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it is our hope that the federal government will follow the science and reopen facilities to taxpaying Americans."

Neal said it's probably going to be a hybrid

I think ... you're probably going to see more people working remotely.

Many, including TSA and Border Patrol officers, had no choice but to remain on site.

managers have already been calling some employees back into the office on a voluntary basis.

We're nowhere near herd immunity. And we don't want the vulnerable populations that we serve exposed to packed lobbies where people are going to literally have to wait post-pandemic like they did pre-pandemic for hours just to turn in documents."

Neal said there are other concerns for managers, including employee morale.

"Lots of people connecting remotely probably presents far more risk of hacking than than a bunch of people connecting on a network in a government building," Neal added.

"It's an opportunity to fundamentally reimagine what it means to work for the federal government,

Collective memory is similar, though its loss does not immediately paralyze everyday private activity. But ignorance of history-that is, absent or defective collective memory-does deprive us of the best available guide for public action, especially in encounters with outsider

Often it is enough for experts to know about outsiders, if their advice is listened to. But democratic citizenship and effective participation in the determination of public policy require citizens to share a collective memory, organized into historical knowledge and belief

This value of historical knowledge obviously justifies teaching and learning about what happened in recent times, for the way things are descends from the way they were yesterday and the day before that

in fact, institutions that govern a great deal of our everyday behavior took shape hundreds or even thousands of years ago

Only an acquaintance with the entire human adventure on earth allows us to understand these dimensions of contemporary reality.

it follows that study of history is essential for every young person.

Collective memory is quite the same. Historians are always at work reinterpreting the past, asking new questions, searching new sources and finding new meanings in old documents in order to bring the perspective of new knowledge and experience to bear on the task of understanding the past.

what we know and believe about history is always changing. In other words, our collective, codified memory alters with time just as personal memories do, and for the same reasons.

skeptics are likely to conclude that history has no right to take student time from other subjects. If what is taught today is not really true, how can it claim space in a crowded school curriculum?

what if the world is more complicated and diverse than words can ever tell? What if human minds are incapable of finding' neat pigeon holes into which everything that happens will fit?

What if we have to learn to live with uncertainty and probabilities, and act on the basis of the best guesswork we are capable of?

Then, surely, the changing perspectives of historical understanding are the very best introduction we can have to the practical problems of real life. Then, surely, a serious effort to understand the interplay of change and continuity in human affairs is the only adequate introduction human beings can have to the confusing flow of events that constitutes the actual, adult world.

Memory is not something fixed and forever. As time passes, remembered personal experiences take on new meanings.

Early in this century, teachers and academic administrators pretty well agreed that two sorts of history courses were needed: a survey of the national history of the United States and a survey of European history.

Memory, indeed, makes us human. History, our collective memory, carefully codified and critically revised, makes us social, sharing ideas and ideals with others so as to form all sorts of different human groups

The varieties of history are enormous; facts and probabilities about the past are far too numerous for anyone to comprehend them all. Every sort of human group has its own histor

Where to start? How bring some sort of order to the enormous variety of things known and believed about the past?

Systematic sciences are not enough. They discount time, and therefore oversimplify reality, especially human reality.

This second course was often broadened into a survey of Western civilization in the 1930s and 1940s

But by the 1960s and 1970s these courses were becoming outdated, left behind by the rise of new kinds social and quantitative history, especially the history of women, of Blacks, and of other formerly overlooked groups within the borders of the United States, and of peoples emerging from colonial status in the world beyond our borders.

much harder to combine old with new to make an inclusive, judiciously balanced (and far less novel) introductory course for high school or college students.

But abandoning the effort to present a meaningful portrait of the entire national and civilizational past destroyed the original justification for requiring students to study history

Competing subjects abounded, and no one could or would decide what mattered most and should take precedence. As this happened, studying history became only one among many possible ways of spending time in school.

The costs of this change are now becoming apparent, and many concerned persons agree that returning to a more structured curriculum, in which history ought to play a prominent part, is imperative.

three levels of generality seem likely to have the greatest importance for ordinary people.

First is family, local, neighborhood history

Second is national history, because that is where political power is concentrated in our time.

Last is global history, because intensified communications make encounters with all the other peoples of the earth increasingly important.

Other pasts are certainly worth attention, but are better studied in the context of a prior acquaintance with personal-local, national, and global history. That is because these three levels are the ones that affect most powerfully what all other groups and segments of society actually do.

National history that leaves out Blacks and women and other minorities is no longer acceptable; but American history that leaves out the Founding Fathers and the Constitution is not acceptable either. What is needed is a vision of the whole, warts and all.

the study of history does not lead to exact prediction of future events. Though it fosters practical wisdom, knowledge of the past does not permit anyone to know exactly what is going to happen

Consequently, the lessons of history, though supremely valuable when wisely formulated, become grossly misleading when oversimplifiers try to transfer them mechanically from one age to another, or from one place to another.

Predictable fixity is simply not the human way of behaving. Probabilities and possibilities-together with a few complete surprises-are what we live with and must learn to expect.

Second, as acquaintance with the past expands, delight in knowing more and more can and often does become an end in itself.

On the other hand, studying alien religious beliefs, strange customs, diverse family patterns and vanished social structures shows how differently various human groups have tried to cop

Broadening our humanity and extending our sensibilities by recognizing sameness and difference throughout the recorded past is therefore an important reason for studying history, and especially the history of peoples far away and long ago

For we can only know ourselves by knowing how we resemble and how we differ from others. Acquaintance with the human past is the only way to such self knowledge.

Our brains are statistical organs that are built simply to predict what will happen next

This makes sense because, in prehistoric times, faulty predictions could lead to some very unpleasant surprises — like a tiger eating you or sinking in quicksand.

So-called prediction errors (like finding salmon instead of turkey on your plate on Thanksgiving) send us into a tizzy because our brains interpret them as a potential threat.

Keep doing what you’ve been doing, because you did it before, and you didn’t die.

all essentially subconscious efforts to make your world more predictable, orderly and safe.

Routines and rituals also conserve precious brainpower

It turns out our brains are incredibly greedy when it comes to energy consumption, sucking up 20 percent of calories while accounting for only 2 percent of overall body weight.

