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Hours after the attack, a post on the fringe online message board 4chan circulated claiming that the gunman was transgender.

where people falsely claimed that the shooting was a result of hormone therapy undertaken by the gunman.

“There is an overwhelming number of individuals who are posting images of this person, who was the shooter, and information about the nature of them being transgender,”

On Tuesday, a transgender artist said on Reddit that people online “just took my photos and used it to spread misinformation.”

False claims that the gunman was born outside the United States began to circulate within hours of the shooting. Spread largely on white nationalist Telegram channels and Gab accounts, the claims alleged that he was an undocumented immigrant in the United States, even after authorities including Roland Gutierrez, a Texas state senator, confirmed that the gunman was born in North Dakota.

“Did he cross the border illegally?” Code of Vets, a veterans organization, posted on Twitter. “Our nation has a serious national security crisis evolving.”

hugely successful media giants dominating the entertainment scene, growing fat and cocky, dismissive of upstart competitors, followed by a humbling slide toward marginalization, if not outright irrelevance.

First radio was so dominant that surely no one thought television could ever replace it. Then broadcast TV was such an enormous presence in American life, some network executives dismissed cable TV as destined to be small-timey forever.

A viewer could watch a whole series in a single day and never be bothered by somebody selling corn flakes.

There could be a number of reasons for the huge subscriber drop, but the biggest seems to be increased competition, with a slew of companies with great resources and deep libraries of content entering the streaming world in recent years, including Disney, Universal and Warner Bros. Discovery (the parent company of CNN).

Netflix, following in the footsteps of streaming competitors like Hulu and HBO Max, is reportedly exploring a new option for financial security. Or rather an old one, a really old one.

The one that brought all those people together in Manhattan for the upfronts: ad dollars.

This made the employee feel like remote work was just another set of disempowering rules.

Workers clearly felt empowered by having more control over their own work life. Companies must give people choices that match their unique work and life needs.

But they also made clear that willingness to stay with the current employer is also a matter of whether their direct managers can deliver on five other factors beyond the paycheck that keep people happy, productive and on the team.

For instance, workers who get unexpected spot bonuses sometimes feel that they don't know what to count on when calculating their future compensation; they'd rather have a predictable total package.

People thrive when their value is acknowledged by getting more responsibility, recognition and stature, such as a bigger title.

Jobs that convey a sense of purpose and meaning are more likely to exercise an emotional hold on people. Whether or not the company overall thinks it stands for social responsibility, people want to see that chance to make a difference in their immediate work experience.

Conventional wisdom holds that the best way to improve employment circumstances is to get an offer from a new company. That shouldn't have to be the case. Managers who want to retain people should act as if they are just now hiring them.

The best labor pool could be the one companies already have. They should treat their people as a precious resource and give them what they want from work. Rewarding them will reward the business.

“The $150 million penalty reflects the seriousness of the allegations against Twitter, and the substantial new compliance measures to be imposed as a result of today’s proposed settlement will help prevent further misleading tactics that threaten users’ privacy.” 

The settlement is the latest attempt by U.S. law enforcers to apply consumer protection law to alleged data privacy violations.

“Keeping data secure and respecting privacy is something we take extremely seriously, and we have cooperated with the FTC every step of the way,” he added.

One aspect of the future that demographics can’t help predict are technological innovations.

Predicting the future may be a fool’s errand. But using demographic data to assess the opportunities and challenges of the next two decades is something that business and political leaders don’t do enough. We’re all too swept up in the here and now, the next quarter and the next year.

The U.S. Energy Information Administration projects that the world will need about 28 percent more energy in 2040 than it did in 2015 based on the number of people in the country and consumption patterns; on our current trajectory, about 42 percent of electricity in the United States will come from renewable sources.

Technology has led us to expect that goods and services will be delivered at the push of a button, often within minutes.

