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In the modern tech world, the value of a humanistic education shows up in evidence of its absence. Sam Bankman-Fried, the disgraced founder of the crypto exchange FTX who recently lost his $16 billion fortune in a few days, is a famously proud illiterate. “I would never read a book,” he once told an interviewer. “I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”

Elon Musk and Twitter are another excellent case in point. It’s painful and extraordinary to watch the ham-fisted way a brilliant engineering mind like Musk deals with even relatively simple literary concepts such as parody and satire. He obviously has never thought about them before.

The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era. Apparently, Mark Zuckerberg has read a great deal about Caesar Augustus, but I wish he’d read about the regulation of the pamphlet press in 17th-century Europe. It might have spared America the annihilation of social trust.

These failures don’t derive from mean-spiritedness or even greed, but from a willful obliviousness. The engineers do not recognize that humanistic questions—like, say, hermeneutics or the historical contingency of freedom of speech or the genealogy of morality—are real questions with real consequences

Everybody is entitled to their opinion about politics and culture, it’s true, but an opinion is different from a grounded understanding. The most direct path to catastrophe is to treat complex problems as if they’re obvious to everyone. You can lose billions of dollars pretty quickly that way.

As the technologists have ignored humanistic questions to their peril, the humanists have greeted the technological revolutions of the past 50 years by committing soft suicide.

As of 2017, the number of English majors had nearly halved since the 1990s. History enrollments have declined by 45 percent since 2007 alone

the humanities have not fundamentally changed their approach in decades, despite technology altering the entire world around them. They are still exploding meta-narratives like it’s 1979, an exercise in self-defeat.

Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine.

the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations.

The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?

Despite the clear value of a humanistic education, its decline continues. Over the past 10 years, STEM has triumphed, and the humanities have collapsed. The number of students enrolled in computer science is now nearly the same as the number of students enrolled in all of the humanities combined.

now there’s GPT-3. Natural-language processing presents the academic humanities with a whole series of unprecedented problems

Practical matters are at stake: Humanities departments judge their undergraduate students on the basis of their essays. They give Ph.D.s on the basis of a dissertation’s composition. What happens when both processes can be significantly automated?

despite the drastic divide of the moment, natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.

The humanists will need to understand natural-language processing because it’s the future of language

that space for collaboration can exist, both sides will have to take the most difficult leaps for highly educated people: Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance.

But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.

Colonisation exposed us to new ideas that shocked and confused us. Graeber & Wengrow focus on the French coming into contact with Native Americans in Canada, and in particular on Wendat Confederacy philosopher–statesman Kandiaronk as an example of European traders, missionaries, and intellectuals debating with, and being criticized by indigenous people. Historians have downplayed how much these encounters shaped Enlightenment ideas.

this thought-provoking book is armed to the teeth with fascinating ideas and interpretations that go against mainstream thinking

ather than yet another history book telling you how humanity got here, they take their respective disciplines to task for dealing in myths.

Its legacy, shaped via several iterations, is the modern textbook narrative: hunter-gathering was replaced by pastoralism and then farming; the agricultural revolution resulted in larger populations producing material surpluses; these allowed for specialist occupations but also needed bureaucracies to share and administer them to everyone; and this top-down control led to today’s nation states. Ta-daa!

this simplistic tale of progress ignores and downplays that there was nothing linear or inevitable about where we have ended up.

ake agriculture. Rather than humans enthusiastically entering into what Harari in Sapiens called a Faustian bargain with crops, there were many pathways and responses

Experiments show that plant domestication could have been achieved in as little as 20–30 years, so the fact that cereal domestication here took some 3,000 years questions the notion of an agricultural “revolution”. Lastly, this book includes many examples of areas where agriculture was purposefully rejected. Designating such times and places as “pre-agricultural” is misleading, write the authors, they were anti-agricultural.

The idea that agriculture led to large states similarly needs revision

correlation is not causation, and some 15–20 additional centres of domestication have since been identified that followed different paths. Some cities have previously remained hidden in the sediments of ancient river deltas until revealed by modern remote-sensing technology.

“extensive agriculture may thus have been an outcome, not a cause, of urbanization”

And cities did not automatically imply social stratification. The Dawn of Everything fascinates with its numerous examples of large settlements without ruling classes, such as Ukrainian mega-sites, the Harappan civilization, or Mexican city-states.

These instead relied on collective decision-making through assemblies or councils, which questions some of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology about scale: that larger human groups require complex (i.e. hierarchical) systems to organize them.

e what is staring them in the face

humans have always been very capable of consciously experimenting with different social arrangements. And—this is rarely acknowledged—they did so on a seasonal basis, spending e.g. part of the year settled in large communal groups under a leader, and another part as small, independently roving bands.

Throughout, Graeber & Wengrow convincingly argue that the only thing we can say about our ancestors is that “there is no single pattern. The only consistent phenomenon is the very fact of alteration […] If human beings, through most of our history, have moved back and forth fluidly between different social arrangements […] maybe the real question should be ‘how did we get stuck?

Next to criticism, the authors put out some interesting ideas of their own, of which I want to quickly highlight two.

The first is that some of the observed variations in social arrangements resulted from schismogenesis. Anthropologist Gregory Bateson coined this term in the 1930s to describe how people define themselves against or in opposition to others, adopting behaviours and attitudes that are different.

The second idea is that states can be described in terms of three elementary forms of domination: control of violence, control of information, and individual charisma, which express themselves as sovereignty, administration, and competitive politics.

Asking which past society most resembles today’s is the wrong question to ask. It risks slipping into an exercise in retrofitting, “which makes us scour the ancient world for embryonic versions of our modern nation states”

I have left unmentioned several other topics: the overlooked role of women, the legacy of Rousseau’s and Hobbes’s ideas, the origins of inequality and the flawed assumptions hiding behind that question

There are so many historical details and delights hiding between these covers that I was thoroughly enthralle

If you have any interest in big history, archaeology, or anthropology, this book is indispensable. I am confident that the questions and critiques raised here will remain relevant for a long time to come.

I was particularly impressed by the in-depth critique by worbsintowords on his YouTube channel What is Politics? of (so far) five videos

invoked an old metaphor to explain why he isn’t convinced by the analysis: He compared it to establishing a theory of how weather works by pointing a video camera out the window for 7 hours.

Indeed, among neuroscientists, the new “comprehensive atlas” of the cerebral cortex is almost as controversial as a historical atlas of the Middle East. That’s because every word has a constellation of meanings and associations — and it’s hard for scientists to agree about how best to study them in the lab.

For this study, neuroscientist Jack Gallant and his team at the University of California, Berkeley played more than two hours’ worth of stories from the Moth Radio Hour for seven grad students and postdocs while measuring their cerebral blood flow using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Then, they linked the activity in some 50,000 pea-sized regions of the cortex to the “meaning” of the words being heard at that moment.

How, you might ask, did they establish the meaning of words? The neuroscientists pulled all the nouns and verbs from the podcasts. With a computer program, they then looked across millions of pages of text to see how often the words from the podcasts are used near 985 common words taken from Wikipedia’s List of 1,000 Basic Words. “Wolf,” for instance, would presumably be used more often in proximity to “dog” than to, say, “eggplant.” Using that data, the program assigned numbers that approximated the meaning of each individual word from the podcasts — and, with some fancy number crunching, they figured out what areas of the brain were activated when their research subjects heard words with certain meanings.

Everyone agrees that the research is innovative in its method. After all, linking up the meanings of thousands of words to the second-by-second brain activity in thousands of tiny brain regions is no mean feat. “That’s way more data than any human being can possibly think about,” said Gallant.

What they can’t agree on is what it means. “In this study, our goal was not to ask a specific question. Our goal was to map everything so that we can ask questions after that,” said Gallant. “One of the most frequent questions we get is, ‘What does it mean?’ If I gave you a globe, you wouldn’t ask what it means, you’d start using it for stuff. You can look for the smallest ocean or how long it will take to get to San Francisco.”

This “data-driven approach” still involves assumptions about how to break up language into different categories of meaning

“Of course it’s a very simplified version of how meaning is captured in our minds, but it seems to be a pretty good proxy,” she said.

hordes of unanswered questions: “We can map where your brain represents the meaning of a narrative text that is associated with family, but we don’t know why the brain is responding to family at that location. Is it the word ‘father’ itself? Is it your memories of your own father? Is it your own thinking about being a parent yourself?” He hopes that it’s just those types of questions that researchers will ask, using his brain map as a guide.

My own view of these things is that we simply do not know enough to judge the ultimate truth of the claims of theology. (I’m with Hamlet, who remarked to Horatio: “There are more things in heaven and earth … than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”) Perhaps we will one day; perhaps not. Meanwhile, given that religious faith is an intrinsic element of human experience, it is best to approach and engage the subject with a sense of history and a critical sensibility.

In his view that faith was “not a possession but a hope,” Hamilton was tapping into an ancient tradition. As the author of the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews wrote, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”—in this sense, religious faith is way of interpreting experience that allows for the possibility of the redemptive. Faith in this sense assumes that scripture and tradition are the works of human hands and hearts, efforts undertaken to explain the seemingly inexplicable. Faith in this sense is inextricably tied to doubt; it is an attempt, sometimes successful and sometimes not, to squint and struggle to “see through a glass darkly,” as Paul wrote in Corinthians. Faith without such doubt has never been part of the Christian tradition; it is telling, I think, that one of the earliest resurrection scenes in the Bible is that of Thomas demanding evidence—he wanted to see, to touch, to prove. Those who question and probe and debate are heirs of the apostles just as much as the most fervent of believers.

designer of the test-taking program, noted that even a simple task for children, like understanding the meaning of an arrow in the context of a test diagram, was not yet something the most advanced A.I. programs could do reliably.

scientific workshops intended to develop more accurate methods than the Turing test for measuring the capabilities of artificial intelligence programs.