Our brains are literally overburdened with all the uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

Not only is there the seeming capriciousness of the virus, but we no longer have the routines that served as the familiar scaffolding of our lives

“It’s counterintuitive because we think of meaning in life as coming from these grandiose experiences

grandiose

grandiose

Of course, you can always take routines and rituals too far, such as the extremely controlled and repetitive behaviors indicative of addiction, obsessive-compulsive disorder and various eating disorders.

it’s mundane routines that give us structure to help us pare things down and better navigate the world, which helps us make sense of things and feel that life has meaning.”

In the coronavirus era, people may resort to obsessive cleaning, hoarding toilet paper, stockpiling food or neurotically wearing masks when driving alone in their cars. On the other end of the spectrum are those who stubbornly adhere to their old routines because stopping feels more threatening than the virus.

You’re much better off establishing a new routine within the limited environment that we find ourselves in

Luckily, there is a vast repertoire of habits you can adopt and routines you can establish to structure your days no matter what crises are unfolding around you

The point is to find what works for you. It just needs to be regular and help you achieve your goals, whether intellectually, emotionally, socially or professionally. The best habits not only provide structure and order but also give you a sense of pleasure, accomplishment or confidence upon completion.

It could be as simple as making your bed as soon as you get up in the morning or committing to working the same hours in the same spot.

Pandemic-proof routines might include weekly phone or video calls with friends, Taco Tuesdays with the family, hiking with your spouse on weekends, regularly filling a bird feeder, set times for prayer or meditation, front yard happy hours with the neighbors or listening to an audiobook every night before bed.

The truth is that you cannot control what happens in life. But you can create a routine that gives your life a predictable rhythm and secure mooring.

This frees your brain to develop perspective so you’re better able to take life’s surprises in stride.

I attended a Thanksgiving dinner several years ago where the hostess, without warning family and friends, broke with tradition and served salmon instead of turkey, roasted potatoes instead of mashed, raspberry coulis instead of cranberry sauce and … you get the idea.

Too many people are still longing for their old routines. Get some new ones instead.

It wasn’t that the meal itself was bad. In fact, the meal was outstanding. The problem was that it wasn’t the meal everyone was expecting.

When there are discrepancies between expectations and reality, all kinds of distress signals go off in the brain.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a holiday ritual or more mundane habit like how you tie your shoes; if you can’t do it the way you normally do it, you’re biologically engineered to get upset.

This in part explains people’s grief and longing for the routines that were the background melodies of their lives before the pandemic

“For many of us, we’d literally rather not know because otherwise it creates such an acutely distressing experience for us as humans.”

this inability to engage presents itself as a complete denial of the climate crisis and climate science. But even among those who accept the dire predictions for the natural world, there are “micro-denials” that can block the ability to take action.

If you’ve got as little as 30 seconds and a decent internet connection, you can help combat the deforestation of the Amazon. 

to build an artificial intelligence model that can recognize signs of deforestation. That data can be used to alert governments and conservation organizations where intervention is needed and to inform policies that protect vital ecosystems. It may even one day predict where deforestation is likely to happen next.

To monitor deforestation, conservation organizations need an eye in the sky.

WRI’s Global Forest Watch online tracking system receives images of the world’s forests taken every few days by NASA satellites. A simple computer algorithm scans the images, flagging instances where before there were trees and now there are not. But slight disturbances, such as clouds, can trip up the computer, so experts are increasingly interested in using artificial intelligence.

Inman was surprised how willing people have been to spend their time clicking on abstract-looking pictures of the Amazon.

Look at these nine blocks and make a judgment about each one. Does that satellite image look like a situation where human beings have transformed the landscape in some way?” Inman explained.

It’s not always easy; that’s the point. For example, a brown patch in the trees could be the result of burning to clear land for agriculture (earning a check mark for human impact), or it could be the result of a natural forest fire (no check mark). Keen users might be able to spot subtle signs of intervention the computer would miss, like the thin yellow line of a dirt road running through the clearing. 

SAS’s website offers a handful of examples comparing natural forest features and manmade changes. 

users have analyzed almost 41,000 images, covering an area of rainforest nearly the size of the state of Montana. Deforestation caused by human activity is evident in almost 2 in 5 photos.

The researchers hope to use historical images of these new geographies to create a predictive model that could identify areas most at risk of future deforestation. If they can show that their AI model is successful, it could be useful for NGOs, governments and forest monitoring bodies, enabling them to carefully track forest changes and respond by sending park rangers and conservation teams to threatened areas. In the meantime, it’s a great educational tool for the citizen scientists who use the app

Users simply select the squares in which they’ve spotted some indication of human impact: the tell-tale quilt of farm plots, a highway, a suspiciously straight edge of tree line. 

we have still had people from 80 different countries come onto the app and make literally hundreds of judgments that enabled us to resolve 40,000 images,

I’m unable to save money for retirement and I get very anxious when I think about the future.

Worse, I’ve lost my sense of meaning to myself. I feel like the culture has moved on without me, and I don’t know what to do.

I feel alone in many ways and unsuccessful by most measures. I don’t own a home and no one needs me; I am nobody’s mother and now I am nobody’s child, as my parents are no longer living.

on bad ones, I feel such futility, like I’ve squandered my own youth and beauty in the hall of mirrors that is our consumerist society.

A: What you wrote is in no way frivolous; it concerns the entire value, direction and purpose of your life.

You’ve realized that, in curating what we call taste, you’ve unwittingly become part of the system, the media-driven consumerist machine that creates the desire to possess things you’ll likely never be able to afford.

Beauty — distracting, exclusionary, often more talismanic and notional than “real” — has never been a steady organizing principle for life

your sense of what is beautiful has become more complicated, as you have. Your work is no longer satisfying to you because it is no longer relevant to the person you are.

your way of seeing things, including yourself, seems not wholly true or right or your own, and is in dire need of a refresh. It feels reductive and merciless, informed too much by the very aspects of our culture that have become deadening to you.

You’re seeking new paths to the shore, new things that sustain you, and this requires doing the work to find out what that looks like. It requires acknowledging the value shift that probably began happening inside you long ago.

or so long the powerful have had room to speak, to say anything they wanted, and back it up with economic and violent force. For people used to power, speaking on the net gives them a granularity in their speech without precedent. It empowers them to speak in ever more sophisticated and persuasive ways.

I found myself on Twitter one night speaking to men’s rights advocates about sexual consent. I tried my gentleness, I tried to explain my concerns, my doubts, the outcomes I feared when people weren’t able to give sober and informed consent. I never got angry, but also tried to understand their fears. Eventually it resolved into a productive conversation. They were always hesitant, but they couldn’t seem to stay mad at me. I came to understand more about how men come to that position, and how to meet them where they are. Undoubtedly it won’t always work, but for those who only want to scream and never to talk, I can at least now see the depth of their fear and feel compassion for them.