Entrepreneurs, industry leaders and policymakers are already at work solving some of the problems that demographic data suggest are ahead of us, whether it’s figuring out how to incentivize farmers to sequester carbon, use insurance as a tool for reducing coal production, reinvent the motors that power heavy industry so they use less energy, or write laws that help govern code.

What about the metaverse? Or crypto technology? Or robots taking our jobs? Or A.I. taking over everything? Demographics can’t answer those questions. All of those things may happen, but life in 2041 may also look a lot like it does today — maybe with the exception of those flying cars.

Not only does this country have more guns than people, but over the last 30 years, Americans have grown less supportive of stricter gun laws. Astonishingly, in 1959, 60 percent of Americans favored a ban on handguns except those used by police officers and other authorized persons; today that figure is 19 percent.

Bearing in mind that the killers in Texas and Buffalo were both only 18, we could try to get through to the next generation.

Make guns less cool, less acceptable, less a part of the supposedly “American way of life.” Scare people. Gross them out. Even try humor.

Or it could go personal, using a testimonial from a child who lost his sister in a school shooting or a teenager whose friend committed suicide at 14 using a weapon kept in the house by his own parents.

Public education and creative P.S.A.s helped reduce teenage cigarette use significantly. While in the pocket of the tobacco industry, Hollywood played a key role in glamorizing smoking, but then later, after paid tobacco product placement was banned, clamped down on the appearance of smoking on film and TV. Those efforts are ongoing.

Sometimes, of course, a cigarette, like a gun, is key to a movie’s story line or characters

Through technology and schools, it could bring kids into creating and disseminating the message.

a reminder to stay informed and vigilant against groupthink.

A common refrain in battles about Covid-19 and vaccination, politics and conspiracy theories, parenting, drugs, food, stock trading and media, it signals not just a rejection of authority but often trust in another kind.

“Do your own research” is an idea central to Joe Rogan’s interview podcast, the most listened to program on Spotify, where external claims of expertise are synonymous with admissions of malice. In its current usage, DYOR is often an appeal to join in, rendered in the language of opting out.

“There’s this idea that the goal of science is consensus,” Professor Carrion said. “The model they brought to it was that we didn’t need consensus.” She noted that the women she surveyed often used singular rather than plural pronouns. “It was ‘she needs to do her own research,” Professor Carrion said, rather than we need to do ours. Unlike some critical health movements in the past, this was an individualist endeavor.

One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it.

In crypto, the uses of DYOR are various and contradictory, earnest and ironic sometimes within the same discussion. Breathless investment pitches for new coins are punctuated with “NFA/DYOR” (not financial advice), or admonitions not to invest more than you can afford to lose, which many people are obviously ignoring; stories about getting rich are prefaced with DYOR; requests for advice about which coins to hold are answered with DYOR. It is the siren song of crypto investing.

In that way — the momentum of a group — crypto investing isn’t altogether distinct from how people have invested in the stock market for decades. Though here it is tinged with a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak: We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool.

“Now it seems like DYOR can only do so much,” the user wrote. Eventually, the user said, you end up relying on “trust.”

Quantum teleportation — what he called “spooky action at a distance” — can transfer information between locations without actually moving the physical matter that holds it.

This technology could profoundly change the way data travels from place to place. It draws on more than a century of research involving quantum mechanics, a field of physics that governs the subatomic realm and behaves unlike anything we experience in our everyday lives. Quantum teleportation not only moves data between quantum computers, but it also does so in such a way that no one can intercept it.

These entangled systems could be electrons, particles of light or other objects. In the Netherlands, Dr. Hanson and his team used what is called a nitrogen vacancy center — a tiny empty space in a synthetic diamond in which electrons can be trapped.

Traditional computers perform calculations by processing “bits” of information, with each bit holding either a 1 or a 0. By harnessing the strange behavior of quantum mechanics, a quantum bit, or qubit, can store a combination of 1 and 0 — a little like how a spinning coin holds the tantalizing possibility that it will turn up either heads or tails when it finally falls flat on the table.