Researchers in the field are now developing a wide range of gauges to measure intelligence — including the Allen Institute’s standardized-test approach and a task that Dr. Marcus proposed, which he called the “Ikea construction challenge.” That test would provide an A.I. program with a bag of parts and an instruction sheet and require it to assemble a piece of furniture.

First proposed in 2011 by Hector Levesque, a University of Toronto computer scientist, the Winograd Schema Challenge would pose questions that require real-world logic to A.I. programs. A question might be: “The trophy would not fit in the brown suitcase because it was too big. What was too big, A: the trophy or B: the suitcase?” Answering this question would require a program to reason spatially and have specific knowledge about the size of objects.

Within the A.I. community, discussions about software programs that can reason in a humanlike way are significant because recent progress in the field has been more focused on improving perception, not reasoning.

GeoSolver, or GeoS, was described at the Conference on Empirical Methods on Natural Language Processing in Lisbon this weekend. It operates by separately generating a series of logical equations, which serve as components of possible answers, from the text and the diagram in the question. It then weighs the accuracy of the equations and tries to discern whether its interpretation of the diagram and text is strong enough to select one of the multiple-choice answers.

Ultimately, Dr. Marcus said, he believed that progress in artificial intelligence would require multiple tests, just as multiple tests are used to assess human performance.

“There is no one measure of human intelligence,” he said. “Why should there be just one A.I. test?”

In the 1960s, Hubert Dreyfus, a philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, expressed this skepticism most clearly when he wrote, “Believing that writing these types of programs will bring us closer to real artificial intelligence is like believing that someone climbing a tree is making progress toward reaching the moon.”

Perhaps more fundamental, the rules that shape how the bricoleur selects the various elements have also changed. Religion is far less formative of our public discourse and culture in the deep, constitutive way that it was even as recently as the postwar period, due in large part to the rise of neo-liberalism.

if we ask Americans a range of questions about matters that extend beyond their immediate horizons, we would be somewhat amazed by the blind spots in our thinking. Ignorance about religion might very well extend to ignorance about geopolitical concerns or about other cultures generally. What is striking, and simultaneously disturbing, is the degree to which our comfort and certainty about ourselves as Americans and about the world we inhabit enable us to settle into a kind of willful ignorance. So I am not inclined to single out religion in this regard; something more fundamental has been revealed

To take seriously the results of the Pew quiz leads us to question the substance of our national commitment to religious tolerance and pluralism. If our knowledge of other religions (even our own) is shoddy, then what constitutes the substance of our toleration of others? Is it simply a procedural concern? And, more importantly, if we fail to know basic facts about others, do we make it easier to retreat into the comfort of insular spaces, deaf to the claims of others? Do we expect, at the end of the day, no matter our public announcements to the contrary, that all others should sound and believe as the majority of Americans do?

The Pew Forum’s Religious Knowledge Survey examines one type of religious knowledge: knowledge-that. Respondents were asked whether certain propositions about world religions were true. But it is an open question whether this really is the sort of knowledge that we have in mind when we are talking about religious knowledge. At least sometimes, it seems like we mean knowledge-how.

The unwritten premise of the survey is that belief ought to be individual, considered, and fully-informed. But that premise fits neither religious experience nor human subjectivity over the long term. Thus to ask these questions in this way is to presume a particular kind of religious subject that is largely nonexistent, then to take pleasure in clucking over its nonexistence.

what if religion is not primarily about knowledge? What if the defining core of religion is more like a way of life, a nexus of action? What if, as per Charles Taylor, a religious orientation is more akin to a “social imaginary,” which functions as an “understanding” on a register that is somewhat inarticulable? Indeed, I think Taylor’s corpus offers multiple resources for criticizing what he would describe as the “intellectualism” of such approaches to religion—methodologies that treat human persons as “thinking things,” and thus reduce religious phenomena to a set of ideas, beliefs, and propositions. Taylor’s account of social imaginaries reminds us of a kind of understanding that is “carried” in practices, implicit in rituals and routines, and can never be adequately articulated or made explicit. If we begin to think about religion more like a social imaginary than a set of propositions and beliefs, then the methodologies of surveys of religious “knowledge” are going to look problematic.

I’m reminded of an observation Wittgenstein makes in the Philosophical Investigations: One could be a master of a game without being able to articulate the rules.

belief, faith and knowledge, Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, religion and science, religion in the U.S., religious literacy, surveys, U.S. Religious Knowledge Survey

Sartre listened to his problem and said simply, ‘You are free, therefore choose — that is to say, invent.’ No signs are vouchsafed in this world, he said. None of the old authorities can relieve you of the burden of freedom. You can weigh up moral or practical considerations as carefully as you like, but ultimately you must take the plunge and do something, and it’s up to you what that something is.

Even if the situation is unbearable — perhaps you are facing execution, or sitting in a Gestapo prison, or about to fall off a cliff — you are still free to decide what to make of it in mind and deed. Starting from where you are now, you choose. And in choosing, you also choose who you will be.

The war had made people realise that they and their fellow humans were capable of departing entirely from civilised norms; no wonder the idea of a fixed human nature seemed questionable.

If this sounds difficult and unnerving, it’s because it is. Sartre does not deny that the need to keep making decisions brings constant anxiety. He heightens this anxiety by pointing out that what you do really matters. You should make your choices as though you were choosing on behalf of the whole of humanity, taking the entire burden of responsibility for how the human race behaves. If you avoid this responsibility by fooling yourself that you are the victim of circumstance or of someone else’s bad advice, you are failing to meet the demands of human life and choosing a fake existence, cut off from your own ‘authenticity’.

Along with the terrifying side of this comes a great promise: Sartre’s existentialism implies that it is possible to be authentic and free, as long as you keep up the effort.

almost all agreed that it was, as an article in Les nouvelles littéraires phrased it, a ‘sickening mixture of philosophic pretentiousness, equivocal dreams, physiological technicalities, morbid tastes and hesitant eroticism … an introspective embryo that one would take distinct pleasure in crushing’.

he offered a philosophy designed for a species that had just scared the hell out of itself, but that finally felt ready to grow up and take responsibility.

In this rebellious world, just as with the Parisian bohemians and Dadaists in earlier generations, everything that was dangerous and provocative was good, and everything that was nice or bourgeois was bad.

Such interweaving of ideas and life had a long pedigree, although the existentialists gave it a new twist. Stoic and Epicurean thinkers in the classical world had practised philosophy as a means of living well, rather than of seeking knowledge or wisdom for their own sake. By reflecting on life’s vagaries in philosophical ways, they believed they could become more resilient, more able to rise above circumstances, and better equipped to manage grief, fear, anger, disappointment or anxiety.

In the tradition they passed on, philosophy is neither a pure intellectual pursuit nor a collection of cheap self-help tricks, but a discipline for flourishing and living a fully human, responsible life.

For Kierkegaard, Descartes had things back to front. In his own view, human existence comes first: it is the starting point for everything we do, not the result of a logical deduction. My existence is active: I live it and choose it, and this precedes any statement I can make about myself.

Studying our own moral genealogy cannot help us to escape or transcend ourselves. But it can enable us to see our illusions more clearly and lead a more vital, assertive existence.

What was needed, he felt, was not high moral or theological ideals, but a deeply critical form of cultural history or ‘genealogy’ that would uncover the reasons why we humans are as we are, and how we came to be that way. For him, all philosophy could even be redefined as a form of psychology, or history.

For those oppressed on grounds of race or class, or for those fighting against colonialism, existentialism offered a change of perspective — literally, as Sartre proposed that all situations be judged according to how they appeared in the eyes of those most oppressed, or those whose suffering was greatest.

She observed that we need not expect moral philosophers to ‘live by’ their ideas in a simplistic way, as if they were following a set of rules. But we can expect them to show how their ideas are lived in. We should be able to look in through the windows of a philosophy, as it were, and see how people occupy it, how they move about and how they conduct themselves.

the existentialists inhabited their historical and personal world, as they inhabited their ideas. This notion of ‘inhabited philosophy’ is one I’ve borrowed from the English philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, who wrote the first full-length book on Sartre and was an early adopter of existentialism

What is existentialism anyway?

An existentialist who is also phenomenological provides no easy rules for dealing with this condition, but instead concentrates on describing lived experience as it presents itself. — By describing experience well, he or she hopes to understand this existence and awaken us to ways of living more authentic lives.

Existentialists concern themselves with individual, concrete human existence. — They consider human existence different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free — — and therefore I’m responsible for everything I do, a dizzying fact which causes — an anxiety inseparable from human existence itself.

On the other hand, I am only free within situations, which can include factors in my own biology and psychology as well as physical, historical and social variables of the world into which I have been thrown. — Despite the limitations, I always want more: I am passionately involved in personal projects of all kinds. — Human existence is thus ambiguous: at once boxed in by borders and yet transcendent and exhilarating. —

The first part of this is straightforward: a phenomenologist’s job is to describe. This is the activity that Husserl kept reminding his students to do. It meant stripping away distractions, habits, clichés of thought, presumptions and received ideas, in order to return our attention to what he called the ‘things themselves’. We must fix our beady gaze on them and capture them exactly as they appear, rather than as we think they are supposed to be.