One day I spoke with a man who hated the idea that he might have white privilege. I tried to explain gently what it meant, but he could only see his own suffering and misfortune, and those without his privilege doing better than him. I talked to him more about his story, looking for a place to explain in terms he would understand what this thing was, and why it was there even if he didn’t see it as benefitting him. Eventually he pulled his trump card: his life was so bad he was suicidal. The only reason he hadn’t killed himself, he told me, was that he didn’t have the courage. I realized this wasn’t a political conversation at all, this was a soul in pain, crying for help.

Beyond the text and pictures we see before us is the skin, and beneath, the blood and viscera, all the way to the cavern of the brain, the mind made of time and memories. We are, every one of us, creatures of need and connection, not merely eschewing disconnection but beings literally incapable of unconnected life.

Not only is the language system thoroughly interactive with a high degree of co-activation across words and concepts, but it also impacts our processing in other domains such as vision, attention and cognitive control.

In other words, it is safe to say that the language you speak influences how you see the world not only figuratively but also quite literally, down to the mechanics of your eye movements.

This is simply how the man talks. About everything. What's more, he says everything, takes the both sides of everything:

Does he believe any of this, either way? Almost certainly not. The man has the brain of a goldfish: He "believes" whatever is in front of him in the moment. No matter whether or not it contradicts something he believed five minutes ago or will believe ten minutes from now.

All this guy does is try to create panic. That's his move

(2) The most alarming part of the Woodward tapes is the way Trump talks about Kim Jong Un and the moment when Trump literally takes sides with Kim Jong Un against a former American president.

In a way, it would be comforting to believe that our president was intelligent enough to grasp the seriousness of the coronavirus, even if his judgment in how to deal with the outbreak was malicious or poor.

All of the available evidence suggests the opposite:

Donald Trump lacks the cognitive ability to understand any concepts more complicated than self-promotion or self-preservation.

Put those two together—constant exaggerating self-aggrandizement and the perpetual attempt to stoke panic—and what you have is a guy was just saying stuff to Woodward.

After the Woodward tapes, anyone still deluding themselves about the authoritarian danger Trump poses to America is, finally, all out of excuses.

This, right here, is the most damning revelation from the Woodward tapes (so far):   Trump reflected on his relationships with authoritarian leaders generally, including Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “It’s funny, the relationships I have, the tougher and meaner they are, the better I get along with them,” he told Woodward. “You know? Explain that to me someday, okay?” It's not hard to explain. And it's not funny.

You have this incredible rise in interest in technology and excitement about technology and the beat itself really took off while I was there. But then at the same time, you have this massive new centralization of government control over technology and the use of technology to control people and along with that rising nationalism.

Paul Mozur, who covers China and tech for the New York Times and is currently living in Taiwain, after the Chinese expelled all foreign journalists. 

That was more apparent, I think, over the past five years or so after Xi Jinping really consolidated power, but the amount of cameras that went up on street corners, the degree to which you used to be able to — there’s a moment maybe seven or eight years ago — where Jack Ma talked about the Tiananmen Square crackdowns on Chinese social media and now that’s just so utterly unthinkable. The degree to which the censorship has increased now to the level where if you say certain things on WeChat, it’s very possible the police will show up at your door where you actually have a truly fully formed Internet Police. . .

I think a lot of Chinese people feel more secure from the cameras, there’s been a lot of propaganda out there saying the cameras are here for your safety. There is this extremely positive, almost Utopian take on technology in China, and a lot of the stuff that I think, our knee-jerk response from the United States would be to be worried about, they kind of embrace as a vision of the future. .

The main reasons WeChat is a concern if you were the United States government is number one, it’s become a major vector of the spread of Chinese propaganda and censorship, and because it’s a social network that is anchored by a vast majority of users in China who are censored and who are receptive to all this propaganda, even if you’re overseas using WeChat and not censored in the same way, what you get is mostly content shared from people who are living in a censored environment, so it basically stays a censored environment. I call that a super filter bubble; the idea is that there are multiple filter bubbles contending in a website like Facebook, but with WeChat, because it’s so dominated by government controls, you get one really big mega pro-China filter bubble that then is spread all over the the world over the app, even if people outside of China don’t face the same censorship. So that’s one thing.

The second is the surveillance is immense and anybody who creates an account in China brings the surveillance with them overseas

And most people, frankly, using WeChat overseas probably created the accounts in China, and even when they don’t create the account in China, when national security priorities hit a certain level, I think they’re probably going to use it to monitor people anyway. I’ve run into a number of people who have had run-ins with the Chinese Internet Police either in China, but some of them outside of China, in their day-to-day life using WeChat, and then they return home and it becomes apparent that the Internet Police were watching them the whole time, and they get a visit and the police have a discussion with them about what their activities have been

So it’s also a major way that the Chinese government is able to spy on and monitor people overseas and then unsurprisingly, because of that, it’s used as a way for the Chinese intel services to harass people overseas. . . .

WeChat is particularly suited to this in part because every single person who uses WeChat within China has it linked to their real identity. And then because everybody on WeChat has linked to their real identity, you can map their relationship networks and lean on them that way.

It also has a bunch of tools that the Chinese police use, for instance key words, where you can set an alarm so that if you were to say “Tiananmen”, they could set an alarm so that anytime you say that they get a warning about that, and then they go look at what you’ve written. So there’s all these tools that are uniquely created for Chinese state surveillance that are within the app that they can also use, so there’s a bunch of ways that the app is just better.

It’s also one of the very few unblocked communication tools that goes between the two countries. So for all these reasons it’s a very, very big deal. For the Chinese government, it’s an important tool of social control, and it’s been a way that they’ve been able to take the social controls that exist within China and expand them to the diaspora community in some pretty unnerving ways.

Last week alone, though, 1.6 million people newly applied for unemployment benefits. That’s the equivalent of 2,300 Carrier plants

Somehow, for years, the four tragic deaths in Benghazi consumed the agenda of six GOP-controlled congressional committees and the programming of the most-watched cable news channel. But today, a deadly shock magnified by government ineptitude that has led to 46,000 times as many lives lost “is what it is.”

the coronavirus death toll is about 46,000 Benghazis

According to congressional investigators, Navarro negotiated a contract that resulted in the government overpaying for ventilators by $500 million. (The contract was canceled Monday.) He also championed a $765 million federal loan to Eastman Kodak to transform it into a drugmaker. (The loan has since unraveled and is the subject of a securities investigation.)