Researchers believe these devices could one day speed the creation of new medicines, power advances in artificial intelligence and summarily crack the encryption that protects computers vital to national security. Across the globe, governments, academic labs, start-ups and tech giants are spending billions of dollars exploring the technology.

Although it cannot move objects from place to place, it can move information by taking advantage of a quantum property called “entanglement”: A change in the state of one quantum system instantaneously affects the state of another, distant one.

“It does not work that way today. Google knows what you are running on its servers.”

The information also cannot be intercepted. A future quantum internet, powered by quantum teleportation, could provide a new kind of encryption that is theoretically unbreakable.

Adobe ADBE 7.19%increase; green up pointing triangle, maker of the Photoshop, released a new tool in Firefly, its generative-AI image suite, that lets you change and add in parts of a photo with AI imagery. Earlier this month, Google showed off a new Magic Editor, initially for Pixel phones, that allows you to easily manipulate a scene. And people are all over TikTok posting the results of AI headshot services like Try It On.

After testing a mix of AI editing and generating tools, I just have one question for all of you armchair philosophers: What even is a photo anymore?

I have always wondered what I’d look like as a naval officer. Now I don’t have to. I snapped a selfie and uploaded it to Adobe Firefly’s generative-fill tool. One click of the Background button and my cluttered office was wiped out. I typed “American flag” and in it went. Then I selected the Add tool, erased my torso and typed in “naval uniform.” Boom! Adobe even found me worthy of numerous awards and decorations.

Astronaut, fighter pilot, pediatrician. I turned myself into all of them in under a minute each. The AI-generated images did have noticeable issues: The uniforms were strange and had odd lettering, the stethoscope seemed to be cut in half and the backgrounds were warped and blurry. Yet the final images are fun, and the quality will only get better. 

In FaceApp, for iOS and Android, I was able to change my frown to a smile—with the right amount of teeth! I was also able to add glasses and change my hair color. Some said it looked completely real, others who know me well figured something was up. “Your teeth look too perfect.”

The real reality-bending happens in Midjourney, which can turn text prompts into hyper-realistic images and blend existing images in new ways. The image quality of generated images exceeds OpenAI’s Dall-E and Adobe’s Firefly.

it’s more complicated to use, since it runs through the chat app Discord. Sign up for service, access the Midjourney bot through your Discord account (via web or app), then start typing in prompts. My video producer Kenny Wassus started working with a more advanced Midjourney plugin called Insight Face Swap-Bot, which allows you to sub in a face to a scene you’ve already made. He’s become a master—making me a Game of Thrones warrior and a Star Wars rebel, among other things.

We’re headed for a time when we won’t be able to tell how manipulated a photo is, what parts are real or fake.

when influential messages are conveyed through images—be they news or misinformation—people have reason to know a photo’s origin and what’s been done to it.

Firefly adds a “content credential,” digital information baked into the file, that says the image was manipulated with AI. Adobe is pushing to get news, tech and social-media platforms to use this open-source standard so we can all understand where the images we see came from.

So, yeah, our ability to spot true photos might depend on the cooperation of the entire internet. And by “true photo,” I mean one that captures a real moment—where you’re wearing your own boring clothes and your hair is just so-so, but you have the exact right number of teeth in your head.

“I have long been interested in classifications of people, in how they affect the people classified, and how the effects on the people in turn change the classifications,” he wrote in “Making Up People

His work in the philosophy of science was groundbreaking: He departed from the preoccupation with questions that had long concerned philosophers. Arguing that science was just as much about intervention as it was about representation, be helped bring experimentation to center stage.

Regarding one such question — whether unseen phenomena like quarks and electrons were real or merely the theoretical constructs of physicists — he argued for reality in the case of phenomena that figured in experiments, citing as an example an experiment at Stanford that involved spraying electrons and positrons into a ball of niobium to detect electric charges. “So far as I am concerned,” he wrote, “if you can spray them, they’re real.”