Husserl therefore says that, to phenomenologically describe a cup of coffee, I should set aside both the abstract suppositions and any intrusive emotional associations. Then I can concentrate on the dark, fragrant, rich phenomenon in front of me now. This ‘setting aside’ or ‘bracketing out’ of speculative add-ons Husserl called epoché — a term borrowed from the ancient Sceptics,

The point about rigour is crucial; it brings us back to the first half of the command to describe phenomena. A phenomenologist cannot get away with listening to a piece of music and saying, ‘How lovely!’ He or she must ask: is it plaintive? is it dignified? is it colossal and sublime? The point is to keep coming back to the ‘things themselves’ — phenomena stripped of their conceptual baggage — so as to bail out weak or extraneous material and get to the heart of the experience.

Husserlian ‘bracketing out’ or epoché allows the phenomenologist to temporarily ignore the question ‘But is it real?’, in order to ask how a person experiences his or her world. Phenomenology gives a formal mode of access to human experience. It lets philosophers talk about life more or less as non-philosophers do, while still being able to tell themselves they are being methodical and rigorous.

Besides claiming to transform the way we think about reality, phenomenologists promised to change how we think about ourselves. They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is, as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does, and how it grasps its experiences.

For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote: in love, something is loved, in hatred, something is hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘about-ness’ or ‘of-ness’.

Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness: it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy.

Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects ‘really’ are, and the question of what the mind ‘really’ is. By doing the epoché and bracketing out all consideration of reality from both topics, one is freed to concentrate on the relationship in the middle. One can apply one’s descriptive energies to the endless dance of intentionality that takes place in our lives: the whirl of our minds as they seize their intended phenomena one after the other and whisk them around the floor,

Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is:

Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep.

a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.

Three simple ideas — description, phenomenon, intentionality — provided enough inspiration to keep roomfuls of Husserlian assistants busy in Freiburg for decades. With all of human existence awaiting their attention, how could they ever run out of things to do?

For Sartre, this gives the mind an immense freedom. If we are nothing but what we think about, then no predefined ‘inner nature’ can hold us back. We are protean.

way of this interpretation. Real, not real; inside, outside; what difference did it make? Reflecting on this, Husserl began turning his phenomenology into a branch of ‘idealism’ — the philosophical tradition which denied external reality and defined everything as a kind of private hallucination.

For Sartre, if we try to shut ourselves up inside our own minds, ‘in a nice warm room with the shutters closed’, we cease to exist. We have no cosy home: being out on the dusty road is the very definition of what we are.

One might think that, if Heidegger had anything worth saying, he could have communicated it in ordinary language. The fact is that he does not want to be ordinary, and he may not even want to communicate in the usual sense. He wants to make the familiar obscure, and to vex us. George Steiner thought that Heidegger’s purpose was less to be understood than to be experienced through a ‘felt strangeness’.

He takes Dasein in its most ordinary moments, then talks about it in the most innovative way he can. For Heidegger, Dasein’s everyday Being is right here: it is Being-in-the-world, or In-der-Welt-sein. The main feature of Dasein’s everyday Being-in-the-world right here is that it is usually busy doing something.

Thus, for Heidegger, all Being-in-the-world is also a ‘Being-with’ or Mitsein. We cohabit with others in a ‘with-world’, or Mitwelt. The old philosophical problem of how we prove the existence of other minds has now vanished. Dasein swims in the with-world long before it wonders about other minds.

Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last. Karl Jaspers was one of those who made this mistake, as he later recalled, and Beauvoir observed similar dismissive attitudes among the French students in Berlin.

In any case, most of those who disagreed with Hitler’s ideology soon learned to keep their view to themselves. If a Nazi parade passed on the street, they would either slip out of view or give the obligatory salute like everyone else, telling themselves that the gesture meant nothing if they did not believe in it. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.

for Arendt, if you do not respond adequately when the times demand it, you show a lack of imagination and attention that is as dangerous as deliberately committing an abuse. It amounts to disobeying the one command she had absorbed from Heidegger in those Marburg days: Think!

‘Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’ Haffner thought modernity itself was partly to blame: people had become yoked to their habits and to mass media, forgetting to stop and think, or to disrupt their routines long enough to question what was going on.

Heidegger’s former lover and student Hannah Arendt would argue, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, that totalitarian movements thrived at least partly because of this fragmentation in modern lives, which made people more vulnerable to being swept away by demagogues. Elsewhere, she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the most extreme failures of personal moral awareness.

His communicative ideal fed into a whole theory of history: he traced all civilisation to an ‘Axial Period’ in the fifth century BC, during which philosophy and culture exploded simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, as though a great bubble of minds had erupted from the earth’s surface. ‘True philosophy needs communion to come into existence,’ he wrote, and added, ‘Uncommunicativeness in a philosopher is virtually a criterion of the untruth of his thinking.’

The idea of being called to authenticity became a major theme in later existentialism, the call being interpreted as saying something like ‘Be yourself!’, as opposed to being phony. For Heidegger, the call is more fundamental than that. It is a call to take up a self that you didn’t know you had: to wake up to your Being. Moreover, it is a call to action. It requires you to do something: to take a decision of some sort.

Being and Time contained at least one big idea that should have been of use in resisting totalitarianism. Dasein, Heidegger wrote there, tends to fall under the sway of something called das Man or ‘the they’ — an impersonal entity that robs us of the freedom to think for ourselves. To live authentically requires resisting or outwitting this influence, but this is not easy because das Man is so nebulous. Man in German does not mean ‘man’ as in English (that’s der Mann), but a neutral abstraction, something like ‘one’ in the English phrase ‘one doesn’t do that’,

for Heidegger, das Man is me. It is everywhere and nowhere; it is nothing definite, but each of us is it. As with Being, it is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to see. If I am not careful, however, das Man takes over the important decisions that should be my own. It drains away my responsibility or ‘answerability’. As Arendt might put it, we slip into banality, failing to think.

Jaspers focused on what he called Grenzsituationen — border situations, or limit situations. These are the moments when one finds oneself constrained or boxed in by what is happening, but at the same time pushed by these events towards the limits or outer edge of normal experience. For example, you might have to make a life-or-death choice, or something might remind you suddenly of your mortality,

Jaspers’ interest in border situations probably had much to do with his own early confrontation with mortality. From childhood, he had suffered from a heart condition so severe that he always expected to die at any moment. He also had emphysema, which forced him to speak slowly, taking long pauses to catch his breath. Both illnesses meant that he had to budget his energies with care in order to get his work done without endangering his life.

If I am to resist das Man, I must become answerable to the call of my ‘voice of conscience’. This call does not come from God, as a traditional Christian definition of the voice of conscience might suppose. It comes from a truly existentialist source: my own authentic self. Alas, this voice is one I do not recognise and may not hear, because it is not the voice of my habitual ‘they-self’. It is an alien or uncanny version of my usual voice. I am familiar with my they-self, but not with my unalienated voice — so, in a weird twist, my real voice is the one that sounds strangest to me.

Marcel developed a strongly theological branch of existentialism. His faith distanced him from both Sartre and Heidegger, but he shared a sense of how history makes demands on individuals. In his essay ‘On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of disponibilité or availability had been explored by other writers,

Marcel made it his central existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed, encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.

Bettelheim later observed that, under Nazism, only a few people realised at once that life could not continue unaltered: these were the ones who got away quickly. Bettelheim himself was not among them. Caught in Austria when Hitler annexed it, he was sent first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald, but was then released in a mass amnesty to celebrate Hitler’s birthday in 1939 — an extraordinary reprieve, after which he left at once for America.

we are used to reading philosophy as offering a universal message for all times and places — or at least as aiming to do so. But Heidegger disliked the notion of universal truths or universal humanity, which he considered a fantasy. For him, Dasein is not defined by shared faculties of reason and understanding, as the Enlightenment philosophers thought. Still less is it defined by any kind of transcendent eternal soul, as in religious tradition. We do not exist on a higher, eternal plane at all. Dasein’s Being is local: it has a historical situation, and is constituted in time and place.

For Marcel, learning to stay open to reality in this way is the philosopher’s prime job. Everyone can do it, but the philosopher is the one who is called on above all to stay awake, so as to be the first to sound the alarm if something seems wrong.

Second, it also means understanding that we are historical beings, and grasping the demands our particular historical situation is making on us. In what Heidegger calls ‘anticipatory resoluteness’, Dasein discovers ‘that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up’. At that moment, through Being-towards-death and resoluteness in facing up to one’s time, one is freed from the they-self and attains one’s true, authentic self.

If we are temporal beings by our very nature, then authentic existence means accepting, first, that we are finite and mortal. We will die: this all-important realisation is what Heidegger calls authentic ‘Being-towards-Death’, and it is fundamental to his philosophy.

Hannah Arendt, instead, left early on: she had the benefit of a powerful warning. Just after the Nazi takeover, in spring 1933, she had been arrested while researching materials on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organisation at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Her apartment was searched; both she and her mother were locked up briefly, then released. They fled, without stopping to arrange travel documents. They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The family would invite people for dinner, then let them leave through the back door at night.

As Sartre argued in his 1943 review of The Stranger, basic phenomenological principles show that experience comes to us already charged with significance. A piano sonata is a melancholy evocation of longing. If I watch a soccer match, I see it as a soccer match, not as a meaningless scene in which a number of people run around taking turns to apply their lower limbs to a spherical object. If the latter is what I’m seeing, then I am not watching some more essential, truer version of soccer; I am failing to watch it properly as soccer at all.

Much as they liked Camus personally, neither Sartre nor Beauvoir accepted his vision of absurdity. For them, life is not absurd, even when viewed on a cosmic scale, and nothing can be gained by saying it is. Life for them is full of real meaning, although that meaning emerges differently for each of us.

