited by physics students everywhere:An object will remain in a state of inertia unless acted upon by force.The relationship between acceleration and applied force is F=ma.For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Across the pages of the Principia, Newton breaks down the workings of the solar system into "'simple"' equations, explaining away the nature of planetary orbits and the pull between heavenly bodies.

As the most social apes, we inhabit a mirror-world in which every important relationship, whether with spouse, friend or child, shapes the brain, which in turn shapes our relationships.

Just consider how much learning happens when you choose a mate. Along with thrilling dependency comes glimpsing the world through another’s eyes; forsaking some habits and adopting others (good or bad); tasting new ideas, rituals, foods or landscapes; a slew of added friends and family; a tapestry of physical intimacy and affection; and many other catalysts, including a tornadic blast of attraction and attachment hormones — all of which revamp the brain.

During idylls of safety, when your brain knows you’re with someone you can trust, it needn’t waste precious resources coping with stressors or menace. Instead it may spend its lifeblood learning new things or fine-tuning the process of healing.

Mr. Trump’s Lost Cause takes its fuel from conspiratorial myths of all kinds, rehearsed for years on Trump media and social media platforms.

The Confederate Lost Cause is one of the most deeply ingrained mythologies in American history. It emerged first as a mood of traumatized defeat in the 1860s, but grew into an array of arguments, organizations and rituals in search of a story that could win hearts and minds and regain power in the Southern states.

It assumed the character of a religious movement in endless sermons about the noble fallen soldiers who defended home, hearth, their women and their God.

Crucially, the Lost Cause argued that the Confederacy never fought to preserve slavery, and that it was never truly defeated on battlefields.

The Trumpian Lost Cause has quite different origins, of course. It does not derive from sacrifice of blood and treasure in war. On its face it is not a response to the military conquest of a society.

historian Greg Grandin describes how a growing sense of alienation, grievance and inequality led millions of largely white Americans to embrace the simple but clear story Mr. Trump told them.

Whether Trumpism can ever attain the staying power of the Confederate Lost Cause is unclear. It may flame out in a few years like the bad TV show it has always been.

the shock of Trumpists’ inevitable attack on the American experiment on Wednesday, Jan. 6, hit like a thunderbolt. They will be back.

Without breaks in a repetitive routine, the mind has difficulty differentiating between memories, which psychologists call pattern separation,

the stress of the year itself can shift how our brains experience time

there is a medical explanation for the feeling of mental haziness: Covid brain fog, a lingering combination of dementia-like symptoms including memory loss, confusion and difficulty focusing

For some who have recovered from Covid-19

Sheer monotony has the ability to warp time and tangle our memories, psychologists say, with quarantines and lockdowns robbing us of the “boundary events” that normally divide the days, like chapters in a book.

Without the usual work mixers, festive holiday celebrations, far-flung vacations or casual dinners that typically mark and divide the calendar, the brain has a harder time processing and cataloging memories,

t doesn’t help that so much of our lives are virtual now, happening only on screens. Instead of stimulating our senses in real life — going to shops, meeting friends for coffee, chatting with colleagues in the office — we FaceTime when the mood strikes, we binge Netflix shows from three years ago and we browse Amazon perpetually

If one problem is that there is too little going on in our lives, another problem, it seems, is that there is also too much.

The unending sense of crisis is an “ongoing, chronic stressor” that can lead to a collapse of the reassuring sense that our lives move in orderly fashion: past, present, future, which is key to mental stability.

In researching the psychological repercussions of devastating Southern California wildfires in the 1990s, Dr. Holman said that victims felt like “time slowed down" and “the days blurred together.” “Their sense of reality changes,” she said. “They’re not sure what’s real anymore. They feel a sense of a blur, like time is just a blur.”

But even people in solitary confinement will tell you that the essence of that experience is something we’re all experiencing now — the deprivation of normal social contact. And human beings really do depend on each other to structure our lives and tell us who we are.”

“We’ve all had basically enough of wearing our masks and having our lives disrupted,” Ms. Spinney said, “which is what we’re seeing now with Covid fatigue.”

Or perhaps we just need to remember that time is a human construct.