His book “The Emergence of Probability” (1975), which is said to have inspired hundreds of books by other scholars, examined how concepts of statistical probability have evolved over time, shaping the way we understand not just arcane fields like quantum physics but also everyday life.

“I was trying to understand what happened a few hundred years ago that made it possible for our world to be dominated by probabilities,” he said in a 2012 interview with the journal Public Culture. “We now live in a universe of chance, and everything we do — health, sports, sex, molecules, the climate — takes place within a discourse of probabilities.”

Whatever the subject, whatever the audience, one idea that pervades all his work is that “science is a human enterprise,” Ragnar Fjelland and Roger Strand of the University of Bergen in Norway wrote when Professor Hacking won the Holberg Prize. “It is always created in a historical situation, and to understand why present science is as it is, it is not sufficient to know that it is ‘true,’ or confirmed. We have to know the historical context of its emergence.”

Hacking often argued that as the human sciences have evolved, they have created categories of people, and that people have subsequently defined themselves as falling into those categories. Thus does human reality become socially constructed.

In 2000, he became the first Anglophone to win a permanent position at the Collège de France, where he held the chair in the philosophy and history of scientific concepts until he retired in 2006.

“I call this the ‘looping effect,’” he added. “Sometimes, our sciences create kinds of people that in a certain sense did not exist before.”

In “Why Race Still Matters,” a 2005 article in the journal Daedalus, he explored how anthropologists developed racial categories by extrapolating from superficial physical characteristics, with lasting effects — including racial oppression. “Classification and judgment are seldom separable,” he wrote. “Racial classification is evaluation.”

Similarly, he once wrote, in the field of mental health the word “normal” “uses a power as old as Aristotle to bridge the fact/value distinction, whispering in your ear that what is normal is also right.”

In his influential writings about autism, Professor Hacking charted the evolution of the diagnosis and its profound effects on those diagnosed, which in turn broadened the definition to include a greater number of people.

Encouraging children with autism to think of themselves that way “can separate the child from ‘normalcy’ in a way that is not appropriate,” he told Public Culture. “By all means encourage the oddities. By no means criticize the oddities.”

His emphasis on historical context also illuminated what he called transient mental illnesses, which appear to be so confined 0cto their time 0c 0cthat they can vanish when times change.

“hysterical fugue” was a short-lived epidemic of compulsive wandering that emerged in Europe in the 1880s, largely among middle-class men who had become transfixed by stories of exotic locales and the lure of trave

His intellectual tendencies were unmistakable from an early age. “When he was 3 or 4 years old, he would sit and read the dictionary,” Jane Hacking said. “His parents were completely baffled.”

He wondered aloud, the interviewer noted, if the whole universe was governed by nonlocality — if “everything in the universe is aware of everything else.”“That’s what you should be writing about,” he said. “Not me. I’m a dilettante. My governing word is ‘curiosity.’”

Guillaume Lancereau, Max Weber fellow at the European University Institute in Florence, was part of a group of historians who published the book Puy du Faux (Puy of Fakes), analysing the park’s take on history. They viewed the park as having a Catholic slant, questionable depictions of nobility and a presentation of rural peasants as unchanged through the ages.

Lancereau did not question the park’s entertainment value. But he said: “Professional historians have repeatedly criticised the park for taking liberties with historical events and characters and, more importantly, for distorting the past to serve a nationalistic, religious and conservative political agenda. This raises important questions about the contemporary entanglement between entertainment, collective memory and politically oriented historical production …

“At a time when increasing numbers of undergraduates are acquiring their historical knowledge from popular culture and historical reenactments, the Puy du Fou’s considerable expansion calls for further investigation of a phenomenon that appears to be influencing the making of historical memory in contemporary Europe.”

Outside the park’s musketeers show, André, 76, had driven 650km (400 miles) from Burgundy with his wife and grandson. “We came because we’re interested in history,” he said. “The shows are technically brilliant and really make you think. You can tell it’s a bit on the right – the focus on war, warriors and anti-revolution – but I don’t think that matters.”