For Sartre, we show bad faith whenever we portray ourselves as passive creations of our race, class, job, history, nation, family, heredity, childhood influences, events, or even hidden drives in our subconscious which we claim are out of our control. It is not that such factors are unimportant: class and race, in particular, he acknowledged as powerful forces in people’s lives, and Simone de Beauvoir would soon add gender to that list.

Sartre takes his argument to an extreme point by asserting that even war, imprisonment or the prospect of imminent death cannot take away my existential freedom. They form part of my ‘situation’, and this may be an extreme and intolerable situation, but it still provides only a context for whatever I choose to do next. If I am about to die, I can decide how to face that death. Sartre here resurrects the ancient Stoic idea that I may not choose what happens to me, but I can choose what to make of it, spiritually speaking.

But the Stoics cultivated indifference in the face of terrible events, whereas Sartre thought we should remain passionately, even furiously engaged with what happens to us and with what we can achieve. We should not expect freedom to be anything less than fiendishly difficult.

Freedom does not mean entirely unconstrained movement, and it certainly does not mean acting randomly. We often mistake the very things that enable us to be free — context, meaning, facticity, situation, a general direction in our lives — for things that define us and take away our freedom. It is only with all of these that we can be free in a real sense.

Nor did he mean that privileged groups have the right to pontificate to the poor and downtrodden about the need to ‘take responsibility’ for themselves. That would be a grotesque misreading of Sartre’s point, since his sympathy in any encounter always lay with the more oppressed side. But for each of us — for me — to be in good faith means not making excuses for myself.

Camus’ novel gives us a deliberately understated vision of heroism and decisive action compared to those of Sartre and Beauvoir. One can only do so much. It can look like defeatism, but it shows a more realistic perception of what it takes to actually accomplish difficult tasks like liberating one’s country.

Camus just kept returning to his core principle: no torture, no killing — at least not with state approval. Beauvoir and Sartre believed they were taking a more subtle and more realistic view. If asked why a couple of innocuous philosophers had suddenly become so harsh, they would have said it was because the war had changed them in profound ways. It had shown them that one’s duties to humanity could be more complicated than they seemed. ‘The war really divided my life in two,’ Sartre said later.

Poets and artists ‘let things be’, but they also let things come out and show themselves. They help to ease things into ‘unconcealment’ (Unverborgenheit), which is Heidegger’s rendition of the Greek term alētheia, usually translated as ‘truth’. This is a deeper kind of truth than the mere correspondence of a statement to reality, as when we say ‘The cat is on the mat’ and point to a mat with a cat on it. Long before we can do this, both cat and mat must ‘stand forth out of concealedness’. They must un-hide themselves.

Heidegger does not use the word ‘consciousness’ here because — as with his earlier work — he is trying to make us think in a radically different way about ourselves. We are not to think of the mind as an empty cavern, or as a container filled with representations of things. We are not even supposed to think of it as firing off arrows of intentional ‘aboutness’, as in the earlier phenomenology of Brentano. Instead, Heidegger draws us into the depths of his Schwarzwald, and asks us to imagine a gap with sunlight filtering in. We remain in the forest, but we provide a relatively open spot where other beings can bask for a moment. If we did not do this, everything would remain in the thickets, hidden even to itself.

The astronomer Carl Sagan began his 1980 television series Cosmos by saying that human beings, though made of the same stuff as the stars, are conscious and are therefore ‘a way for the cosmos to know itself’. Merleau-Ponty similarly quoted his favourite painter Cézanne as saying, ‘The landscape thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness.’ This is something like what Heidegger thinks humanity contributes to the earth. We are not made of spiritual nothingness; we are part of Being, but we also bring something unique with us. It is not much: a little open space, perhaps with a path and a bench like the one the young Heidegger used to sit on to do his homework. But through us, the miracle occurs.

Beauty aside, Heidegger’s late writing can also be troubling, with its increasingly mystical notion of what it is to be human. If one speaks of a human being mainly as an open space or a clearing, or a means of ‘letting beings be’ and dwelling poetically on the earth, then one doesn’t seem to be talking about any recognisable person. The old Dasein has become less human than ever. It is now a forestry feature.

Even today, Jaspers, the dedicated communicator, is far less widely read than Heidegger, who has influenced architects, social theorists, critics, psychologists, artists, film-makers, environmental activists, and innumerable students and enthusiasts — including the later deconstructionist and post-structuralist schools, which took their starting point from his late thinking. Having spent the late 1940s as an outsider and then been rehabilitated, Heidegger became the overwhelming presence in university philosophy all over the European continent from then on.

As Levinas reflected on this experience, it helped to lead him to a philosophy that was essentially ethical, rather than ontological like Heidegger’s. He developed his ideas from the work of Jewish theologian Martin Buber, whose I and Thou in 1923 had distinguished between my relationship with an impersonal ‘it’ or ‘them’, and the direct personal encounter I have with a ‘you’. Levinas took it further: when I encounter you, we normally meet face-to-face, and it is through your face that you, as another person, can make ethical demands on me. This is very different from Heidegger’s Mitsein or Being-with, which suggests a group of people standing alongside one another, shoulder to shoulder as if in solidarity — perhaps as a unified nation or Volk.

For Levinas, we literally face each other, one individual at a time, and that relationship becomes one of communication and moral expectation. We do not merge; we respond to one another. Instead of being co-opted into playing some role in my personal drama of authenticity, you look me in the eyes — and you remain Other. You remain you.

This relationship is more fundamental than the self, more fundamental than consciousness, more fundamental even than Being — and it brings an unavoidable ethical obligation. Ever since Husserl, phenomenologists and existentialists had being trying to stretch the definition of existence to incorporate our social lives and relationships. Levinas did more: he turned philosophy around entirely so that these relationships were the foundation of our existence, not an extension of it.

Her last work, The Need for Roots, argues, among other things, that none of us has rights, but each one of us has a near-infinite degree of duty and obligation to the other. Whatever the underlying cause of her death — and anorexia nervosa seems to have been involved — no one could deny that she lived out her philosophy with total commitment. Of all the lives touched on in this book, hers is surely the most profound and challenging application of Iris Murdoch’s notion that a philosophy can be ‘inhabited’.

Other thinkers took radical ethical turns during the war years. The most extreme was Simone Weil, who actually tried to live by the principle of putting other people’s ethical demands first. Having returned to France after her travels through Germany in 1932, she had worked in a factory so as to experience the degrading nature of such work for herself. When France fell in 1940, her family fled to Marseilles (against her protests), and later to the US and to Britain. Even in exile, Weil made extraordinary sacrifices. If there were people in the world who could not sleep in a bed, she would not do so either, so she slept on the floor.

The mystery tradition had roots in Kierkegaard’s ‘leap of faith’. It owed much to the other great nineteenth-century mystic of the impossible, Dostoevsky, and to older theological notions. But it also grew from the protracted trauma that was the first half of the twentieth century. Since 1914, and especially since 1939, people in Europe and elsewhere had come to the realisation that we cannot fully know or trust ourselves; that we have no excuses or explanations for what we do — and yet that we must ground our existence and relationships on something firm, because otherwise we cannot survive.

One striking link between these radical ethical thinkers, all on the fringes of our main story, is that they had religious faith. They also granted a special role to the notion of ‘mystery’ — that which cannot be known, calculated or understood, especially when it concerns our relationships with each other. Heidegger was different from them, since he rejected the religion he grew up with and had no real interest in ethics — probably as a consequence of his having no real interest in the human.

Meanwhile, the Christian existentialist Gabriel Marcel was also still arguing, as he had since the 1930s, that ethics trumps everything else in philosophy and that our duty to each other is so great as to play the role of a transcendent ‘mystery’. He too had been led to this position partly by a wartime experience: during the First World War he had worked for the Red Cross’ Information Service, with the unenviable job of answering relatives’ inquiries about missing soldiers. Whenever news came, he passed it on, and usually it was not good. As Marcel later said, this task permanently inoculated him against warmongering rhetoric of any kind, and it made him aware of the power of what is unknown in our lives.

As the play’s much-quoted and frequently misunderstood final line has it: ‘Hell is other people.’ Sartre later explained that he did not mean to say that other people were hellish in general. He meant that after death we become frozen in their view, unable any longer to fend off their interpretation. In life, we can still do something to manage the impression we make; in death, this freedom goes and we are left entombed in other’s people’s memories and perceptions.

We have to do two near-impossible things at once: understand ourselves as limited by circumstances, and yet continue to pursue our projects as though we are truly in control. In Beauvoir’s view, existentialism is the philosophy that best enables us to do this, because it concerns itself so deeply with both freedom and contingency. It acknowledges the radical and terrifying scope of our freedom in life, but also the concrete influences that other philosophies tend to ignore: history, the body, social relationships and the environment.

The aspects of our existence that limit us, Merleau-Ponty says, are the very same ones that bind us to the world and give us scope for action and perception. They make us what we are. Sartre acknowledged the need for this trade-off, but he found it more painful to accept. Everything in him longed to be free of bonds, of impediments and limitations

Of course we have to learn this skill of interpreting and anticipating the world, and this happens in early childhood, which is why Merleau-Ponty thought child psychology was essential to philosophy. This is an extraordinary insight. Apart from Rousseau, very few philosophers before him had taken childhood seriously; most wrote as though all human experience were that of a fully conscious, rational, verbal adult who has been dropped into this world from the sky — perhaps by a stork.