Most investors regard Warren Buffett as someone who has parlayed brilliant analysis, hard work and extensive connections into one of the best track records in financial history. Mr. Housel, however, notices that Mr. Buffett accrued at least 95% of his wealth after age 65.

Had Mr. Buffett earned his world-beating returns for only 30 years rather than much longer, he would be worth 99.9% less, notes Mr. Housel. “The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century,” he writes of Mr. Buffett. “His skill is investing, but his secret is time.”

So Mr. Buffett—traditionally viewed as the greatest living example of investing skill—is also proof of the power of luck and longevity.

In a similar vein, “The Psychology of Money” argues the biggest determinant of long-term returns often happens to be when you were born. Adjusted for inflation, people born in 1950 earned essentially nothing in the stock market between the ages of 13 and 30, Mr. Housel shows. Those born in 1970 earned roughly nine times as much on stocks in their formative years. Those born in 2000? They may have to save a lot more than their parents did.

Bubbles form when catchy stories and the human need for imitation and conformity turn investing into a social imperative.

Mr. Housel urges investors to think about what money and wealth are for. He draws a critical distinction between being rich (having a high current income) and being wealthy (having the freedom to choose not to spend money).

Many rich people aren’t wealthy, Mr. Housel argues, because they feel the need to spend a lot of money to show others how rich they are

He defines the optimal savings level as “the gap between your ego and your income.” Wealth consists in caring less about what others think about you and more about using your money to control how you spend your time.

He writes: “The ability to do what you want, when you want, with who[m] you want, for as long as you want to, pays the highest dividend that exists in finance.”

While education used to revolve around learning Latin, Greek, and philosophy (even today, literacy rates are high at approximately 99%), the education system today is well-rounded.

The government invests heavily in education, approximately 8% of its budget, and education is free for students until they turn 15 or 16 years old.

The public system is divided into six years of primary school, three years of secondary school, and then three years of either academic or vocational school.

allows students time each day to take a course of their choice that isn't included in their regular curriculum

. Students in South Korea take education seriously: many also are involved in supplemental tutoring and after-school programs called "hagwons."

The link between countries with outstanding educational systems and strong financial service sectors is becoming increasingly prominent, and the speed with which nations recovered from the effects of the global recession also showcased extraordinary robustnes

It is interesting to note that each nation is extremely federated, flexible, and far removed from the centralized model favored historically by developed nations.

Computers already are predominant, human life already takes place mostly within them, and people are satisfied with the results.

These devices pose numerous problems. Cost is one. Like a cheap propane gauge, a traditional bike lock is a commodity. It can be had for $10 to $15, a tenth of the price of Nokē’s connected version. Security and privacy are others. The CIA was rumored to have a back door into Samsung TVs for spying. Disturbed people have been caught speaking to children over hacked baby monitors. A botnet commandeered thousands of poorly secured internet-of-things devices to launch a massive distributed denial-of-service attack against the domain-name syste

Reliability plagues internet-connected gadgets, too. When the network is down, or the app’s service isn’t reachable, or some other software behavior gets in the way, the products often cease to function properly—or at all.

Turing guessed that machines would become most compelling when they became convincing companions, which is essentially what today’s smartphones (and smart toasters) do.

But Turing never claimed that machines could think, let alone that they might equal the human mind. Rather, he surmised that machines might be able to exhibit convincing behavior.

People choose computers as intermediaries for the sensual delight of using computers

ne such affection is the pleasure of connectivity. You don’t want to be offline. Why would you want your toaster or doorbell to suffer the same fate? Today, computational absorption is an ideal. The ultimate dream is to be online all the time, or at least connected to a computational machine of some kind.

Doorbells and cars and taxis hardly vanish in the process. Instead, they just get moved inside of computers.

“Being a computer” means something different today than in 1950, when Turing proposed the imitation game. Contra the technical prerequisites of artificial intelligence, acting like a computer often involves little more than moving bits of data around, or acting as a controller or actuator. Grill as computer, bike lock as computer, television as computer. An intermediary

Or consider doorbells once more. Forget Ring, the doorbell has already retired in favor of the computer. When my kids’ friends visit, they just text a request to come open the door. The doorbell has become computerized without even being connected to an app or to the internet. Call it “disruption” if you must, but doorbells and cars and taxis hardly vanish in the process. Instead, they just get moved inside of computers, where they can produce new affections.