So how many taxpayer dollars was Navarro involved in wasting through these two deals alone? Measured in units that should be familiar to consumers of right-wing news, it’s roughly two Solyndras.

The debt increase under Trump during a single term is on track to surpass that under Obama across two terms.

For each Hillary Clinton private email scandal (one), there are at least eight senior Trump officials who have reportedly used private email to conduct official business

For every Obama-era incident involving supposed retaliation against political opponents, there are literally dozens of instances of Trump trying to use the power of his office to punish perceived enemie

“The idea of guiding savages out of the darkness into the light was omnipresent in France’s discourse,” he said. “The idea of the savage is still deeply rooted in French society.”

“The word benefits from ambiguity and works in France’s collective consciousness by letting the person using it avoid being directly called a racist,

“Césaire goes further by saying that Nazism was the product of the ensauvagement of Europe,” said Pap Ndiaye, a historian who led efforts to establish Black studies in France, adding that a genocide committed by Germans in their former African colony in what is now Namibia in the early 20th century is widely regarded as a precursor of the Holocaust.

But stripped of its historical meaning, ensauvagement can literally mean, in French, the state of becoming wild.

Aimé Césaire, the anticolonial writer from Martinique, even tried to turn the word ensauvagement against Europe in the 1950s. In “Discourse on Colonialism,” he wrote that Europeans had dehumanized themselves through the brutality of colonialism in Africa and that they themselves had turned into savages.

“It is necessary to stop the ensauvagement of a certain part of the society,” Mr. Darmanin, the interior minister, told the newspaper Le Figaro in late July.

That is why the word appeared to have slipped into the mainstream recently, he said.

“There are no savages in France,” Sacha Houlié, a lawmaker, told the minister in Parliament. “There are only citizens.”

The minister defended himself, saying that his use of the word had nothing to do with immigration or ethnicity, adding, “I’m miles away from that.”

In an interview this week, Mr. Houlié said that Mr. Macron and his party came to power in 2017 promising to reconcile the French. But by using ensauvagement, he said, “We recreate divisions, we create new fractures.”

The justice minister, Eric Dupont-Moretti, told a French radio station on Monday that he would not use the term because “ensauvagement is a word that fuels the feeling of insecurity.”

The very same day, Marlène Schiappa, a junior minister for equality, said, “It doesn’t bother me to talk about an ensauvagement of society, because it’s a reality, quite simply.”

Mr. Darmanin hardened his position by insisting its usage was legitimate — a stance considered especially significant because he oversees the national police as interior minister

“Ensauvagement is coded language to mean young, violent youths of sub-Saharan or North African origin,” Mr. Ndiaye said. “And that opens the door to policies on immigration, police checkpoints, and it could be used to justify police violence.”

“If police officers are dealing with savages, well, then, it’s legitimate that they use violent means to control these so-called savages,” he said

It is telling, however, that the letter’s critics focus on speakers and what they deserve to say far more than the listening public and what we deserve to hear

In Free Speech and Its Relation to Self-Government (1948), Meikeljohn challenges us to approach public discourse from the perspective of the “good man”: that is to say, the virtuous citizen

One cannot appreciate the freedom of speech, he writes, unless one sees it as an act of collective deliberation, carried out by “a man who, in his political activities, is not merely fighting for what…he can get, but is eagerly and generously serving the common welfare”

Free speech is not only about discovering truth, or encouraging ethical individualism, or protecting minority opinions—liberals’ usual lines of defense—it is ultimately about binding our fate to others’ by “sharing” the truth with our fellow citizens

Sharing truth requires mutual respect and a jealous defense of intellectual freedom, so that “no idea, no opinion, no doubt, no belief, no counter belief, no relevant information” is withheld from the electorate

For their part, voters must judge these arguments individually, through introspection, virtue, and meditation on the common good. 

The “marketplace of ideas” is dangerous because it relieves citizens of exactly these duties. As Meikeljohn writes:   As separate thinkers, we have no obligation to test our thinking, to make sure that it is worthy of a citizen who is one of the ‘rulers of the nation.’ That testing is to be done, we believe, not by us, but by ‘the competition of the market.

this is precisely the sort of self-interested posturing that many on the Left resent in their opponents, but which they now propose to embrace as their own, casually accepting the notion that their fellow citizens are incapable of exercising public reason or considering alternative viewpoints with honesty, bravery, humility, and compassion. 

In practice, curtailing public speech is likely to worsen polarization and further empower dominant cultural interests. As an ideal (or a lack thereof), it undermines the intelligibility and mutual respect that form the very basis of citizenship.

political polarization has induced Americans to abandon “truth-directed methods of persuasion”—such as argumentation and evidence—for a form of non-rational “messaging,” in which “every speech act is classified as friend or foe… and in which very little faith exists as to the rational faculties of those being spoken to.”

“In such a context,” she writes, “even the cry for ‘free speech’ invites a nonliteral interpretation, as being nothing but the most efficient way for its advocates to acquire or consolidate power.”

Segments of the Right have pushed this sort of political messaging to its cynical extremes—taking Donald Trump’s statements “seriously but not literally” or taking antagonistic positions simply to “own the libs.”

Rather than assuming the supremacy of our own opinions or aspersing the motives of those with whom we disagree, our duty as Americans is to think with, learn from, and correct each other.

some critics of the Harper’s letter seem eager to reduce all public debate to a form of power politics

Trans activist Julia Serano merely punctuates the tendency when she writes that calls for free speech represent a “misconception that we, as a society, are all in the midst of some grand rational debate, and that marginalized people simply need to properly plea our case for acceptance, and once we do, reason-minded people everywhere will eventually come around. This notion is utterly ludicrous.”

one could say that critics of the Harper’s letter take the “bad man” as their unit of analysis. By their lights, all participants in public debate are prejudiced, particular, and self-interested

This is what artificial intelligence and machine learning are. Facebook is a series of algorithms and goals aimed at maximizing engagement with Facebook. That’s why it’s worth hundreds of billions of dollars. It has a vast army of computer scientists and programmers whose job it is to make that machine more efficient.

the Facebook engine is designed to scope you out, take a psychographic profile of who you are and then use its data compiled from literally billions of humans to serve you content designed to maximize your engagement with Facebook.

Put in those terms, you barely have a chance.