Jeffrey A. Hall, a communication professor at the University of Kansas who studies technology and relationships, calls this the “twilight of the social-media era,” in which “the distance between using it for talking to your friends and what we have now” is bigger than it’s ever been. He believes that although those sites aren’t fostering real connection—advice, inside jokes, updates, memes—nearly as much anymore, people might be reclaiming it with group chats.

To borrow from Dungeons & Dragons, the Age of the Group Chat seemed like it would be Chaotic Good—but it’s verging on Chaotic Evil.

group chats can create a “waterfall type of effect,” where messages keep flooding in and adding up. Eventually, you’re underwater

without a standard etiquette, people have very different ideas about what degree of responsiveness is required—which can cause real tension.

The AI boosters emphasized the incredible potential of their innovation, and Netanyahu raised practical objections to their enthusiasm. They cited futurists such as Ray Kurzweil to paint a bright picture of a post-AI world; Netanyahu cited the Bible and the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides to caution against upending human institutions and subordinating our existence to machines.

Musk matter-of-factly explained that the “very positive scenario of AI” is “actually in a lot of ways a description of heaven,” where “you can have whatever you want, you don’t need to work, you have no obligations, any illness you have can be cured,” and death is “a choice.” Netanyahu incredulously retorted, “You want this world?”

By the time the panel began to wind down, the Israeli leader had seemingly made up his mind. “This is like having nuclear technology in the Stone Age,” he said. “The pace of development [is] outpacing what solutions we need to put in place to maximize the benefits and limit the risks.”

“You have these trillion-dollar [AI] companies that are produced overnight, and they concentrate enormous wealth and power with a smaller and smaller number of people,” the Israeli leader said, noting that even a free-market evangelist like himself was unsettled by such monopolization. “That will create a bigger and bigger distance between the haves and the have-nots, and that’s another thing that causes tremendous instability in our world. And I don’t know if you have an idea of how you overcome that?”

This was less because he is a prophet and more because he is a pessimist. When it comes to grandiose predictions about a better tomorrow—whether through peace with the Palestinians, a nuclear deal with Iran, or the advent of artificial intelligence—Netanyahu always bets against. Informed by a dark reading of Jewish history, he is a cynic about human nature and a skeptic of human progress.

fter all, no matter how far civilization has advanced, it has always found ways to persecute the powerless, most notably, in his mind, the Jews. For Netanyahu, the arc of history is long, and it bends toward whoever is bending it.

This is why the Israeli leader puts little stock in utopian promises, whether they are made by progressive internationalists or Silicon Valley futurists, and places his trust in hard power instead

“The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.”

To his many critics, myself included, Netanyahu’s refusal to envision a different future makes him a “creature of the bunker,” perpetually governed by fear. Although his pessimism may sometimes be vindicated, it also holds his country hostag

In other words, the same cynicism that drives Netanyahu’s reactionary politics is the thing that makes him an astute interrogator of AI and its promoters. Just as he doesn’t trust others not to use their power to endanger Jews, he doesn’t trust AI companies or AI itself to police its rapidly growing capabilities.

I believe “Twitter poisoning” is a real thing. It is a side effect that appears when people are acting under an algorithmic system that is designed to engage them to the max. It’s a symptom of being part of a behavior-modification scheme.

The same could be said about any number of other figures, including on the left. Examples are found in the excesses of cancel culture and joyless orthodoxies in fandom, in vain attention competitions and senseless online bullying.

The human brain did not evolve to handle modern chemicals or modern media technology and is vulnerable to addiction. That is true for me and for us all.

Behavioral changes occur as a side effect of something called operant conditioning, which is the underlying mechanism of social media addiction. This is the core mechanism analogous to the role alcohol plays in alcoholism.

In the case of digital platforms, the purpose is usually “engagement,” a concept that is hard to distinguish from addiction. People receive little positive and negative jolts of social feedback — getting followed or liked, or being ignored or even humiliated.