For Merleau-Ponty, we cannot understand our experience if we don’t think of ourselves in part as overgrown babies. We fall for optical illusions because we once learned to see the world in terms of shapes, objects and things relevant to our own interests. Our first perceptions came to us in tandem with our first active experiments in observing the world and reaching out to explore it, and are still linked with those experiences.

Another factor in all of this, for Merleau-Ponty, is our social existence: we cannot thrive without others, or not for long, and we need this especially in early life. This makes solipsistic speculation about the reality of others ridiculous; we could never engage in such speculation if we hadn’t already been formed by them.

As Descartes could have said (but didn’t), ‘I think, therefore other people exist.’ We grow up with people playing with us, pointing things out, talking, listening, and getting us used to reading emotions and movements; this is how we become capable, reflective, smoothly integrated beings.

In general, Merleau-Ponty thinks human experience only makes sense if we abandon philosophy’s time-honoured habit of starting with a solitary, capsule-like, immobile adult self, isolated from its body and world, which must then be connected up again — adding each element around it as though adding clothing to a doll. Instead, for him, we slide from the womb to the birth canal to an equally close and total immersion in the world. That immersion continues as long as we live, although we may also cultivate the art of partially withdrawing from time to time when we want to think or daydream.

When he looks for his own metaphor to describe how he sees consciousness, he comes up with a beautiful one: consciousness, he suggests, is like a ‘fold’ in the world, as though someone had crumpled a piece of cloth to make a little nest or hollow. It stays for a while, before eventually being unfolded and smoothed away. There is something seductive, even erotic, in this idea of my conscious self as an improvised pouch in the cloth of the world. I still have my privacy — my withdrawing room. But I am part of the world’s fabric, and I remain formed out of it for as long as I am here.

By the time of these works, Merleau-Ponty is taking his desire to describe experience to the outer limits of what language can convey. Just as with the late Husserl or Heidegger, or Sartre in his Flaubert book, we see a philosopher venturing so far from shore that we can barely follow. Emmanuel Levinas would head out to the fringes too, eventually becoming incomprehensible to all but his most patient initiates.

Sartre once remarked — speaking of a disagreement they had about Husserl in 1941 — that ‘we discovered, astounded, that our conflicts had, at times, stemmed from our childhood, or went back to the elementary differences of our two organisms’. Merleau-Ponty also said in an interview that Sartre’s work seemed strange to him, not because of philosophical differences, but because of a certain ‘register of feeling’, especially in Nausea, that he could not share. Their difference was one of temperament and of the whole way the world presented itself to them.

The two also differed in their purpose. When Sartre writes about the body or other aspects of experience, he generally does it in order to make a different point. He expertly evokes the grace of his café waiter, gliding between the tables, bending at an angle just so, steering the drink-laden tray through the air on the tips of his fingers — but he does it all in order to illustrate his ideas about bad faith. When Merleau-Ponty writes about skilled and graceful movement, the movement itself is his point. This is the thing he wants to understand.

We can never move definitively from ignorance to certainty, for the thread of the inquiry will constantly lead us back to ignorance again. This is the most attractive description of philosophy I’ve ever read, and the best argument for why it is worth doing, even (or especially) when it takes us no distance at all from our starting point.

By prioritising perception, the body, social life and childhood development, Merleau-Ponty gathered up philosophy’s far-flung outsider subjects and brought them in to occupy the centre of his thought.

In his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France on 15 January 1953, published as In Praise of Philosophy, he said that philosophers should concern themselves above all with whatever is ambiguous in our experience. At the same time, they should think clearly about these ambiguities, using reason and science. Thus, he said, ‘The philosopher is marked by the distinguishing trait that he possesses inseparably the taste for evidence and the feeling for ambiguity.’ A constant movement is required between these two

As Sartre wrote in response to Hiroshima, humanity had now gained the power to wipe itself out, and must decide every single day that it wanted to live. Camus also wrote that humanity faced the task of choosing between collective suicide and a more intelligent use of its technology — ‘between hell and reason’. After 1945, there seemed little reason to trust in humanity’s ability to choose well.

Merleau-Ponty observed in a lecture of 1951 that, more than any previous century, the twentieth century had reminded people how ‘contingent’ their lives were — how at the mercy of historical events and other changes that they could not control. This feeling went on long after the war ended. After the A-bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, many feared that a Third World War would not be long in coming, this time between the Soviet Union and the United States.

But the headline-grabbing differences between the findings of these Nobel laureates are less significant than the profound agreement in their scientific approach to economic questions, which is characterized by formulating and testing precise hypotheses

I’m troubled by the sense among skeptics that disagreements about the answers to certain questions suggest that economics is a confused discipline, a fake science whose findings cannot be a useful basis for making policy decisions.

It is true that the answers to many “big picture” macroeconomic questions — like the causes of recessions or the determinants of growth — remain elusive.

As is the case with epidemiologists, the fundamental challenge faced by economists — and a root cause of many disagreements in the field — is our limited ability to run experiments

economists have recently begun to overcome these challenges by developing tools that approximate scientific experiments to obtain compelling answer

Other economic studies have taken advantage of the constraints inherent in a particular policy to obtain scientific evidence

Even when such experiments are unfeasible, there are ways to use “big data” to help answer policy questions

Do not skip around. To evaluate each candidate add up the six scores ... Firmly resolve that you will hire the candidate whose final score is the highest, even if there is another one whom you like better — try to resist your wish to invent broken legs to change the ranking.

than if you do what people normally do in such situations, which is to go into the interview unprepared and to make choices by an overall intuitive judgment such as "I looked into his eyes and liked what I saw."

for example, a good instructor would teach Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech by encouraging a conversation that involved analyzing the text and identifying the evidence, both factual and rhetorical, that makes it persuasive. “The opposite of what we’d want is a classroom where a teacher might ask only: ‘What was the year the speech was given? Where was it given?’ ”

in the past, assembling the SAT focused on making sure the questions performed on technical grounds, meaning: Were they appropriately easy or difficult among a wide range of students, and were they free of bias when tested across ethnic, racial and religious subgroups? The goal was “maximizing differentiation” among kids, which meant finding items that were answered correctly by those students who were expected to get them right and incorrectly by the weaker students. A simple way of achieving this, Coleman said, was to test the kind of obscure vocabulary words for which the SAT was famous

In redesigning the test, the College Board shifted its emphasis. It prioritized content, measuring each question against a set of specifications that reflect the kind of reading and math that students would encounter in college and their work lives. Schmeiser and others then spent much of early last year watching students as they answered a set of 20 or so problems, discussing the questions with the students afterward. “The predictive validity is going to come out the same,” she said of the redesigned test. “But in the new test, we have much more control over the content and skills that are being measured.”

Evidence-based reading and writing, he said, will replace the current sections on reading and writing. It will use as its source materials pieces of writing — from science articles to historical documents to literature excerpts — which research suggests are important for educated Americans to know and understand deeply. “The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Federalist Papers,” Coleman said, “have managed to inspire an enduring great conversation about freedom, justice, human dignity in this country and the world” — therefore every SAT will contain a passage from either a founding document or from a text (like Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address) that is part of the “great global conversation” the founding documents inspired.

The idea is that the test will emphasize words students should be encountering, like “synthesis,” which can have several meanings depending on their context. Instead of encouraging students to memorize flashcards, the test should promote the idea that they must read widely throughout their high-school years.

The Barbara Jordan vocabulary question would have a follow-up — “How do you know your answer is correct?” — to which students would respond by identifying lines in the passage that supported their answer.

. No longer will it be good enough to focus on tricks and trying to eliminate answer choices. We are not interested in students just picking an answer, but justifying their answers.”

the essay portion of the test will also be reformulated so that it will always be the same, some version of: “As you read the passage in front of you, consider how the author uses evidence such as facts or examples; reasoning to develop ideas and to connect claims and evidence; and stylistic or persuasive elements to add power to the ideas expressed. Write an essay in which you explain how the author builds an argument to persuade an audience.”

The math section, too, will be predicated on research that shows that there are “a few areas of math that are a prerequisite for a wide range of college courses” and careers. Coleman conceded that some might treat the news that they were shifting away from more obscure math problems to these fewer fundamental skills as a dumbing-down the test, but he was adamant that this was not the case. He explained that there will be three areas of focus: problem solving and data analysis, which will include ratios and percentages and other mathematical reasoning used to solve problems in the real world; the “heart of algebra,” which will test how well students can work with linear equations (“a powerful set of tools that echo throughout many fields of study”); and what will be called the “passport to advanced math,” which will focus on the student’s familiarity with complex equations and their applications in science and social science.

“Sometimes in the past, there’s been a feeling that tests were measuring some sort of ineffable entity such as intelligence, whatever that might mean. Or ability, whatever that might mean. What this is is a clear message that good hard work is going to pay off and achievement is going to pay off. This is one of the most significant developments that I have seen in the 40-plus years that I’ve been working in admissions in higher education.”

The idea of creating a transparent test and then providing a free website that any student could use — not to learn gimmicks but to get a better grounding and additional practice in the core knowledge that would be tested — was appealing to Coleman.

(The College Board won’t pay Khan Academy.) They talked about a hypothetical test-prep experience in which students would log on to a personal dashboard, indicate that they wanted to prepare for the SAT and then work through a series of preliminary questions to demonstrate their initial skill level and identify the gaps in their knowledge. Khan said he could foresee a way to estimate the amount of time it would take to achieve certain benchmarks. “It might go something like, ‘O.K., we think you’ll be able to get to this level within the next month and this level within the next two months if you put in 30 minutes a day,’ ” he said. And he saw no reason the site couldn’t predict for anyone, anywhere the score he or she might hope to achieve with a commitment to a prescribed amount of work.

agents will open up many more learning opportunities.