Of course, Facebook can come in and say, this is damaging so we’re going to add some code that says don’t show this dieting/fat-shaming content but girls 18 and under. But the algorithms will find other vulnerabilities

So what to do? The decision of all the companies, if not all individuals, was just to lie. What else are you going to do? Say we’re closing down our multi-billion dollar company because our product shouldn’t exist?

why exactly are you creating a separate group of subroutines that yanks Facebook back when it does what it’s supposed to do particularly well? This, indeed, was how the internal dialog at Facebook developed, as described in the article I read. Basically, other executives said: Our business is engagement, why are we suggesting people log off for a while when they get particularly engaged?

what it makes me think about more is the conversations at Tobacco companies 40 or 50 years ago. At a certain point you realize: our product is bad. If used as intended it causes lung cancer, heart disease and various other ailments in a high proportion of the people who use the product. And our business model is based on the fact that the product is chemically addictive. Our product is getting people addicted to tobacco so that they no longer really have a choice over whether to buy it. And then a high proportion of them will die because we’ve succeeded.

. The algorithms can be taught to find and address an infinite numbers of behaviors. But really you’re asking the researchers and programmers to create an alternative set of instructions where Instagram (or Facebook, same difference) jumps in and does exactly the opposite of its core mission, which is to drive engagement

You can add filters and claim you’re not marketing to kids. But really you’re only ramping back the vast social harm marginally at best. That’s the product. It is what it is.

there is definitely an analogy inasmuch as what you’re talking about here aren’t some glitches in the Facebook system. These aren’t some weird unintended consequences that can be ironed out of the product. It’s also in most cases not bad actors within Facebook. It’s what the product is. The product is getting attention and engagement against which advertising is sold

How good is the machine learning? Well, trial and error with between 3 and 4 billion humans makes you pretty damn good. That’s the product. It is inherently destructive, though of course the bad outcomes aren’t distributed evenly throughout the human population.

The business model is to refine this engagement engine, getting more attention and engagement and selling ads against the engagement. Facebook gets that revenue and the digital roadkill created by the product gets absorbed by the society at large

Facebook is like a spectacularly profitable nuclear energy company which is so profitable because it doesn’t build any of the big safety domes and dumps all the radioactive waste into the local river.

in the various articles describing internal conversations at Facebook, the shrewder executives and researchers seem to get this. For the company if not every individual they seem to be following the tobacco companies’ lead.

Ed. Note: TPM Reader AS wrote in to say I was conflating Facebook and Instagram and sometimes referring to one or the other in a confusing way. This is a fair

I spoke of them as the same intentionally. In part I’m talking about Facebook’s corporate ownership. Both sites are owned and run by the same parent corporation and as we saw during yesterday’s outage they are deeply hardwired into each other.

the main reason I spoke of them in one breath is that they are fundamentally the same. AS points out that the issues with Instagram are distinct because Facebook has a much older demographic and Facebook is a predominantly visual medium. (Indeed, that’s why Facebook corporate is under such pressure to use Instagram to drive teen and young adult engagement.) But they are fundamentally the same: AI and machine learning to drive engagement. Same same. Just different permutations of the same dynamic.

Commenting on one country does not prevent me from commenting on another; the two are not mutually exclusive.

Also, there’s the accusation of bias. When Shipman says that his reporting is wholly impartial because he only goes on information he gets from government sources and is not subject to any pressure from his editor to weight his copy, I understand that is how he works.

This false dichotomy between supposedly objective reporting and analysis is intellectually problematic at best: conflating analysis and bias is, in fact, dangerous – especially in times like these, where, to get anywhere near the truth, journalists in Britain have to hack their way through the thicket of lies and obfuscations emanating from the government itself.

by criticising the government as a correspondent for a public-service broadcaster (ARD in Germany), I had somehow failed to maintain the necessary “impartiality”.

Now, of course, this kind of approach is easier to apply in a podcast than in traditional media work, but what we can take from it is that when you are dealing with an intrinsically dishonest government, the mere reporting of facts is nowhere near adequate anymore. Most journalists have been trained to see themselves as coming from nowhere, but to cover a populist leader and system, they have to go a step further: positioning themselves clearly and critically outside of the system, and reflect on the methods of the populist rather than simply repeating his lines.

She showed that accounts of so-called “aces” — fighters said to have heroically held off much more powerful enemies with a single tank or plane — were based on propaganda.

In making these repairs, Coffman faced resistance from a group of editors who were mainly military buffs and wanted to write about battlefield valor without too much scrutiny. She, however, kept coming back to facts and sources — how do we know what we think we know? — and an insistence that Wikipedia not be swept up in mythology.

In a speech last year, Putin strolled through 1,000 years of battles and alliances to justify his claim of the “historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”

Just look at the rhetoric around Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin has described as a battle to “de-Nazify” the leadership of Ukraine.

Since the Russian invasion, the English Wikipedia articles about the historical figures and topics Putin invoked have been racking up pop-star numbers.

When it comes to allegations about Nazi collaboration by prominent Ukrainian nationalists like Bandera, Wikipedia has pulled no punches. Even as Putin has emphasized these Nazi ties as a reason for his invasion, Wikipedia has resisted attempts to water down this history.

When Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, was asked how Ukraine could be in need of de-Nazification if its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, is Jewish, Lavrov replied: “I could be wrong, but Hitler also had Jewish blood. [That Zelensky is Jewish] means absolutely nothing. Wise Jewish people say that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews.” It was an appalling answer that, according to the Israeli government, Putin apologized for.

In an unusual step, the English Wikipedia article brings up this particular falsehood to explicitly refute it.

The Wikipedia project comes with a stubborn confidence that facts can guide us through the darkness. In Wikipedia’s 20-year history, this belief has never been asked to do more.

the very existence of tweets about an event can make that event seem newsworthy—by virtue of having garnered tweets. This supposed newsworthiness can then result in literal news stories, written by journalists and based on inspiration or sourcing from tweets themselves, or it can entail the further spread of a tweet’s message by on-platform engagement, such as likes and quote tweets. Either way, the nature of Twitter is to assert the importance of tweets.

Tweets appear more meaningful when amplified, and when amplified they inspire more tweets in the same vein. A thing becomes “tweetworthy” when it spreads but then also justifies its value both on and beyond Twitter by virtue of having spread. This is the “famous for being famous” effect

This propensity is not unique to Twitter—all social media possesses it. But the frequency and quantity of posts on Twitter, along with their brevity, their focus on text, and their tendency to be vectors of news, official or not, make Twitter a particularly effective amplification house of mirrors

At least in theory. In practice, Twitter is more like an asylum, inmates screaming at everyone and no one in particular, histrionics displacing reason, posters posting at all costs because posting is all that is possible

Twitter shapes an epistemology for users under its thrall. What can be known, and how, becomes infected by what has, or can, be tweeted.

