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As a philosopher, I have nothing to add to the scientific evidence of global warming, but I can tell you how it’s possible to get ourselves to sincerely doubt things, despite abundant evidence to the contrary

scenarios suggest that it’s possible to feel as though you don’t know something even when possessing enormous evidence in its favor. Philosophers call scenarios like these “skeptical pressure” cases

In general, a skeptical pressure case is a thought experiment in which the protagonist has good evidence for something that he or she believes, but the reader is reminded that the protagonist could have made a mistake

If the story is set up in the right way, the reader will be tempted to think that the protagonist’s belief isn’t genuine knowledge

When presented with these thought experiments, some philosophy students conclude that what these examples show is that knowledge requires full-blown certainty. In these skeptical pressure cases, the evidence is overwhelming, but not 100 percent. It’s an attractive idea, but it doesn’t sit well with the fact that we ordinarily say we know lots of things with much lower probability.

Although there is no consensus about how it arises, a promising idea defended by the philosopher David Lewis is that skeptical pressure cases often involve focusing on the possibility of error. Once we start worrying and ruminating about this possibility, no matter how far-fetched, something in our brains causes us to doubt. The philosopher Jennifer Nagel aptly calls this type of effect “epistemic anxiety.”

In my own work, I have speculated that an extreme version of this phenomenon is operative in obsessive compulsive disorder

The standard response by climate skeptics is a lot like our reaction to skeptical pressure cases. Climate skeptics understand that 97 percent of scientists disagree with them, but they focus on the very tiny fraction of holdouts. As in the lottery case, this focus might be enough to sustain their skepticism.

Anti-vaccine proponents, for example, aware that medical professionals disagree with their position, focus on any bit of fringe research that might say otherwise.

Skeptical allure can be gripping. Piling on more evidence does not typically shake you out of it, just as making it even more probable that you will lose the lottery does not all of a sudden make you feel like you know your ticket is a loser.

One way to counter the effects of skepticism is to stop talking about “knowledge” and switch to talking about probabilities. Instead of saying that you don’t know some claim, try to estimate the probability that it is true. As hedge fund managers, economists, policy researchers, doctors and bookmakers have long been aware, the way to make decisions while managing risk is through probabilities.

Once we switch to this perspective, claims to “not know,” like those made by Trump, lose their force and we are pushed to think more carefully about the existing data and engage in cost-benefit analyses.

It’s easy to say you don’t know, but it’s harder to commit to an actual low probability estimate in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence.

Socrates was correct that awareness of one’s ignorance is virtuous, but philosophers have subsequently uncovered many pitfalls associated with claims of ignorance. An appreciation of these issues can help elevate public discourse on important topics, including the future of our planet.

A recent set of experiments shows us that there is a way to help reduce the effects of misinformation on people: the authors amusingly call it the “inoculation.”

which even then were heavily influenced by their pre-existing worldviews.

teaching about misconceptions leads to greater learning overall then just telling somebody the truth.

This matters for social animals like us, whose safety and very survival ultimately depend on our ability to coexist. Views that have more to do with competing tribal biases than objective interpretations of the evidence create destructive and violent conflict. Denial of scientifically established ‘truth’ cause all sorts of serious direct harms. Consider a few examples; • The widespread faith-based rejection of evolution feeds intense polarization. • Continued fear of vaccines is allowing nearly eradicated diseases to return. • Those who deny the evidence of the safety of genetically modified food are also denying the immense potential benefits of that technology to millions. • Denying the powerful evidence for climate change puts us all in serious jeopardy should that evidence prove to be true.

To address these harms, we need to understand why we often have trouble agreeing on what is true (what some have labeled science denialism). Social science has taught us that human cognition is innately, and inescapably, a process of interpreting the hard data about our world – its sights and sound and smells and facts and ideas - through subjective affective filters that help us turn those facts into the judgments and choices and behaviors that help us survive. The brain’s imperative, after all, is not to reason. It’s job is survival, and subjective cognitive biases and instincts have developed to help us make sense of information in the pursuit of safety, not so that we might come to know ‘THE universal absolute truth

This subjective cognition is built-in, subconscious, beyond free will, and unavoidably leads to different interpretations of the same facts.

But here is a truth with which I hope we can all agree. Our subjective system of cognition can be dangerous.