Already, AI can help you pick out a new TV and recommend movies, books, shows, and podcasts. Likewise, a company I’ve invested in, recently launched Pix, which lets you ask questions (“Which Robert Redford movies would I like and where can I watch them?”) and then makes recommendations based on what you’ve liked in the past

Productivity

copilots can do a lot—such as turn a written document into a slide deck, answer questions about a spreadsheet using natural language, and summarize email threads while representing each person’s point of view.

before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it.

Helping patients and healthcare workers will be especially beneficial for people in poor countries, where many never get to see a doctor at all.

To create a new app or service, you won’t need to know how to write code or do graphic design. You’ll just tell your agent what you want. It will be able to write the code, design the look and feel of the app, create a logo, and publish the app to an online store

Agents will do even more. Having one will be like having a person dedicated to helping you with various tasks and doing them independently if you want. If you have an idea for a business, an agent will help you write up a business plan, create a presentation for it, and even generate images of what your product might look like

For decades, I’ve been excited about all the ways that software would make teachers’ jobs easier and help students learn. It won’t replace teachers, but it will supplement their work—personalizing the work for students and liberating teachers from paperwork and other tasks so they can spend more time on the most important parts of the job.

Mental health care is another example of a service that agents will make available to virtually everyone. Today, weekly therapy sessions seem like a luxury. But there is a lot of unmet need, and many people who could benefit from therapy don’t have access to it.

I don’t think any single company will dominate the agents business--there will be many different AI engines available.

The real shift will come when agents can help patients do basic triage, get advice about how to deal with health problems, and decide whether they need to seek treatment.

They’ll replace word processors, spreadsheets, and other productivity apps.

Education

For example, few families can pay for a tutor who works one-on-one with a student to supplement their classroom work. If agents can capture what makes a tutor effective, they’ll unlock this supplemental instruction for everyone who wants it. If a tutoring agent knows that a kid likes Minecraft and Taylor Swift, it will use Minecraft to teach them about calculating the volume and area of shapes, and Taylor’s lyrics to teach them about storytelling and rhyme schemes. The experience will be far richer—with graphics and sound, for example—and more personalized than today’s text-based tutors.

your agent will be able to help you in the same way that personal assistants support executives today. If your friend just had surgery, your agent will offer to send flowers and be able to order them for you. If you tell it you’d like to catch up with your old college roommate, it will work with their agent to find a time to get together, and just before you arrive, it will remind you that their oldest child just started college at the local university.

To see the dramatic change that agents will bring, let’s compare them to the AI tools available today. Most of these are bots. They’re limited to one app and generally only step in when you write a particular word or ask for help. Because they don’t remember how you use them from one time to the next, they don’t get better or learn any of your preferences.

The current state of the art is Khanmigo, a text-based bot created by Khan Academy. It can tutor students in math, science, and the humanities—for example, it can explain the quadratic formula and create math problems to practice on. It can also help teachers do things like write lesson plans.

Businesses that are separate today—search advertising, social networking with advertising, shopping, productivity software—will become one business.

other issues won’t be decided by companies and governments. For example, agents could affect how we interact with friends and family. Today, you can show someone that you care about them by remembering details about their life—say, their birthday. But when they know your agent likely reminded you about it and took care of sending flowers, will it be as meaningful for them?

In the computing industry, we talk about platforms—the technologies that apps and services are built on. Android, iOS, and Windows are all platforms. Agents will be the next platform.

A shock wave in the tech industry

Agents won’t simply make recommendations; they’ll help you act on them. If you want to buy a camera, you’ll have your agent read all the reviews for you, summarize them, make a recommendation, and place an order for it once you’ve made a decision.

Agents will affect how we use software as well as how it’s written. They’ll replace search sites because they’ll be better at finding information and summarizing it for you

they’ll be dramatically better. You’ll be able to have nuanced conversations with them. They will be much more personalized, and they won’t be limited to relatively simple tasks like writing a letter.

Companies will be able to make agents available for their employees to consult directly and be part of every meeting so they can answer questions.

AI agents that are well trained in mental health will make therapy much more affordable and easier to get. Wysa and Youper are two of the early chatbots here. But agents will go much deeper. If you choose to share enough information with a mental health agent, it will understand your life history and your relationships. It’ll be available when you need it, and it will never get impatient. It could even, with your permission, monitor your physical responses to therapy through your smart watch—like if your heart starts to race when you’re talking about a problem with your boss—and suggest when you should see a human therapist.

If the number of companies that have started working on AI just this year is any indication, there will be an exceptional amount of competition, which will make agents very inexpensive.

Agents are smarter. They’re proactive—capable of making suggestions before you ask for them. They accomplish tasks across applications. They improve over time because they remember your activities and recognize intent and patterns in your behavior. Based on this information, they offer to provide what they think you need, although you will always make the final decisions.

Agents are not only going to change how everyone interacts with computers. They’re also going to upend the software industry, bringing about the biggest revolution in computing since we went from typing commands to tapping on icons.

The most exciting impact of AI agents is the way they will democratize services that today are too expensive for most people

The ramifications for the software business and for society will be profound.

In the next five years, this will change completely. You won’t have to use different apps for different tasks. You’ll simply tell your device, in everyday language, what you want to do. And depending on how much information you choose to share with it, the software will be able to respond personally because it will have a rich understanding of your life. In the near future, anyone who’s online will be able to have a personal assistant powered by artificial intelligence that’s far beyond today’s technology.

You’ll also be able to get news and entertainment that’s been tailored to your interests. CurioAI, which creates a custom podcast on any subject you ask about, is a glimpse of what’s coming.

An agent will be able to help you with all your activities if you want it to. With permission to follow your online interactions and real-world locations, it will develop a powerful understanding of the people, places, and activities you engage in. It will get your personal and work relationships, hobbies, preferences, and schedule. You’ll choose how and when it steps in to help with something or ask you to make a decision.

even the best sites have an incomplete understanding of your work, personal life, interests, and relationships and a limited ability to use this information to do things for you. That’s the kind of thing that is only possible today with another human being, like a close friend or personal assistant.

In the distant future, agents may even force humans to face profound questions about purpose. Imagine that agents become so good that everyone can have a high quality of life without working nearly as much. In a future like that, what would people do with their time? Would anyone still want to get an education when an agent has all the answers? Can you have a safe and thriving society when most people have a lot of free time on their hands?

They’ll have an especially big influence in four areas: health care, education, productivity, and entertainment and shopping.

There is a high level of political discussion in the editorials and op-eds of national newspapers and magazines as well as on a number of blogs, with positions often carefully formulated and supported with argument and evidence. But even here we seldom see a direct and sustained confrontation of rival positions through the dialectic of assertion, critique, response and counter-critique.

As a result, partisans typically remain safe in their ideological worlds, convincing themselves that they hold to obvious truths, while their opponents must be either knaves or fools — with no need to think through the strengths of their rivals’ positions or the weaknesses of their own.

In the second session, the Republican asks the Democrat a series of questions (no more than one minute per question and three minutes per response) on the debate topic. In the third session, the Democrat questions the Republican. In the fourth session, each side has 15 minutes to present a final argument.

A first condition is that the debates be focused on specific points of major disagreement.

Is there any way to make genuine debates — sustained back-and-forth exchanges, meeting high intellectual standards but still widely accessible — part of our political culture?

Here’s one suggestion for an effective exchange. The debate would consist of a series of four half-hour televised sessions, carried out on successive days. In the first session, the Republican, say, presents a pre-written case for a particular position

Another issue is the medium of the debate. Written discussions, in print or online could be easily arranged, but personal encounters are more vivid and will better engage public attention. They should not, however, be merely extemporaneous events, where too much will depend on quick-thinking and an engaging manner. We want remarks to be carefully prepared and open to considered responses

they will set much higher standards of discussion, requiring fuller explanations of positions and even modifications to make them more defensible. It’s unlikely that either side would ever simply give up its view, but, politically, they would have to react to a strong public consensus if they had not made a respectable case. Further, the quasi-official status of the participants, as representatives chosen by their parties, would make the parties’ politicians answerable to points the representatives have made.

The only major obstacle to implementing this proposal would be getting the parties to participate. Here, I suggest, shame would be a prime motivator.

Facts and reasoning will never settle political issues. All of us have fundamental commitments that are impervious to argument

But rationality almost always has some role in our decisions, and more rationality in our political discussion will at a minimum help many to better understand what is at stake in our disputes and why their opponents think as they do.

So why not give reason a chance?

each industry, as it (mostly) legally can, designs products that are difficult to resist and sometimes addictive.

The issues of auto and gun safety, of drug, alcohol and tobacco addiction, and of hyperconsumption of unhealthy food are not as distinct as we’ve long believed; really, they’re quite similar. For example, the argument for protecting people against marketers of junk food relies in part on the fact that antismoking regulations and seatbelt laws were initially attacked as robbing us of choice; now we know they’re lifesavers.

Until now (and, sadly, perhaps well into the future), corporations have been both more nimble and more flush with cash than the public health arms of government

“What we need,” Freudenberg said to me, “is to return to the public sector the right to set health policy and to limit corporations’ freedom to profit at the expense of public health.”

The turning point in the tobacco wars was when the question changed from the industry’s — “Do people have the right to smoke?” — to that of public health: “Do people have the right to breathe clean air?” Note that both questions are legitimate, but if you address the first (to which the answer is of course “yes”) without asking the second (to which the answer is of course also “yes”) you miss an opportunity to convert the answer from one that leads to greater industry profits to one that has literally cut smoking rates in half.