Producers of supposedly actual news see the world through tweet-colored glasses, by transforming tweets’ hypothetical status as news into published news—which produces more tweeting in turn.

For them, and others on this website, it has become an awful habit. Habits feel normal and even justified because they are familiar, not because they are righteous.

Twitter convinced us that it mattered, that it was the world’s news service, or a vector for hashtag activism, or a host for communities without voices, or a mouthpiece for the little gal or guy. It is those things, sometimes, for some of its users. But first, and mostly, it is a habit.

We never really tweeted to say something. We tweeted because Twitter offered a format for having something to say, over and over again. Just as the purpose of terrorism is terror, so the purpose of Twitter is tweeting.

The novel probes how nothing in life is fixed, including the legacies of the dead and the stories we tell about our pas

“The study of history shouldn’t be backward looking,” explains a historian in “Halcyon.” “To matter, it has to take us forward.”

Ackerman was in college on Sept. 11, 2001, but what he remembers more vividly is watching the premiere of the TV miniseries “Band of Brothers” the previous Sunday. “If you wanted to know the zeitgeist in the U.S. at the time, it was this very sentimental view of World War II,” he says. “There was this nostalgia for a time where we’re the good guys, they’re the bad guys, and we’re going to liberate oppressed people.”

Ackerman, who also covers wars and veteran affairs as a journalist, says that America’s backing of Ukraine is essential in the face of what he calls “an authoritarian axis rising up in the world, with China, Russia and Iran.” Were the country to offer similar help to Taiwan in the face of an invasion from China, he notes, having some air bases in nearby Afghanistan would help, but the U.S. gave those up in 2021.

With Islamic fundamentalists now in control of places where he lost friends, he says he is often asked if he regrets his service. “When you are a young man and your country goes to war, you’re presented with a choice: You either fight or you don’t,” he writes in his 2019 memoir “Places and Names.” “I don’t regret my choice, but maybe I regret being asked to choose.”

Serving in the military at a time when wars are no longer generation-defining events has proven alienating for Ackerman. “When you’ve got wars with an all-volunteer military funded through deficit spending, they can go on forever because there are no political costs

The catastrophic withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, which Ackerman covers in his recent memoir “The Fifth Act,” compounded this moral injury. “The fact that there has been so little government support for our Afghan allies has left it to vets to literally clean this up,” he says, noting that he still fields requests for help on WhatsApp. He adds that unless lawmakers act, the tens of thousands of Afghans currently living in the U.S. on humanitarian parole will be sent back to Taliban-held Afghanistan later this year: “It’s very painful to see how our allies are treated.”

Looking back on America’s misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, he notes that “the stories we tell about war are really important to the decisions we make around war. It’s one reason why storytelling fills me with a similar sense of purpose.”

“We don’t talk about the world and our place in it in a holistic way, or a strategic way,” Ackerman says. “We were telling a story about ending America’s longest war, when the one we should’ve been telling was about repositioning ourselves in a world that’s becoming much more dangerous,” he adds. “Our stories sometimes get us in trouble, and we’re still dealing with that trouble today.”

The same person who, on his own, wouldn’t ‘hurt a fly’ will not hesitate to set a government building on fire or rob a liquor store when part of an angry mass. The most mild-mannered of us can make the meanest comments as part of an online mob.

Once caught up in the maelstrom, it is extremely difficult to hold back: you see it as your duty to participate. Any act of lynching, ancient or modern, literal or on social media, displays this feature. ‘A murder shared with many others, which is not only safe and permitted, but indeed recommended, is irresistible to the great majority of men,’ writes Elias Canetti in Crowds and Power (1960).

The herd can also give its members a disproportionate sense of personal worth. No matter how empty or miserable their individual existence may otherwise be, belonging to a certain group makes them feel accepted and recognised – even respected. There is no hole in one’s personal life, no matter how big, that one’s intense devotion to one’s tribe cannot fill, no trauma that it does not seem to heal.

to a disoriented soul, they can offer a sense of fulfilment and recognition that neither family nor friends nor profession can supply. A crowd can be therapeutic in the same way in which a highly toxic substance can have curative powers.

Herding, then, engenders a paradoxical form of identity: you are somebody not despite the fact that you’ve melted into the crowd, but because of it

You will not be able to find yourself in the crowd, but that’s the least of your worries: you are now part of something that feels so much grander and nobler than your poor self

Your connection with the life of the herd not only fills an inner vacuum but adds a sense of purpose to your disoriented existence.

The primatologist Frans de Waal, who has studied the social and political behaviour of apes for decades, concludes in his book Mama’s Last Hug (2018) that primates are ‘made to be social’ – and ‘the same applies to us.’ Living in groups is ‘our main survival strategy’

we are all wired for herding. We herd all the time: when we make war as when we make peace, when we celebrate and when we mourn, we herd at work and on vacation. The herd is not out there somewhere, but we carry it within us. The herd is deeply seated in our mind.

As far as the practical conduct of our lives and our survival in the world are concerned, this is not a bad arrangement. Thanks to the herd in our minds, we find it easier to connect with others, to communicate and collaborate with them, and in general to live at ease with one another. Because of our herding behaviour, then, we stand a better chance to survive as members of a group than on our own

The trouble starts when we decide to use our mind against our biology. As when we employ our thinking not pragmatically, to make our existence in the world easier and more comfortable in some respect or another, but contemplatively, to see our situation in its naked condition, from the outside.

In such a situation, if we are to make any progress, we need to pull the herd out of our mind and set it firmly aside, exceedingly difficult as the task may be. This kind of radical thinking can be done only in the absence of the herd’s influence in its many forms: societal pressure, political partisanship, ideological bias, religious indoctrination, media-induced fads and fashions, intellectual mimetism, or any other -isms, for that matter.

a society’s established knowledge is the glue that keeps it together. Indeed, this unique concoction – a combination of pious lies and convenient half-truths, useful prejudices and self-flattering banalities – is what gives that society its specific cultural physiognomy and, ultimately, its sense of identity

By celebrating its established knowledge, that community celebrates itself. Which, for the sociologist Émile Durkheim, is the very definition of religion.