It can produce perceptions that conflict with the evidence, what I call The Perception Gap, which can in turn produce profound harm

We need to recognize the greater threat that our subjective system of cognition can pose, and in the name of our own safety and the welfare of the society on which we depend, do our very best to rise above it or, when we can’t, account for this very real danger in the policies we adopt.

"Everyone engages in motivated reasoning, everyone screens out unwelcome evidence, no one is a fully rational actor. Sure. But when it comes to something with such enormous consequences to human welfare

I think it's fair to say we have an obligation to confront our own ideological priors. We have an obligation to challenge ourselves, to push ourselves, to be suspicious of conclusions that are too convenient, to be sure that we're getting it right.

But that all changed when the pandemic struck. During the lockdowns, when he was stuck at home, his anxiety levels went up. He stopped exercising and started stress eating. Gone were the hummus and vegetables; instead, he snacked on cookies, sweets and Lay’s potato chips. He ate more fried foods and ordered takeout from local restaurants.

“We were feeding the soul more than feeding the stomach,”

“We were making sure to eat things that made us feel better — not just nutritional items.

Now a global survey conducted earlier this year confirms what Mr. Loy and many others experienced firsthand: The coronavirus pandemic and resulting lockdowns led to dramatic changes in health behaviors, prompting people around the world to cut back on physical activity and eat more junk foods.

While they tended to experience improvements in some aspects of their diets, such as cooking at home more and eating out less, they were also the most likely to report struggling with their weight and mental health.

With months to go before a vaccine becomes widely available and we can safely resume our pre-pandemic routines, now might be a good time to assess the healthy habits we may have let slip and to find new ways to be proactive about our physical and mental health.

The researchers found that the decline in healthy behaviors during the pandemic and widespread lockdowns was fairly common regardless of geography.

Alone

“Individuals with obesity were impacted the most — and that’s what we were afraid of,”

“They not only started off with higher anxiety levels before the pandemic, but they also had the largest increase in anxiety levels throughout the pandemic.”

The pandemic disrupted everyday life, isolated people from friends and family, and spawned an economic crisis, with tens of millions of people losing jobs or finding their incomes sharply reduced.

despite snacking on more junk foods, many people showed an increase in their “healthy eating scores,” a measure of their overall diet quality, which includes things like eating more fruits and fewer fried foods.

The researchers said that the overall improvements in diet appeared to be driven by the fact that the lockdowns prompted people to cook, bake and prepare more food at home.

Other recent surveys have also shown a sharp rise in home cooking and baking this year, with many people saying they are discovering new ingredients and looking for ways to make healthier foods.

But social isolation can take a toll on mental wellness, and that was evident in the findings.

About 20 percent said that their symptoms, such as experiencing dread and not being able to control or stop their worrying, were severe enough to interfere with their daily activities.

Dr. Flanagan said it was perhaps not surprising that people tended to engage in less healthful habits during the pandemic, as so many aspects of health are intertwined.

Stress can lead to poor sleep, which can cause people to exercise less, consume more junk foods, and then gain weight, and so on.

But she said she hoped that the findings might inspire people to take steps to be more proactive about their health, such as seeking out mental health specialists, prioritizing sleep and finding ways to exercise at home and cook more, in the event of future lockdowns.

“Being aware is really the No. 1 thing here.”

Labor leaders and liberal Democrats have seized on the union drive, saying it shows how Amazon is not as friendly to workers as the company says it is.

Lawmakers and regulators — not competitors — are some of its greatest threats, and it has spent significant time and money trying to keep the government away from its business.

I think the narrative is cooked now on their status as a monopoly, their status as an abusive employer and their status as one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C.”

we’ve been surprised by some of the negative things we’ve seen certain members say in the press and on social media,”

In February, Mr. Biden appeared in a video that didn’t mention Amazon explicitly but was seen as a clear sign of support to the union.

We really think we are an example of what a U.S. company should be doing for its employees.”

They have also attacked Mr. Bezos, the richest person in the world by some measures, for his personal wealth.

In the final quarter of last year, Amazon paid Jeff Ricchetti $60,000, according to disclosure forms he filed with the government.

He has deep relationships with Mr. Biden’s inner circle, and has played in a garage band with Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

Amazon has promoted the $15-an-hour minimum in ads in publications frequently used to reach government officials, including Politico and The New York Times. Its lobbyists have pushed for a federal law raising the wage.