Before social media, that kind of tight feedback loop had rarely been present in human communications outside of laboratories or marriages. (This is part of why marriage can be hard, I suspect.)  

was around when Google and other companies that operate on the personalized advertising model were created, and I can say that at least in the early days, operant conditioning was not part of the plan.

What happened was that the algorithms that optimized the individualized advertising model found their way into it automatically, unintentionally rediscovering methods that had been tested on dogs and pigeons.

There is a childish insecurity, where before there was pride. Instead of being above it all, like traditional strongmen throughout history, the modern social media-poisoned alpha male whines and frets.

What do I think are the symptoms of Twitter poisoning?

o be clear, whiners are much better than Stalins. And yet there have been plenty of more mature and gracious leaders who are better than either

When we were children, we all had to negotiate our way through the jungle of human power relationships at the playground

When we feel those old humiliations, anxieties and sadisms again as adults — over and over, because the algorithm has settled on that pattern as a powerful way to engage us — habit formation restimulates old patterns that had been dormant. We become children again, not in a positive, imaginative sense, but in a pathetic way.

Twitter poisoning makes sufferers feel more oppressed than is reasonable in response to reasonable rules. The scope of fun is constricted to transgressions.

Unfortunately, scale changes everything. Taunts become dangerous hate when amplified. A Twitter-poisoned soul will often complain of a loss of fun when someone succeeds at moderating the spew of hate.

the afflicted lose all sense of proportion about their own powers. They can come to believe they have almost supernatural abilities

The degree of narcissism becomes almost absolute. Everything is about what someone else thinks of you.

These observations should inform our concerns about TikTok. The most devastating way China might use TikTok is not to misdirect our elections or to prefer pro-China posts, but to generally ramp up social media disease, so as to make Americans more divided, less able to talk to one another and less able to put up a coordinated, unified front.

uide society. Whether that idea appeals or not, when technology degrades the minds of those same engineers, then the result can only be dysfunction.

Jaron Lanier is a computer scientist who pioneered research in virtual reality and whose books include “Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now.” He is Microsoft’s “prime unifying scientist” but does not speak for the company.

Beitman defines a coincidence as “two events coming together with apparently no causal explanation.” They can be life-changing, like his experience with his father, or comforting, such as when a loved one’s favorite song comes on the radio just when you are missing them most.

Although Beitman has long been fascinated by coincidences, it wasn’t until the end of his academic career that he was able to study them in earnest. (Before then, his research primarily focused on the relationship between chest pain and panic disorder.)

He started by developing the Weird Coincidence Survey in 2006 to assess what types of coincidences are most commonly observed, what personality types are most correlated with noticing them and how most people explain them. About 3,000 people have completed the survey so far.

he has drawn a few conclusions. The most commonly reported coincidences are associated withmass media: A person thinks of an idea and then hears or sees it on TV, the radio or the internet. Thinking of someone and then having that person call unexpectedly is next on the list, followed by being in the right place at the right time to advance one’s work, career or education.

People who describe themselves as spiritual or religious report noticing more meaningful coincidences than those who do not, and people are more likely to experience coincidences when they are in a heightened emotional state — perhaps under stress or grieving.

The most popular explanation among survey respondents for mysterious coincidences: God or fate. The second explanation: randomness. The third is that our minds are connected to one another. The fourth is that our minds are connected to the environment.

“Some say God, some say universe, some say random and I say ‘Yes,’ ” he said. “People want things to be black and white, yes or no, but I say there is mystery.”

He’s particularly interested in what he’s dubbed “simulpathity”: feeling a loved one’s pain at a distance, as he believes he did with his father. Science can’t currently explain how it might occur, but in his books he offers some nontraditional ideas, such as the existence of “the psychosphere,” a kind of mental atmosphere through which information and energy can travel between two people who are emotionally close though physically distant.

In his new book published in September, “Meaningful Coincidences: How and Why Synchronicity and Serendipity Happen,” he shares the story of a young man who intended to end his life by the shore of an isolated lake. While he sat crying in his car, another car pulled up and his brother got out. When the young man asked for an explanation, the brother said he didn’t know why he got in the car, where he was going, or what he would do when he got there. He just knew he needed to get in the car and drive.