Similarly, we need to be asking not “Do junk food companies have the right to market to children?” but “Do children have the right to a healthy diet?”

The question is not only, “Do we have a right to bear arms?” but also “Do we have the right to be safe in our streets and schools?”

n short, says Freudenberg: “The right to be healthy trumps the right of corporations to promote choices that lead to premature death and preventable illnesses. Protecting public health is a fundamental government responsibility

“Shouldn’t science and technology be used to improve human well-being, not to advance business goals that harm health?” Two other questions that can be answered “yes.”

MTurk is a fantastic tool available to quickly collect human subjects data. It pulls from a massive group of people looking to complete small tasks for small amounts of money. So for 5 cents per survey, I collected 100 responses to a short survey from American MTurk Workers. It asked only 3 questions:Please define astrology in 25 words or less.Do you believe astrology to be scientific? (using the same scale as the NSF study)What is your highest level of education completed? (using the same scale as the NSF study)

Among those that correctly identified astrology as astrology, only 13.5% found it “pretty scientific” or “very scientific”. Only 1 person said it was “very scientific.” Among those that identified astrology as astronomy, the field was overwhelmingly seen as scientific, exactly as I expected. This is the true driver of the NSF report findings

it was John Stuart Mill who crystallised the importance of having your ideas challenged through engagement with others who disagree with you.

As he put it: ‘Both teachers and learners go to sleep at their post, as soon as there is no enemy in the field.’

The point of philosophy is not to have a range of facts at your disposal, though that might be useful, nor to become a walking Wikipedia or ambulant data bank: rather, it is to develop the skills and sensitivity to be able to argue about some of the most significant questions we can ask ourselves, questions about reality and appearance, life and death, god and society. As Plato’s Socrates tells us, ‘These are not trivial questions we are discussing here, we are discussing how to live.’

you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of an unfortunate overreaction. It does not matter if it originates in a misunderstanding. It does not matter if the destruction springs from a foolish policy

But a society that protects some people through a safety net of schools, government-backed home loans, and ancestral wealth but can only protect you with the club of criminal justice has either failed at enforcing its good intentions or has succeeded at something much darker.

It is hard to face this. But all our phrasing—race relations, racial chasm, racial justice, racial profiling, white privilege, even white supremacy—serves to obscure that racism is a visceral experience, that it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth

ou must never look away from this. You must always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body.

And should one live in such a body? What should be our aim beyond meager survival of constant, generational, ongoing battery and assault? I have asked this question all my life.

The question is unanswerable, which is not to say futile. The greatest reward of this constant interrogation, of confrontation with the brutality of my country, is that it has freed me from ghosts and myths.

I was afraid long before you, and in this I was unoriginal. When I was your age the only people I knew were black, and all of them were powerfully, adamantly, dangerously afraid. It was always right in front of me. The fear was there in the extravagant boys of my West Baltimore neighborhood

The fear lived on in their practiced bop, their slouching denim, their big T- shirts, the calculated angle of their baseball caps, a catalog of behaviors and garments enlisted to inspire the belief that these boys were in firm possession of everything they desired.

To be black in the Baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. The law did not protect us. And now, in your time, the law has become an excuse for stopping and frisking you, which is to say, for furthering the assault on your body

I remember being amazed that death could so easily rise up from the nothing of a boyish afternoon, billow up like fog. I knew that West Baltimore, where I lived; that the north side of Philadelphia, where my cousins lived; that the South Side of Chicago, where friends of my father lived, comprised a world apart. Somewhere out there beyond the firmament, past the asteroid belt, there were other worlds where children did not regularly fear for their bodies

here will surely always be people with straight hair and blue eyes, as there have been for all history. But some of these straight-haired people with blue eyes have been “black,” and this points to the great difference between their world and ours. We did not choose our fences. They were imposed on us by Virginia planters obsessed with enslaving as many Americans as possible. Now I saw that we had made something down here, in slavery, in Jim Crow, in ghettoes. At The Mecca I saw how we had taken their one-drop rule and flipped it. They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.

I came to understand that my country was a galaxy, and this galaxy stretched from the pandemonium of West Baltimore to the happy hunting grounds of Mr. Belvedere. I obsessed over the distance between that other sector of space and my own. I knew that my portion of the American galaxy, where bodies were enslaved by a tenacious gravity, was black and that the other, liberated portion was not. I knew that some inscrutable energy preserved the breach. I felt, but did not yet understand, the relation between that other world and me. And I felt in this a cosmic injustice, a profound cruelty, which infused an abiding, irrepressible desire to unshackle my body and achieve the velocity of escape.

Before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils which seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed

When I was your age, fully one-third of my brain was concerned with who I was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times I smiled, who or what I smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not—all of which is to say that I practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body.

Why were only our heroes nonviolent? Back then all I could do was measure these freedom-lovers by what I knew. Which is to say, I measured them against children pulling out in the 7-Eleven parking lot, against parents wielding extension cords, and the threatening intonations of armed black gangs saying, “Yeah, nigger, what’s up now?” I judged them against the country I knew, which had acquired the land through murder and tamed it under slavery, against the country whose armies fanned out across the world to extend their dominion. The world, the real one, was civilization secured and ruled by savage means. How could the schools valorize men and women whose values society actively scorned? How could they send us out into the streets of Baltimore, knowing all that they were, and then speak of nonviolence?

the beauty of the black body was never celebrated in movies, in television, or in the textbooks I’d seen as a child. Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white. This was why your grandparents banned Tarzan and the Lone Ranger and toys with white faces from the house. They were rebelling against the history books that spoke of black people only as sentimental “firsts”—first black four-star general, first black congressman, first black mayor—always presented in the bemused manner of a category of Trivial Pursuit.

erious history was the West, and the West was white. This was all distilled for me in a quote I once read, from the novelist Saul Bellow. I can’t remember where I read it, or when—only that I was already at Howard. “Who is the Tolstoy of the Zulus?,” Bellow quipped

this view of things was connected to the fear that passed through the generations, to the sense of dispossession. We were black, beyond the visible spectrum, beyond civilization. Our history was inferior because we were inferior, which is to say our bodies were inferior. And our inferior bodies could not possibly be accorded the same respect as those that built the West. Would it not be better, then, if our bodies were civilized, improved, and put to some legitimate Christian use?

now I looked back on my need for a trophy case, on the desire to live by the standards of Saul Bellow, and I felt that this need was not an escape but fear again—fear that “they,” the alleged authors and heirs of the universe, were right. And this fear ran so deep that we accepted their standards of civilization and humanity.

“Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus,” wrote Wiley. “Unless you find a profit in fencing off universal properties of mankind into exclusive tribal ownership.” And there it was. I had accepted Bellow’s premise. In fact, Bellow was no closer to Tolstoy than I was to Nzinga. And if I were closer it would be because I chose to be, not because of destiny written in DNA. My great error was not that I had accepted someone else’s dream but that I had accepted the fact of dreams, the need for escape, and the invention of racecraft.

still and all I knew that we were something, that we were a tribe—on one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real. The reality was out there on the Yard, on the first warm day of spring when it seemed that every sector, borough, affiliation, county, and corner of the broad diaspora had sent a delegate to the great world party

I could see now that that world was more than a photonegative of that of the people who believe they are white. “White America” is a syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies. Sometimes this power is direct (lynching), and sometimes it is insidious (redlining). But however it appears, the power of domination and exclusion is central to the belief in being white, and without it, “white people” would cease to exist for want of reasons

There is nothing uniquely evil in these destroyers or even in this moment. The destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy. This legacy aspires to the shackling of black bodies

Think of all the embraces, all the private jokes, customs, greetings, names, dreams, all the shared knowledge and capacity of a black family injected into that vessel of flesh and bone. And think of how that vessel was taken, shattered on the concrete, and all its holy contents, all that had gone into each of them, was sent flowing back to the earth. It is terrible to truly see our particular beauty, Samori, because then you see the scope of the loss. But you must push even further. You must see that this loss is mandated by the history of your country, by the Dream of living white.

I don’t know if you remember how the film we saw at the Petersburg Battlefield ended as though the fall of the Confederacy were the onset of a tragedy, not jubilee. I doubt you remember the man on our tour dressed in the gray wool of the Confederacy, or how every visitor seemed most interested in flanking maneuvers, hardtack, smoothbore rifles, grapeshot, and ironclads, but virtually no one was interested in what all of this engineering, invention, and design had been marshaled to achieve. You were only 10 years old. But even then I knew that I must trouble you, and this meant taking you into rooms where people would insult your intelligence, where thieves would try to enlist you in your own robbery and disguise their burning and looting as Christian charity. But robbery is what this is, what it always was.

American reunion was built on a comfortable narrative that made enslavement into benevolence, white knights of body snatchers, and the mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor, and élan. This lie of the Civil War is the lie of innocence, is the Dream.

I, like every kid I knew, loved The Dukes of Hazzard. But I would have done well to think more about why two outlaws, driving a car named the General Lee, must necessarily be portrayed as “just some good ole boys, never meanin’ no harm”—a mantra for the Dreamers if there ever was one. But what one “means” is neither important nor relevant. It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.

Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body—it is heritage. Enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor—it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. And so enslavement must be casual wrath and random manglings, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. It must be rape so regular as to be industrial. There is no uplifting way to say this.

It had to be blood. It had to be the thrashing of kitchen hands for the crime of churning butter at a leisurely clip. It had to be some woman “chear’d ... with thirty lashes a Saturday last and as many more a Tuesday again.” It could only be the employment of carriage whips, tongs, iron pokers, handsaws, stones, paperweights, or whatever might be handy to break the black body, the black family, the black community, the black nation. The bodies were pulverized into stock and marked with insurance. And the bodies were an aspiration, lucrative as Indian land, a veranda, a beautiful wife, or a summer home in the mountains. For the men who needed to believe themselves white, the bodies were the key to a social club, and the right to break the bodies was the mark of civilization.