When professors at Georgetown and New York Universities asked Americans in 2018 which institutions they had the most confidence in, only the military ranked higher than Amazon

That absolutely includes the Amazon workers in Alabama, just like workers in Washington State and across our country.”

“I often say we are the Bernie Sanders of employers, but that’s not quite right because we actually deliver a progressive workplace to our constituents,”

I am optimistic about a favourable shift in the political wind. The youth climate movement has galvanised attention and re-centred the debate on intergenerational ethics. We are seeing a tipping point in public consciousness. That bodes well. There is still a viable way forward to avoid climate catastrophe.

You can see from the talking points of inactivists that they are really in retreat. Republican pollsters like Frank Luntz have advised clients in the fossil fuel industry and the politicians who carry water for them that you can’t get away with denying climate change any more.

Let’s dig into deniers’ tactics. One that you mention is deflection. What are the telltale signs?Any time you are told a problem is your fault because you are not behaving responsibly, there is a good chance that you are being deflected from systemic solutions and policies

Blaming the individual is a tried and trusted playbook that we have seen in the past with other industries. In the 1970s, Coca Cola and the beverage industry did this very effectively to convince us we don’t need regulations on waste disposal. Because of that we now have a global plastic crisis. The same tactics are evident in the gun lobby’s motto, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, which is classic deflection

look at BP, which gave us the world’s first individual carbon footprint calculator. Why did they do that? Because BP wanted us looking at our carbon footprint not theirs.

Of course lifestyle changes are necessary but they alone won’t get us where we need to be. They make us more healthy, save money and set a good example for others.

But we can’t allow the forces of inaction to convince us these actions alone are the solution and that we don’t need systemic changes

I don’t eat meat. We get power from renewable energy. I have a plug-in hybrid vehicle. I do those things and encourage others to do them. but i don’t think it is helpful to shame people people who are not as far along as you.

Instead, let’s help everybody to move in that direction. That is what policy and system change is about: creating incentives so even those who don’t think about their environmental footprint are still led in that direction.

Another new front in the new climate war is what you call “doomism”. What do you mean by that?Doom-mongering has overtaken denial as a threat and as a tactic. Inactivists know that if people believe there is nothing you can do, they are led down a path of disengagement

They unwittingly do the bidding of fossil fuel interests by giving up.What is so pernicious about this is that it seeks to weaponise environmental progressives who would otherwise be on the frontline demanding change. These are folk of good intentions and good will, but they become disillusioned or depressed and they fall into despair.

Many of the prominent doomist narratives – [Jonathan] Franzen, David Wallace-Wells, the Deep Adaptation movement – can be traced back to a false notion that an Arctic methane bomb will cause runaway warming and extinguish all life on earth within 10 years. This is completely wrong. There is no science to support that.

Good people fall victim to doomism. I do too sometimes. It can be enabling and empowering as long as you don’t get stuck there. It is up to others to help ensure that experience can be cathartic.

the entry of new participants. Bill Gates is perhaps the most prominent. His new book, How to Prevent a Climate Disaster, offers a systems analyst approach to the problem, a kind of operating system upgrade for the planet. What do you make of his take?I want to thank him for using his platform to raise awareness of the climate crisis

I disagree with him quite sharply on the prescription. His view is overly technocratic and premised on an underestimate of the role that renewable energy can play in decarbonising our civilisation

If you understate that potential, you are forced to make other risky choices, such as geoengineering and carbon capture and sequestration. Investment in those unproven options would crowd out investment in better solutions.

Gates writes that he doesn’t know the political solution to climate change. But the politics are the problem buddy. If you don’t have a prescription of how to solve that, then you don’t have a solution and perhaps your solution might be taking us down the wrong path.

What are the prospects for political change with Joe Biden in the White House?Breathtaking. Biden has surprised even the most ardent climate hawks in the boldness of his first 100 day agenda, which goes well beyond any previous president, including Obama when it comes to use of executive actions. He has incorporated climate policy into every single government agency and we have seen massive investments in renewable energy infrastructure, cuts in subsidies for fossil fuels, and the cancellation of the Keystone XL pipeline.

On the international front, the appointment of John Kerry, who helped negotiate the Paris Accord, has telegraphed to the rest of the world that the US is back and ready to lead again

That is huge and puts pressure on intransigent state actors like [Australian prime minister] Scott Morrison, who has been a friend of the fossil fuel industry in Australia. Morrison has changed his rhetoric dramatically since Biden became president. I think that creates an opportunity like no other.