The word for ‘philosophy’ in Korean is 철학, pronounced ch’ŏrhak. It literally means the ‘study of wisdom’ or, perhaps better, ‘how to become wise’, which reflects its more dynamic and proactive implications

At night, in the darkness of the cave, he drank water from a perfectly useful ‘bowl’. But when he could see properly, he found that there was no ‘bowl’ at all, only a disgusting human skull.

Our lives and minds are affected by others (and their actions), as others (and their minds) are affected by our actions. This is particularly true in the Korean application of Confucian and Buddhist ideas.

Wŏnhyo understood that how we think about things shapes their very existence – and in turn our own existence, which is constructed according to our thoughts.

In the Korean tradition of philosophy, human beings are social beings, therefore knowing how to interact with others is an essential part of living a good life – indeed, living well with others is our real contribution to human life

he realised that there isn’t a difference between the ‘bowl’ and the skull: the only difference lies with us and our perceptions. We interpret our lives through a continual stream of thoughts, and so we become what we think, or rather how we think

As our daily lives are shaped by our thoughts, so our experience of this reality is good or bad – depending on our thoughts – which make things ‘appear’ good or bad because, in ‘reality’, things in and of themselves are devoid of their own independent nature

We can take from Wŏnhyo the idea that, if you change the patterns that have become engrained in how you think, you will begin to live differently. To do this, you need to change your mental habits, which is why meditation and mindful awareness can help. And this needs to be practised every day

Wŏnhyo’s most important work is titled Awaken your Mind and Practice (in Korean, Palsim suhaeng-jang). It is an explicit call to younger adherents to put Buddhist ideas into practice, and an indirect warning not to get lost in contemplation or in the study of text

While Wŏnhyo had emphasised the mind and the need to ‘practise’ Buddhism, a later Korean monk, Chinul (1158-1210), spearheaded Sŏn, the meditational tradition in Korea that espoused the idea of ‘sudden enlightenment’ that alerts the mind, accompanied by ‘gradual cultivation’

we still need to practise meditation, for if not we can easily fall into our old ways even if our minds have been awakened

his greatest contribution to Sŏn is Secrets on Cultivating the Mind (Susim kyŏl). This text outlines in detail his teachings on sudden awakening followed by the need for gradual cultivation

hinul’s approach recognises the mind as the ‘essence’ of one’s Buddha nature (contained in the mind, which is inherently good), while continual practice and cultivation aids in refining its ‘function’ – this is the origin of the ‘essence-function’ concept that has since become central to Korean philosophy.

These ideas also influenced the reformed view of Confucianism that became linked with the mind and other metaphysical ideas, finally becoming known as Neo-Confucianism.

During the Chosŏn dynasty (1392-1910), the longest lasting in East Asian history, Neo-Confucianism became integrated into society at all levels through rituals for marriage, funerals and ancestors

Neo-Confucianism recognises that we as individuals exist through plural relationships with responsibilities to others (as a child, brother/sister, lover, husband/wife, parent, teacher/student and so on), an idea nicely captured in 2000 by the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy when he described our ‘being’ as ‘singular plural’

Corrupt interpretations of Confucianism by heteronormative men have historically championed these ideas in terms of vertical relationships rather than as a reciprocal set of benevolent social interactions, meaning that women have suffered greatly as a result.

Setting aside these sexist and self-serving interpretations, Confucianism emphasises that society works as an interconnected set of complementary reciprocal relationships that should be beneficial to all parties within a social system

Confucian relationships have the potential to offer us an example of effective citizenship, similar to that outlined by Cicero, where the good of the republic or state is at the centre of being a good citizen

There is a general consensus in Korean philosophy that we have an innate sociability and therefore should have a sense of duty to each other and to practise virtue.

The main virtue of Confucianism is the idea of ‘humanity’, coming from the Chinese character 仁, often left untranslated and written as ren and pronounced in Korean as in.

It is a combination of the character for a human being and the number two. In other words, it signifies what (inter)connects two people, or rather how they should interact in a humane or benevolent manner to each other. This character therefore highlights the link between people while emphasising that the most basic thing that makes us ‘human’ is our interaction with others.

Neo-Confucianism adopted a turn towards a more mind-centred view in the writings of the Korean scholar Yi Hwang, known by his pen name T’oegye (1501-70), who appears on the 1,000-won note. He greatly influenced Neo-Confucianism in Japan through his formidable text, Ten Diagrams on Sage Learning (Sŏnghak sipto), composed in 1568, which was one of the most-reproduced texts of the entire Chosŏn dynasty and represents the synthesis of Neo-Confucian thought in Korea

with commentaries that elucidate the moral principles of Confucianism, related to the cardinal relationships and education. It also embodies T’oegye’s own development of moral psychology through his focus on the mind, and illuminates the importance of teaching and the practice of self-cultivation.

He writes that we ourselves can transform the unrestrained mind and its desires, and achieve sagehood, if we take the arduous, gradual path of self-cultivation centred on the mind.

Confucians had generally accepted the Mencian idea that human nature was embodied in the unaroused state of the mind, before it was shaped by its environment. The mind in its unaroused state was taken to be theoretically good. However, this inborn tendency for goodness is always in danger of being reduced to passivity, unless you cultivate yourself as a person of ‘humanity’ (in the Confucian sense mentioned above).

You should constantly try to activate your humanity to allow the unhampered operation of the original mind to manifest itself through socially responsible and moral character in action

Humanity is the realisation of what I describe as our ‘optimum level of perfection’ that exists in an inherent stage of potentiality due our innate good nature

This, in a sense, is like the Buddha nature of the Buddhists, which suggests we are already enlightened and just need to recover our innate mental state. Both philosophies are hopeful: humans are born good with the potential to correct their own flaws and failures

this could hardly contrast any more greatly with the Christian doctrine of original sin

The seventh diagram in T’oegye’s text is entitled ‘The Diagram of the Explanation of Humanity’ (Insŏl-to). Here he warns how one’s good inborn nature may become impaired, hampering the operation of the original mind and negatively impacting our character in action. Humanity embodies the gradual realisation of our optimum level of perfection that already exists in our mind but that depends on how we think about things and how we relate that to others in a social context

For T’oegye, the key to maintaining our capacity to remain level-headed, and to control our impulses and emotions, was kyŏng. This term is often translated as ‘seriousness’, occasionally ‘mindfulness’, and it identifies the serious need for constant effort to control one’s mind in order to go about one’s life in a healthy manner

For T’oegye, mindfulness is as serious as meditation is for the Buddhists. In fact, the Neo-Confucians had their own meditational practice of ‘quiet-sitting’ (chŏngjwa), which focused on recovering the calm and not agitated ‘original mind’, before putting our daily plans into action

These diagrams reinforce this need for a daily practice of Confucian mindfulness, because practice leads to the ‘good habit’ of creating (and maintaining) routines. There is no short-cut provided, no weekend intro to this practice: it is life-long, and that is what makes it transformative, leading us to become better versions of who were in the beginning. This is consolation of Korean philosophy.