“The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black,” said the great South Carolina senator John C. Calhoun. “And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.” And there it is—the right to break the black body as the meaning of their sacred equality. And that right has always given them meaning, has always meant that there was someone down in the valley because a mountain is not a mountain if there is nothing below.

There is no them without you, and without the right to break you they must necessarily fall from the mountain, lose their divinity, and tumble out of the Dream. And then they would have to determine how to build their suburbs on something other than human bones, how to angle their jails toward something other than a human stockyard, how to erect a democracy independent of cannibalism. I would like to tell you that such a day approaches when the people who believe themselves to be white renounce this demon religion and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.

I think now of the old rule that held that should a boy be set upon in someone else’s chancy hood, his friends must stand with him, and they must all take their beating together. I now know that within this edict lay the key to all living. None of us were promised to end the fight on our feet, fists raised to the sky. We could not control our enemies’ number, strength, or weaponry. Sometimes you just caught a bad one. But whether you fought or ran, you did it together, because that is the part that was in our control. What we must never do is willingly hand over our own bodies or the bodies of our friends. That was the wisdom: We knew we did not lay down the direction of the street, but despite that, we could—and must—fashion the way of our walk. And that is the deeper meaning of your name—that the struggle, in and of itself, has meaning.

I have raised you to respect every human being as singular, and you must extend that same respect into the past. Slavery is not an indefinable mass of flesh. It is a particular, specific enslaved woman, whose mind is as active as your own, whose range of feeling is as vast as your own; who prefers the way the light falls in one particular spot in the woods, who enjoys fishing where the water eddies in a nearby stream, who loves her mother in her own complicated way, thinks her sister talks too loud, has a favorite cousin, a favorite season, who excels at dressmaking and knows, inside herself, that she is as intelligent and capable as anyone. “Slavery” is this same woman born in a world that loudly proclaims its love of freedom and inscribes this love in its essential texts, a world in which these same professors hold this woman a slave, hold her mother a slave, her father a slave, her daughter a slave, and when this woman peers back into the generations all she sees is the enslaved. She can hope for more. She can imagine some future for her grandchildren. But when she dies, the world—which is really the only world she can ever know—ends. For this woman, enslavement is not a parable. It is damnation. It is the never-ending night. And the length of that night is most of our history. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains—whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never redeem this. Perhaps our triumphs are not even the point. Perhaps struggle is all we have

I am not a cynic. I love you, and I love the world, and I love it more with every new inch I discover. But you are a black boy, and you must be responsible for your body in a way that other boys cannot know. Indeed, you must be responsible for the worst actions of other black bodies, which, somehow, will always be assigned to you. And you must be responsible for the bodies of the powerful—the policeman who cracks you with a nightstick will quickly find his excuse in your furtive movements. You have to make your peace with the chaos, but you cannot lie.

“I could have you arrested,” he said. Which is to say: “One of your son’s earliest memories will be watching the men who sodomized Abner Louima and choked Anthony Baez cuff, club, tase, and break you.” I had forgotten the rules, an error as dangerous on the Upper West Side of Manhattan as on the West Side of Baltimore. One must be without error out here. Walk in single file. Work quietly. Pack an extra No. 2 pencil. Make no mistakes.

the price of error is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined—with Eric Garner’s anger, with Trayvon Martin’s mythical words (“You are gonna die tonight”), with Sean Bell’s mistake of running with the wrong crowd, with me standing too close to the small-eyed boy pulling out.

You are called to struggle, not because it assures you victory but because it assures you an honorable and sane life

I am sorry that I cannot save you—but not that sorry. Part of me thinks that your very vulnerability brings you closer to the meaning of life, just as for others, the quest to believe oneself white divides them from it. The fact is that despite their dreams, their lives are also not inviolable. When their own vulnerability becomes real—when the police decide that tactics intended for the ghetto should enjoy wider usage, when their armed society shoots down their children, when nature sends hurricanes against their cities—they are shocked by the rages of logic and the natural world in a way that those of us who were born and bred to understand cause and effect can never be.

I would not have you live like them. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.

I never wanted you to be twice as good as them, so much as I have always wanted you to attack every day of your brief bright life determined to struggle. The people who must believe they are white can never be your measuring stick. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

Mr. Walker frequently speaks to the news media, but that the encounters are amid gaggles of reporters without time for pointed follow-up questions. “Local reporters have become conditioned to the idea he’s not going to amplify his answer,” he said.

the governor’s “disciplined and relentless approach to political messaging.”

Talk about some examples of policy preferences that the majority holds that the government is not responsive to. Financial reform -- the deregulatory agenda has been pursued, somewhat more fervently among Republicans but certainly by Democrats as well in recent decades. Higher minimum wage. More support for the unemployed. More support for education spending. We'd see, perhaps ironically, less liberal policies in some domains like religious or moral issues. Affluent people tend to be more socially liberal on things like abortion or gay rights.

When did things start to become this way? It's possible that in earlier eras, that we don't have data for, that things were better. But in the time period that we do have data for, there's certainly no such evidence. Over time responsiveness to elites has grown.

Given your findings, what do you make of the great sense of persecution that people at the top appear to feel in recent years? Is there a phenomenon you came by that speaks to this, and does that perpetuate the cycle of policy moving in their direction? It's certainly not something our study or data has addressed. But it's part of an effort to defend, in the face of growing inequality, their advantages and wealth.

sometimes non-rich people favor an agenda that supports the rich. For instance, middle class tea partiers want low taxes on the highest earners, just as Steve Forbes does. Isn't that still democracy at work, albeit in an arguably perverse way? Yes, absolutely. I think people are entitled to preferences that conflict with their immediate interests -- narrowly conceived interests. That may be an example of that. Opposition to the estate tax among low-income individuals is another. But what we see in this study is that's not what this is happening. We don't look at whether preferences expressed by these different groups are consistent or inconsistent with their interests, narrowly conceived. We just look at whether they're responded to by government policy-makers, and we find that in the case of ordinary Americans, they're not.

What are the three or four most crucial factors that have made the United States this way? Very good question. I'd say two crucial factors. One central factor is the role of money in our political system, and the overwhelming role that affluent individuals that affluent individuals and organized interests play, in campaign finance and in lobbying. And the second thing is the lack of mass organizations that represent and facilitate the voice of ordinary citizens. Part of that would be the decline of unions in the country which has been quite dramatic over the last 30 or 40 years. And part of it is the lack of a socialist or a worker's party.

Your study calls to mind something that Dennis Kucinich, the former congressman, said years ago during the recession. He essentially said the class war is over and the working class lost. Was he right? I mean, for now, it certainly seems like it. The middle class has not done well over the last three and a half decades, and certainly has not done well during the Great Recession. The political system responded to the crisis in a way that led to a pretty nice recovery for economic elites and corporations.

what kind of data do you use to test this theory and how confident are you in the conclusions? What we did was to collect survey questions that asked whether respondents would favor or oppose some particular change in federal government policy. These were questions asked across the decades from 1981 to 2002. And so from each of those questions we know what citizens of average income level prefer and we know what people at the top of the income distribution say they want. For each of the 2,000 possible policy changes we determined whether in fact they've been adopted or not. I had a large number of research assistants who spent years putting that data together.

A new political science study that's gone viral finds that majority-rule democracy exists only in theory in the United States -- not so much in practice. The government caters to the affluent few and organized interest groups, the researchers find, while the average citizen's influence on policy is "near zero."

TPM spoke to Gilens about the study, its main findings and its lessons.

Three. Marx has often been criticized for oversimplifying the relationship between what he called the economic base and the intellectual superstructure. There is some truth to the charge, but it is largely a case of misplaced concreteness. He was quite aware that ideas influence the relations of production, as witness his comments about various reform movements. But he was primarily concerned with attacking the proposition that ideas had an ethereal and independent origin, and lived a self-contained existence

Four. Two questions take precedence under capitalism: how to turn a short-term profit, and how to keep the system from generating the very opposition that Marx predicted. Those two imperatives have so limited and inhibited the life of the mind, let alone the quality of life, that they amount to a denial of the human spirit. Let us agree that Adam Smith was correct in arguing that entrepreneurial capitalism freed human beings from the constraints of medieval and mercantilist cultures. We must also insist that Marx was correct in explaining how corporate capitalism forged new fetters.

permit me my summary of Marx's legacy. First, the weaknesses. I have mentioned some of those in passing, so here I will concentrate on the major items.

Five. There is much in Lenin's thought and practice that I disagree with, but he understood at least one essential element of Marx's thought. Marx realized that capitalism increasingly defined human beings by their function in the marketplace - and so demeaned and stunted their lives, turning them inwards upon themselves as possessors of trivia.

First, Marx never broke free of the capitalist conception of time defined as short-run success

On balance, however, the strengths of Marx outweigh his weaknesses. We can begin with his detailed, tough and persistent inquiry into the dynamics of capitalism that produced a strategy of intellectual inquiry that has provided a sustained tradition of exciting and consequential scholarship in almost every field of knowledge.

Then we must salute Marx's deep commitment to the proposition that, since human beings make their own history, we can devise and create a more human and equitable life as members of a community. We can change the world. That is indeed the ultimate purpose of knowledge - to change the world for the better.

Next we must acknowledge that the people who have acted on those Marxian contributions have indeed improved the lives of millions of non- and even anti-Marxists