Have the prospects for that been helped or hindered by Covid?I see a perfect storm of climate opportunity. Terrible as the pandemic has been, this tragedy can also provide lessons, particularly on the importance of listening to the word of science when facing risks

Out of this crisis can come a collective reconsideration of our priorities. How to live sustainably on a finite planet with finite space, food and water. A year from now, memories and impacts of coronavirus will still feel painful, but the crisis itself will be in the rear-view mirror thanks to vaccines. What will loom larger will be the greater crisis we face – the climate crisis.

“Since older people are also more likely to experience severe disease symptoms and, sadly, die, our findings make clear how important it is to implement policies to protect the elderly during the pandemic,

The large new study out of Denmark did not examine the role of variants in reinfection, given the time frame of the research. So it does not offer any clues about whether variants make it more likely for someone to come down with COVID-19 more than once.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that people who have had COVID-19 should get vaccinated once it’s available to them, in large part because there is a slim chance they could become infected again if they come into contact with the virus.

That is until the pandemic, when she ended up in the emergency room because she had a bad reaction to a drug prescribed to bring down her elevated blood pressure.

when the hospital gave her the option of going home and monitoring herself, or staying an extra night, she chose to stay. It was the first time she had felt calm in a year.

Primal Scream phone line

explored the emotional and economic pressures on a generation of moms,

hough there is additional federal support to families, more Americans are vaccinated every day and job loss is not quite as dire as it was in the early days of the pandemic, unemployment claims remain higher than they were in previous economic crises

And moms are still not OK.

“Despite the increased labor force participation of mothers, mothers are still having a really hard time,”

Despite their return to the labor force, they are not having much relief at home, and by that I mean, many children are still home-schooling.

She added that the burden of remote school has fallen disproportionately on the shoulders of mothers

Almost every mother I have spoken to during the pandemic, no matter what their financial and family circumstances, has expressed guilt about complaining

Lower-income parents have already been hit harder by unemployment than their higher-income and college-educated counterparts.

Research has shown that in states where children received only remote instruction during the pandemic, mothers’ labor force participation has been lower than in those where children attended school in person.

“Now it’s like 76 percent of moms and 94 percent of dads with college degrees,” he said. This suggests that where families could afford for one parent to step back from work to deal with domestic labor, mothers were bearing the brunt.

While I can list these labor market statistics all day, the emotional impact of Covid-19 is ongoing, devastating and harder to quantify.

“I cry on Tuesdays and Fridays. Sometimes I have an extra bonus day, like on this Monday,”

when she called into the Primal Scream line

Why Tuesdays and Fridays? On Tuesdays, her husband has a lot of meetings, and her day isn’t light either, so even though she is trading off baby care, it’s “really high octane all day.”

It’s a matter of having kept things nominally together all week, and then you have this big letdown,”

She said she has felt “terrified” for two years, after being anxious during her pregnancy as well, because she wanted her daughter so badly.

“I must have buckets of cortisol,”

“More than parental status or gender, education has been most decisive in who has lost jobs during the pandemic,”

But mothers shouldn’t have to slap on a Pollyanna smile.

, there was already a gender gap in caregiving before the pandemic, and moms were more likely than dads to step back from paid work to fill any family needs.

The past year has only exacerbated the difficulties caregivers face in the United States.

We can acknowledge that things could be worse, but at the same time honor the fact that our circumstances are still so far from good.

Screens, small and large, became crucial links to the rest of the world.

In doing so, they rediscovered each other, and experienced the joys of bonding and the suffocation of constant proximity.

In some instances, these revelations were not happy ones: lawyers and mediators saw a spike in clients looking to divorce as soon as courts reopened.

Engagements and pregnancy announcements seemed to pop up constantly on social media. And there were plenty of weddings.

Couples in quarantine learned a lot about their significant others.

Inside nursing homes, Covid-19 outbreaks became all too regular, with more than 163,000 residents and workers dying of the virus.

In one study, almost one-third of the teens interviewed said they had felt unhappy or depressed.

Parents, especially mothers, left the work force quickly and in large numbers in the spring.

Those who continued working had to balance the demands of their jobs with domestic chores, child care and online schooling, putting strain on their mental health.

Retirees put off plans that had been years in the making, like travel and volunteer work.

Young people around the world, cut off from their usual social lives, faced a “mental health pandemic.”