The present status of intelligent machines is more powerful than any future robot apocalypse.

Why would anyone ever choose a solution that doesn’t involve computers, when computers are available? Propane tanks and bike locks are still edge cases, but ordinary digital services work similarly: The services people seek out are the ones that allow them to use computers to do things—from finding information to hailing a cab to ordering takeout. This is a feat of aesthetics as much as it is one of business. People choose computers as intermediaries for the sensual delight of using computers, not just as practical, efficient means for solving problems.

This is not where anyone thought computing would end up. Early dystopic scenarios cautioned that the computer could become a bureaucrat or a fascist, reducing human behavior to the predetermined capacities of a dumb machine. Or else, that obsessive computer use would be deadening, sucking humans into narcotic detachment.Those fears persist to some extent, partly because they have been somewhat realized. But they have also been inverted. Being away from them now feels deadening, rather than being attached to them without end. And thus, the actions computers take become self-referential: to turn more and more things into computers to prolong that connection.

But the real present status of intelligent machines is both humdrum and more powerful than any future robot apocalypse. Turing is often called the father of AI, but he only implied that machines might become compelling enough to inspire interaction. That hardly counts as intelligence, artificial or real. It’s also far easier to achieve. Computers already have persuaded people to move their lives inside of them. The machines didn’t need to make people immortal, or promise to serve their every whim, or to threaten to destroy them absent assent. They just needed to become a sufficient part of everything human beings do such that they can’t—or won’t—imagine doing those things without them.

. The real threat of computers isn’t that they might overtake and destroy humanity with their future power and intelligence. It’s that they might remain just as ordinary and impotent as they are today, and yet overtake us anyway.

I was hesitant with the Times. They were far out of my comfort zone, but I felt that the people I was talking to had a sincerity greater than their confusion. Nothing that has happened since then has dissuaded me from that impression.

If you’re reading this, especially on the internet, you are the teacher for those institutions at a local, national, and global level. I understand that you didn’t ask for this position. Neither did I. History doesn’t ask you if you want to be born in a time of upheaval, it just tells you when you are. When the backlash began, I got the call from the person who had sought me out and recruited me. The fear I heard in that shaky voice coming through my mobile phone was unmistakable. It was the fear of a mob, of the unknown, and of the idea that maybe they had gotten it wrong and done something terrible. I have felt all of those things. Many of us have. It’s not a place of strength, even when it seems to be coming from someone standing in a place of power. The Times didn’t know what the internet was doing—tearing down a new hire, exposing a fraud, threatening them—everything seemed to be in the mix.

I had even written about context collapse myself, but that hadn’t saved me from falling into it, and then hurting other people I didn’t mean to hurt. This particular collapse didn’t create much of a doppelgänger, but it did find me spending a morning as a defensive jerk. I’m very sorry for that dumb mistake. It helped me learn a lesson: Be damn sure when you make angry statements. Check them out long enough that, even if the statements themselves are still angry, you are not angry by the time you make them. Again and again, I have learned this: Don’t internet angry. If you’re angry, internet later.

I think if I’d gotten to write for the Times as part of their editorial board, this might have been different. I might have been in a position to show how our media doppelgängers get invented, and how we can unwind them. It takes time and patience. It doesn’t come from denying the doppelgänger—there’s nothing there to deny. I was accused of homophobia because of the in-group language I used with anons when I worked with them. (“Anons” refers to people who identify as part of the activist collective Anonymous.) I was accused of racism for use of taboo language, mainly in a nine-year-old retweet in support of Obama. Intentions aside, it wasn’t a great tweet, and I was probably overemotional when I retweeted it.