David Hand, a British statistician and author of the 2014 book “The Improbability Principle: Why Coincidences, Miracles, and Rare Events Happen Every Day,” sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from Beitman. He says most coincidences are fairly easy to explain, and he specializes in demystifying even the strangest ones.

“When you look closely at a coincidence, you can often discover the chance of it happening is not as small as you think,” he said. “It’s perhaps not a 1-in-a-billion chance, but in fact a 1-in-a-hundred chance, and yeah, you would expect that would happen quite often.”

the law of truly large numbers. “You take something that has a very small chance of happening and you give it lots and lots and lots of opportunities to happen,” he said. “Then the overall probability becomes big.”

But just because Hand has a mathematical perspective doesn’t mean he finds coincidences boring. “It’s like looking at a rainbow,” he said. “Just because I understand the physics behind it doesn’t make it any the less wonderful.

Paying attention to coincidences, Osman and Johansen say, is an essential part of how humans make sense of the world. We rely constantly on our understanding of cause and effect to survive.

“Coincidences are often associated with something mystical or supernatural, but if you look under the hood, noticing coincidences is what humans do all the time,”

Zeltzer has spent 50 years studying the writings of Carl Jung, the 20th century Swiss psychologist who introduced the modern Western world to the idea of synchronicity. Jung defined synchronicity as “the coincidence in time of two or more causally unrelated events which have the same meaning.”

One of Jung’s most iconic synchronistic stories concerned a patient who he felt had become so stuck in her rationality that it interfered with her ability to understand her psychology and emotional life.

One day, the patient was recounting a dream in which she’d received a golden scarab. Just then, Jung heard a gentle tapping at the window. He opened the window and a scarab-like beetle flew into the room. Jung plucked the insect out of the air and presented it to his patient. “Here is your scarab,” he said.The experience proved therapeutic because it demonstrated to Jung’s patient that the world is not always rational, leading her to break her own identification with rationality and thus become more open to her emotional life, Zeltzer explained

Like Jung, Zeltzer believes meaningful coincidences can encourage people to acknowledge the irrational and mysterious. “We have a fantasy that there is always an answer, and that we should know everything,”

Honestly, I’m not sure what to believe, but I’m not sure it matters. Like Beitman, my attitude is “Yes.”

The political and methodological stresses within the historical profession are intensified by economic troubles. For a long time, but especially since the economic crisis of 2008, university students have turned away from the humanities, preferring to major in fields that seem to offer more certain and lucrative employment. Consequently, academic jobs in the humanities and especially in history have become radically more precarious for younger faculty—even as universities have sought to meet diversity goals in their next-generation hiring by expanding offerings in history-adjacent specialties, such as gender and ethnic studies.

The result has produced a generational divide. Younger scholars feel oppressed and exploited by universities pressing them to do more labor for worse pay with less security than their elders; older scholars feel that overeager juniors are poised to pounce on the least infraction as an occasion to end an elder’s career and seize a job opening for themselves. Add racial difference as an accelerant, and what was intended as an interesting methodological discussion in a faculty newsletter can explode into a national culture war.

One of the greatest American Africanists was the late Philip Curtin. He wrote one of the first attempts to tally the exact number of persons trafficked by the transatlantic slave trade. Upon publication in 1972, his book was acclaimed as a truly pioneering work of history. By 1995, however, he was moved to protest against trends in the discipline at that time in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education:I am troubled by increasing evidence of the use of racial criteria in filling faculty posts in the field of African history … This form of intellectual apartheid has been around for several decades, but it appears to have become much more serious in the past few years, to the extent that white scholars trained in African history now have a hard time finding jobs.

Much of academia is governed these days by a joke from the Soviet Union: “If you think it, don’t speak it. If you speak it, don’t write it. If you write it, don’t sign it. But if you do think it, speak it, write it, and sign it—don’t be surprised.”