Delivery drivers dealt with health risks, theft and assault.

Airline workers who weren’t furloughed had to confront passengers who refused to wear masks.

hospital staff around the country dealt with the gut-wrenching horrors of a steep surge in cases.

Doctors and nurses agonized over putting their families at risk, and dealt with intense burnout and pay cuts.

Some said that being characterized as heroes by the public left them little room to express vulnerability.

a toll higher than in any other country.

The world’s struggle to contain the coronavirus was often compared to a war

in this case, the enemy claimed more Americans than World War I, World War II and the Vietnam War combined

Grief and loss defined the last year

Funerals and final goodbyes took place over video calls, if at all.

a sign that people will soon be finding their way back to each other.

If you’re wondering what comes after, we are, too.Are you anxious that things will never be the same? Or are you fearful that we’ll return to “the same” much too quickly? Or maybe there is something seemingly small that you will cherish being able to do?

President Joe Biden is expected to sign the $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package Thursday afternoon. The plan will send direct payments of up to $1,400 to most Americans, and will also put nearly $20 billion into Covid-19 vaccinations and $350 billion into state, local and tribal relief.

The economic reopening, coupled with additional fiscal stimulus, accelerated the rotation into more cyclical sectors, such as energy. The S&P 500 energy sector has been the biggest winner this year, up 40% so far.

The irony gnawed at me: My entire vocation as an investigative reporter was predicated on being able to reveal truths, and yet I could not even rustle up the evidence to convince my own mother that our 45th president was not, in fact, the hero she believed him to be. Or, for that matter, that John F. Kennedy Jr. was dead. Or that Tom Hanks had not been executed for drinking the blood of children.

The theories spun from Q’s messages seemed much easier to disprove. Oprah Winfrey couldn’t have been detained during a wave of deep state arrests because we could still see her conducting live interviews on television. Trump’s 4th of July speech at Mount Rushmore came to an end without John F. Kennedy Jr. revealing he was alive and stepping in as the president’s new running mate. The widespread blackouts that her Patriot friend’s “source from the Pentagon” had warned about failed to materialize. And I could testify firsthand that the CIA had no control over my newsroom’s editorial decisions.

“I believe the Holy Spirit led me to the QAnons to discover the truth which is being suppressed,” she texted me. “Otherwise, how would I be able to know the truth if the lamestream media suppresses the truth?”

Through the years, I’d battled against conspiracy theories my mom threw at me that were far more formidable than QAnon. I’d been stumped when she asked me to prove that Beyoncé wasn’t an Illuminati member, dumbfounded when research studies I sent her weren’t enough to reach an agreement on vaccine efficacy, and too worn down to say anything more than “that’s not true” when confronted with false allegations of murders committed by prominent politicians.

Eventually, I accepted the impasse. It didn’t seem healthy that every conversation we had would devolve into a circuitous debate about which one of us was on the side of the bad guys. So I tried to pick my battles.

But what I had dismissed as damaging inconsistencies turned out to be the core strength of the belief system: It was alive, flexible, sprouting more questions than answers, more clues to study, an investigation playing out in real time, with the fate of the world at stake.

With no overlap between our filters of reality, I was at a loss for any facts that would actually stick.

Meanwhile, she wondered where she’d gone wrong with me

She regretted not taking politics more seriously when I was younger. I’d grown up blinkered by American privilege, trained to ignore the dirty machinations securing my comforts. My mom had shed that luxury long ago.

The year my mom began falling down QAnon rabbit holes, I turned the age she was when she first arrived in the States. By then, I was no longer sure that America was worth the cost of her migration. When the real estate market collapsed under the weight of Wall Street speculation, she had to sell our house at a steep loss to avoid foreclosure and her budding career as a realtor evaporated. Her near–minimum wage jobs weren’t enough to cover her bills, so her credit card debts rose. She delayed retirement plans because she saw no path to breaking even anytime soon, though she was hopeful that a turnaround was on the horizon. Through the setbacks and detours, she drifted into the arms of the people and beliefs I held most responsible for her troubles.

With a fervor I knew was futile, I’d tell my mom she was missing the real conspiracy: The powerful people shaping policy to benefit their own interests, to maintain wealth and white predominance, through tax cuts and voter suppression, were commandeering her support solely by catering to her stance on the one issue she cared most about.