In late 2015 I woke up a little before 6 a.m., jet-lagged in New York, and started looking at Twitter. There was a hashtag, I don’t remember if it was trending or just in my timeline, called #whitegirlsaremagic. I clicked on it, and found it was racist and sexist dross. It was being promulgated in opposition to another hashtag, #blackgirlsaremagic. I clicked on that, and found a few model shots and borderline soft-core porn of black women. Armed with this impression, I set off to tweet in righteous anger about how much I disliked women being reduced to sex objects regardless of race. I was not just wrong in this moment, I was incoherently wrong. I had made my little mental model of what #blackgirlsaremagic was, and I had no clue that I had no clue what I was talking about. My 60-second impression of #whitegirlsaremagic was dead-on, but #blackgirlsaremagic didn’t fit in the last few tweets my browser had loaded.

I had been a victim of something the sociologists Alice Marwick and danah boyd call context collapse, where people create online culture meant for one in-group, but exposed to any number of out-groups without its original context by social-media platforms, where it can be recontextualized easily and accidentally.

Not everyone believes loving engagement is the best way to fight evil beliefs, but it has a good track record. Not everyone is in a position to engage safely with racists, sexists, anti-Semites, and homophobes, but for those who are, it’s a powerful tool. Engagement is not the one true answer to the societal problems destabilizing America today, but there is no one true answer. The way forward is as multifarious and diverse as America is, and a method of nonviolent confrontation and accountability, arising from my pacifism, is what I can bring to helping my society.

Here is your task, person on the internet, reader of journalism, speaker to the world on social media: You make the world now, in a way that you never did before. Your beliefs have a power they’ve never had in human history. You must learn to investigate with a scientific and loving mind not only what is true, but what is effective in the world. Right now we are a world of geniuses who constantly love to call each other idiots. But humanity is the most complicated thing we’ve found in the universe, and so far as we know, we’re the only thing even looking. We are miracles by the billions with powers and luxuries beyond the dreams of kings of old.

We are powerful creatures, but power must come with gentleness and responsibility. No one prepared us for this, no one trained us, no one came before us with an understanding of our world. There were hints, and wise people, and I lean on and cherish them. But their philosophies and imaginations can only take us so far. We have to build our own philosophies and imagine great futures for our world in order to have any futures at all. Let mercy guide us forward in these troubled times. Let yourself imagine, because imagination is the wellspring of hope. Here, in the beginning of the 21st century, hope is our duty to the future.

Anglin is an ideological descendant of men such as George Lincoln Rockwell, who created the American Nazi Party in the late 1950s, and William Luther Pierce, who founded the National Alliance, a powerful white-nationalist group, in the 1970s. Anglin admires these predecessors, who saw themselves as revolutionaries at the vanguard of a movement to take back the country. He dreams of a violent insurrection.

Anglin has the internet. His reach is exponentially greater, his ability to connect with like-minded young men unprecedented.

Anglin and his ilk like to talk about the Overton Window, a term that describes the range of acceptable discourse in society.

They’d been tugging at that window for years only to watch, with surprise and delight, as it flew wide open during Donald Trump’s candidacy. Suddenly it was okay to talk about banning Muslims or to cast Mexican immigrants as criminals and parasites—which meant Anglin’s even-more-extreme views weren’t as far outside the mainstream as they once had been

Until the Roof massacre, Burkholder hadn’t thought about the “adorable,” “happy-go-lucky” boy in her class who loved dinosaurs. Anglin was a normal kid back then, whose only remarkable quality was his extraordinarily nasal voice—it was so bad that Burkholder thought he might have a sinus problem, and raised the issue with his mother, Katie, at a parent–teacher conference.

y all outward appearances, Andrew Anglin had an ordinary, comfortable childhood, at least until adolescence. He grew up in a big house in Worthington Hills, an upper-middle-class neighborhood, where he collected X-Men comics, played computer games, ate burgers at the original Wendy’s restaurant, and got into music with his best friend, West Emerson. And he loved to read. One book that left a deep impression on him was Weasel, which tells the story of a boy in frontier Ohio seeking revenge against a psychopath who, having run out of American Indians to murder, takes to slaughtering white homesteaders.

A declared atheist, he styled his reddish hair in dreadlocks and favored jeans with 50-inch leg openings. He often wore a hoodie with a large fuck racism patch on the back.

Anglin was one of only two vegans at Linworth

But people who knew Anglin in high school told me that, for reasons that were unclear, his behavior became erratic and frightening sometime around the beginning of his sophomore year at Linworth