Seeing the world as it is can steer us away from making unnecessary mistakes, while highlighting what is good and how to maintain that good while also reducing anxiety from an agitated mind and harmful desires. This is why Korean philosophy can provide us with consolation; it recognises the bad, but prioritises the good, providing several moral pathways that are referred to in the East Asian traditions (Confucianism, Buddhism and Daoism) as modes of ‘self-cultivation’

As social beings, we penetrate the consciousness of others, and so humans are linked externally through conduct but also internally through thought. Humanity is a unifying approach that holds the potential to solve human problems, internally and externally, as well as help people realise the perfection that is innately theirs

What happened in 2012, when the oldest Gen-Z babies were in their middle teens? That was the year Facebook acquired Instagram and young people flocked to the latter site. It was also “the beginning of the selfie era.”

Mr. Haidt’s research, confirmed by that of others, shows that depression rates started to rise “all of a sudden” around 2013, “especially for teen girls,” but “it’s only Gen Z, not the older generations.” If you’d stopped collecting data in 2011, he says, you’d see little change from previous years. “By 2015 it’s an epidemic.” (His data are available in an open-source document.)

Mr. Haidt imagines “literally launching our children into outer space” and letting their bodies grow there: “They would come out deformed and broken. Their limbs wouldn’t be right. You can’t physically grow up in outer space. Human bodies can’t do that.” Yet “we basically do that to them socially. We launched them into outer space around the year 2012,” he says, “and then we expect that they will grow up normally without having normal human experiences.”

He calls this phenomenon “compare and despair” and says: “It seems social because you’re communicating with people. But it’s performative. You don’t actually get social relationships. You get weak, fake social links.”

That meant the first social-media generation was one of “weakened kids” who “hadn’t practiced the skills of adulthood in a low-stakes environment” with other children. They were deprived of “the normal toughening, the normal strengthening, the normal anti-fragility.

Now, their childhood “is largely just through the phone. They no longer even hang out together.” Teenagers even drive less than earlier generations did.

Mr. Haidt especially worries about girls. By 2020 more than 25% of female teenagers had “a major depression.” The comparable number for boys was just under 9%.

The comparable numbers for millennials at the same age registered at half the Gen-Z rate: about 13% for girls and 5% for boys. “Kids are on their devices all the time,”

Most girls, by contrast, are drawn to “visual platforms,” Instagram and TikTok in particular. “Those are about display and performance. You post your perfect life, and then you flip through the photos of other girls who have a more perfect life, and you feel depressed.

Mr. Haidt says he has no antipathy toward the young, and he calls millennials “amazing.”

“Social media is incompatible with liberal democracy because it has moved conversation, and interaction, into the center of the Colosseum. We’re not there to talk to each other. We’re there to perform” before spectators who “want blood.”

To illustrate his point about Gen Z, Mr. Haidt challenges people to name young people today who are “really changing the world, who are doing big things that have an impact beyond their closed ecosystem.”

He can think of only two, neither of them American: Greta Thunberg, 19, the Swedish climate militant, and Malala Yousafzai, 25, the Pakistani advocate for female education

I’m predicting that they will be less effective, less impactful, than previous generations.” Why? “You should always keep your eye on whether people are in ‘discover mode’ or ‘defend mode.’ ” In the former mode, you seize opportunities to be creative. In the latter, “you’re not creative, you’re not future-thinking, you’re focused on threats in the present.”

University students who matriculated starting in 2014 or so have arrived on campus in defend mode: “Here they are in the safest, most welcoming, most inclusive, most antiracist places on the planet, but many of them were acting like they were entering some sort of dystopian, threatening, immoral world.”

56% of liberal women 18 to 29 responded affirmatively to the question: Has a doctor or other healthcare provider ever told you that you have a mental health condition? “Some of that,” Mr. Haidt says, “has to be just self-presentational,” meaning imagined.

This new ideology . . . valorizes victimhood. And if your sub-community motivates you to say you have an anxiety disorder, how is this going to affect you for the rest of your life?” He answers his own question: “You’re not going to take chances, you’re going to ask for accommodations, you’re going to play it safe, you’re not going to swing for the fences, you’re not going to start your own company.”

Whereas millennial women are doing well, “Gen-Z women, because they’re so anxious, are going to be less successful than Gen-Z men—and that’s saying a lot, because Gen-Z men are messed up, too.”

The problem, he says, is distinct to the U.S. and other English-speaking developed countries: “You don’t find it as much in Europe, and hardly at all in Asia.” Ideas that are “nurtured around American issues of race and gender spread instantly to the U.K. and Canada. But they don’t necessarily spread to France and Germany, China and Japan.”

something I hear from a lot of managers, that it’s very difficult to supervise their Gen-Z employees, that it’s very difficult to give them feedback.” That makes it hard for them to advance professionally by learning to do their jobs better.

“this could severely damage American capitalism.” When managers are “afraid to speak up honestly because they’ll be shamed on Twitter or Slack, then that organization becomes stupid.” Mr. Haidt says he’s “seen a lot of this, beginning in American universities in 2015. They all got stupid in the same way. They all implemented policies that backfire.”

Mr. Haidt, who describes himself as “a classical liberal like John Stuart Mill,” also laments the impact of social media on political discourse

Social media and selfies hit a generation that had led an overprotected childhood, in which the age at which children were allowed outside on their own by parents had risen from the norm of previous generations, 7 or 8, to between 10 and 12.

Is there a solution? “I’d raise the age of Internet adulthood to 16,” he says—“and enforce it.”

By contrast, “life went onto phone-based apps 10 years ago, and the protections we have for children are zero, absolutely zero.” The damage to Generation Z from social media “so vastly exceeds the damage from Covid that we’re going to have to act.”

Gen Z, he says, “is not in denial. They recognize that this app-based life is really bad for them.” He reports that they wish they had childhoods more like those of their parents, in which they could play outside and have adventur