The voice my mom trusted most now was Trump’s. Our disagreements were no longer ideological to her but part of a celestial conflict.

“I love you but you have to be on the side of good,” she texted me. “Im sad cuz u have become part of the deep state. May God have mercy on you...I pray you will see the truth of the evil agenda and be on the side of Trump.”

She likened her fellow Patriots to the early Christians who spread the word of Jesus at the risk of persecution. She often sent me a meme with a caption about “ordinary people who spent countless hours researching, debating, meditating and praying” for the truth to be revealed to them. “Although they were mocked, dismissed and cast off, they knew their souls had agreed long ago to do this work.”

Last summer, as my mom marched in a pink MAGA hat amid maskless crowds, and armed extremists stalked racial justice protests, and a disputed election loomed like a time bomb, I entertained my darkest thoughts about the fate of our country. Was there any hope in a democracy without a shared set of basic facts? Had my elders fled one authoritarian regime only for their children to face another? Amid the gloom, I found only a single morsel of solace: My mom was as hopeful as she’d ever been.

I wish I could offer some evidence showing that the gulf between us might be narrowing, that my love, persistence, and collection of facts might be enough to draw her back into a reality we share, and that when our wager about the storm comes due in a few months, she’ll realize that the voices she trusts have been lying to her. But I don’t think that will happen

What can I do but try to limit the damage? Send my mom movie recommendations to occupy the free time she instead spends on conspiracy research. Shift our conversations to the common ground of cooking recipes and family gossip. Raise objections when her beliefs nudge her toward dangerous decisions.

I now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●

understand

now understand our debates as marks of the very bond I thought was disintegrating. No matter how far she believes I’ve fallen into the deep state, how hard I fight for the forces of evil, how imminent the grand plan’s rapture, my mom will be there on the other side of the line putting in a good word for me with the angels and saints, trying to save me from damnation. And those are the two realities we live in. ●

There are many things that our colleagues in Korea did that allowed them to have a very effective initial response. Our public-private smorgasbord of clinical laboratories and testing, our regulatory environment for how new lab tests can be rolled out, the public health capacity [being] very weak in terms of ability to get the contact tracing done.

There were just many things that delayed us. That said, there was lots of great work in many communities. But I think as a nation, it wasn't a good performance.

The supply chain is very interdependent internationally. This was a really complex, systemwide assault.

She took pride in the basic things, like cleaning engine parts. And she only hinted at the truth: When one fan told her in October, “It’s great to be young,” Soya replied, “Youth does not mean a certain period of life, but how to hold your heart.”

She seemed, well, happy, and FaceApp had made her that way. Creating the lifelike impostor had taken only a few taps: He changed the “Gender” setting to “Female,” the “Age” setting to “Teen,” and the “Impression” setting — a mix of makeup filters — to a glamorous look the app calls “Hollywood.”

Soya pouted and scowled on rare occasions when Nakajima himself felt frustrated. But her baseline expression was an extra-wide smile, activated with a single tap.

Nakajima grew his shimmering hair below his shoulders and raided his local convenience store for beauty supplies he thought would make the FaceApp images more convincing: blushes, eyeliners, concealers, shampoos.

“When I compare how I feel when I started to tweet as a woman and now, I do feel that I’m gradually gravitating toward this persona … this fantasy world that I created,” Nakajima said. “When I see photos of what I tweeted, I feel like, ‘Oh. That’s me.’ ”

The sensation Nakajima was feeling is so common that there’s a term for it: the Proteus effect, named for the shape-shifting Greek god. Stanford University researchers first coined it in 2007 to describe how people inhabiting the body of a digital avatar began to act the part

People made to appear taller in virtual-reality simulations acted more assertively, even after the experience ended. Prettier characters began to flirt.

What is it about online disguises? Why are they so good at bending people’s sense of self-perception?

they tap into this “very human impulse to play with identity and pretend to be someone you’re not.”

Users in the Internet’s early days rarely had any presumptions of authenticity, said Melanie C. Green, a University of Buffalo professor who studies technology and social trust. Most people assumed everyone else was playing a character clearly distinguished from their real life.

“This identity play was considered one of the huge advantages of being online,” Green said. “You could switch your gender and try on all of these different personas. It was a playground for people to explore.”

It wasn’t until the rise of giant social networks like Facebook — which used real identities to, among other things, supercharge targeted advertising — that this big game of pretend gained an air of duplicity. Spaces for playful performance shrank, and the biggest Internet watering holes began demanding proof of authenticity as a way to block out malicious intent.

The Web’s big shift from text to visuals — the rise of photo-sharing apps, live streams and video calls — seemed at first to make that unspoken rule of real identities concrete. It seemed too difficult to fake one’s appearance when everyone’s face was on constant display.

Now, researchers argue, advances in image-editing artificial intelligence have done for the modern Internet what online pseudonyms did for the world’s first chat rooms. Facial filters have allowed anyone to mold themselves into the character they want to play.

researchers fear these augmented reality tools could end up distorting the beauty standards and expectations of actual reality.

Some political and tech theorists worry this new world of synthetic media threatens to detonate our concept of truth, eroding our shared experiences and infusing every online relationship with suspicion and self-doubt.

Deceptive political memes, conspiracy theories, anti-vaccine hoaxes and other scams have torn the fabric of our democracy, culture and public health.

But she also thinks about her kids, who assume “that everything online is fabricated,” and wonders whether the rules of online identity require a bit more nuance — and whether that generational shift is already underway.

“Bots pretending to be people, automated representations of humanity — that, they perceive as exploitative,” she said. “But if it’s just someone engaging in identity experimentation, they’re like: ‘Yeah, that’s what we’re all doing.'

To their generation, “authenticity is not about: ‘Does your profile picture match your real face?’ Authenticity is: ‘Is your voice your voice?’

“Their feeling is: ‘The ideas are mine. The voice is mine. The content is mine. I’m just looking for you to receive it without all the assumptions and baggage that comes with it.’ That’s the essence of a person’s identity. That’s who they really are.”

But wasn’t this all just a big con? Nakajima had tricked people with a “cool girl” stereotype to boost his Twitter numbers. He hadn’t elevated the role of women in motorcycling; if anything, he’d supplanted them. And the character he’d created was paper thin: Soya had no internal complexity outside of what Nakajima had projected, just that eternally superimposed smile.

Perhaps he should have accepted his irrelevance and faded into the digital sunset, sharing his life for few to see. But some of Soya’s followers have said they never felt deceived: It was Nakajima — his enthusiasm, his attitude about life — they’d been charmed by all along. “His personality,” as one Twitter follower said, “shined through.”

In Nakajima’s mind, he’d used the tools of a superficial medium to craft genuine connections. He had not felt real until he had become noticed for being fake.

Nakajima said he doesn’t know how long he’ll keep Soya alive. But he said he’s grateful for the way she helped him feel: carefree, adventurous, seen.

Harris announced the formation of an anti-corruption task force,

She also said the administration will provide 500,000 COVID-19 vaccines

on these points — and for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize — the 1619 Project has failed.

That doesn’t mean that the project seeks to erase the Declaration of Independence from history. But it does mean that it seeks to dethrone the Fourth of July by treating American history as a story of Black struggle against white supremacy — of which the Declaration is, for all of its high-flown rhetoric, supposed to be merely a part.

he deleted assertions went to the core of the project’s most controversial goal, “to reframe American history by considering what it would mean to regard 1619 as our nation’s birth year.”

She then challenged me to find any instance in which the project stated that “using 1776 as our country’s birth date is wrong,” that it “should not be taught to schoolchildren,” and that the only one “that should be taught” was 1619. “Good luck unearthing any of us arguing that,” she added.

I emailed her to ask if she could point to any instances before this controversy in which she had acknowledged that her claims about 1619 as “our true founding” had been merely metaphorical. Her answer was that the idea of treating the 1619 date metaphorically should have been so obvious that it went without saying.

“1619. It is not a year that most Americans know as a notable date in our country’s history. Those who do are at most a tiny fraction of those who can tell you that 1776 is the year of our nation’s birth. What if, however, we were to tell you that this fact, which is taught in our schools and unanimously celebrated every Fourth of July, is wrong, and that the country’s true birth date, the moment that its defining contradictions first came into the world, was in late August of 1619?”

Here is an excerpt from the introductory essay to the project by The New York Times Magazine’s editor, Jake Silverstein, as it appeared in print in August 2019 (italics added):

In his introduction, Silverstein argues that America’s “defining contradictions” were born in August 1619, when a ship carrying 20 to 30 enslaved Africans from what is present-day Angola arrived in Point Comfort, in the English colony of Virginia. And the title page of Hannah-Jones’s essay for the project insists that “our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written.”

What was surprising was that in 1776 a politically formidable “defining contradiction” — “that all men are created equal” — came into existence through the Declaration of Independence. As Abraham Lincoln wrote in 1859, that foundational document would forever serve as a “rebuke and stumbling block to the very harbingers of reappearing tyranny and oppression.”

As for the notion that the Declaration’s principles were “false” in 1776, ideals aren’t false merely because they are unrealized, much less because many of the men who championed them, and the nation they created, hypocritically failed to live up to them.

These two flaws led to a third, conceptual, error. “Out of slavery — and the anti-Black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional,” writes Silverstein.

Nearly everything? What about, say, the ideas contained by the First Amendment? Or the spirit of openness that brought millions of immigrants through places like Ellis Island? Or the enlightened worldview of the Marshall Plan and the Berlin airlift? Or the spirit of scientific genius and discovery exemplified by the polio vaccine and the moon landing?

On the opposite side of the moral ledger, to what extent does anti-Black racism figure in American disgraces such as the brutalization of Native Americans, the Chinese Exclusion Act or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II?

The world is complex. So are people and their motives. The job of journalism is to take account of that complexity, not simplify it out of existence through the adoption of some ideological orthodoxy.

This mistake goes far to explain the 1619 Project’s subsequent scholarly and journalistic entanglements. It should have been enough to make strong yet nuanced claims about the role of slavery and racism in American history. Instead, it issued categorical and totalizing assertions that are difficult to defend on close examination.

It should have been enough for the project to serve as curator for a range of erudite and interesting voices, with ample room for contrary takes. Instead, virtually every writer in the project seems to sing from the same song sheet, alienating other potential supporters of the project and polarizing national debate.

James McPherson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Battle Cry of Freedom” and a past president of the American Historical Association. He was withering: “Almost from the outset,” McPherson told the World Socialist Web Site, “I was disturbed by what seemed like a very unbalanced, one-sided account, which lacked context and perspective.”

In particular, McPherson objected to Hannah-Jones’s suggestion that the struggle against slavery and racism and for civil rights and democracy was, if not exclusively then mostly, a Black one. As she wrote in her essay: “The truth is that as much democracy as this nation has today, it has been borne on the backs of Black resistance.”

McPherson demurs: “From the Quakers in the 18th century, on through the abolitionists in the antebellum, to the Radical Republicans in the Civil War and Reconstruction, to the N.A.A.C.P., which was an interracial organization founded in 1909, down through the civil rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, there have been a lot of whites who have fought against slavery and racial discrimination, and against racism,” he said. “And that’s what’s missing from this perspective.”

Wilentz’s catalog of the project’s mistakes is extensive. Hannah-Jones’s essay claimed that by 1776 Britain was “deeply conflicted” over its role in slavery. But despite the landmark Somerset v. Stewart court ruling in 1772, which held that slavery was not supported by English common law, it remained deeply embedded in the practices of the British Empire. The essay claimed that, among Londoners, “there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade” by 1776. But the movement to abolish the British slave trade only began about a decade later — inspired, in part, Wilentz notes, by American antislavery agitation that had started in the 1760s and 1770s.

ie M. Harris, an expert on pre-Civil War African-American life and slavery. “On Aug. 19 of last year,” Harris wrote, “I listened in stunned silence as Nikole Hannah-Jones … repeated an idea that I had vigorously argued against with her fact checker: that the patriots fought the American Revolution in large part to preserve slavery in North America.”

The larger problem is that The Times’s editors, however much background reading they might have done, are not in a position to adjudicate historical disputes. That should have been an additional reason for the 1619 Project to seek input from, and include contributions by, an intellectually diverse range of scholarly voices. Yet not only does the project choose a side, it also brooks no doubt.

“It is finally time to tell our story truthfully,” the magazine declares on its 1619 cover page. Finally? Truthfully? Is The Times suggesting that distinguished historians, like the ones who have seriously disputed aspects of the project, had previously been telling half-truths or falsehoods?

unlike other dates, 1776 uniquely marries letter and spirit, politics and principle: The declaration that something new is born, combined with the expression of an ideal that — because we continue to believe in it even as we struggle to live up to it — binds us to the date.

On the other, the 1619 Project has become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, and that is being widely written about outside The Times. To avoid writing about it on account of the first scruple is to be derelict in our responsibility toward the second.

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