Yet this silence has consequences, too. One of the most unsettling is the displacement of history by mythmaking

mythmaking is spreading from “just the movies” to more formal and institutional forms of public memory. If old heroes “must fall,” their disappearance opens voids for new heroes to be inserted in their place—and that insertion sometimes requires that new history be fabricated altogether, the “bad history” that Sweet tried to warn against.

If it is not the job of the president of the American Historical Association to confront those questions, then whose is it?

Sweet used a play on words—“Is History History?”—for the title of his complacency-shaking essay. But he was asking not whether history is finished, done with, but Is history still history? Is it continuing to do what history is supposed to do? Or is it being annexed for other purposes, ideological rather than historical ones?

Advocates of studying the more distant past to disturb and challenge our ideas about the present may accuse their academic rivals of “presentism.”

In real life, of course, almost everybody who cares about history believes in a little of each option. But how much of each? What’s the right balance? That’s the kind of thing that historians do argue about, and in the arguing, they have developed some dismissive labels for one another

Those who look to the more recent past to guide the future may accuse the other camp of “antiquarianism.”

The accusation of presentism hurts because it implies that the historian is sacrificing scholarly objectivity for ideological or political purposes. The accusation of antiquarianism stings because it implies that the historian is burrowing into the dust for no useful purpose at all.

In his mind, he was merely reopening one of the most familiar debates in professional history: the debate over why? What is the value of studying the past? To reduce the many available answers to a stark choice: Should we study the more distant past to explore its strangeness—and thereby jolt ourselves out of easy assumptions that the world we know is the only possible one?

Or should we study the more recent past to understand how our world came into being—and thereby learn some lessons for shaping the future?

The August edition of the association’s monthly magazine featured, as usual, a short essay by the association’s president, James H. Sweet, a professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Within hours of its publication, an outrage volcano erupted on social media. A professor at Cornell vented about the author’s “white gaze.”

Another way to put this is that critics are looking for something “interesting”; audiences are merely looking to be “entertained.”

The best thing it could do for society would be to implode.

Twitter hooks people in much the same way slot machines do, with what experts call an “intermittent reinforcement schedule.” Most of the time, it’s repetitive and uninteresting, but occasionally, at random intervals, some compelling nugget will appear. Unpredictable rewards, as the behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner found with his research on rats and pigeons, are particularly good at generating compulsive behavior.

“I don’t know that Twitter engineers ever sat around and said, ‘We are creating a Skinner box,’” said Natasha Dow Schüll, a cultural anthropologist at New York University and author of a book about gambling machine design. But that, she said, is essentially what they’ve built. It’s one reason people who should know better regularly self-destruct on the site — they can’t stay away.

Twitter is not, obviously, the only social media platform with addictive qualities. But with its constant promise of breaking news, it feeds the hunger of people who work in journalism and politics, giving it a disproportionate, and largely negative, impact on those fields, and hence on our national life.

Twitter is much better at stoking tribalism than promoting progress.

According to a 2021 study, content expressing “out-group animosity” — negative feelings toward disfavored groups — is a major driver of social-media engagement

That builds on earlier research showing that on Twitter, false information, especially about politics, spreads “significantly farther, faster, deeper and more broadly than the truth.”

The company’s internal research has shown that Twitter’s algorithm amplifies right-wing accounts and news sources over left-wing ones.

This dynamic will probably intensify quite a bit if Musk takes over. Musk has said that Twitter has “a strong left bias,” and that he wants to undo permanent bans, except for spam accounts and those that explicitly call for violence. That suggests figures like Alex Jones, Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene will be welcomed back.

But as one of the people who texted Musk pointed out, returning banned right-wingers to Twitter will be a “delicate game.” After all, the reason Twitter introduced stricter moderation in the first place was that its toxicity was bad for business

For A-list entertainers, The Washington Post reports, Twitter “is viewed as a high-risk, low-reward platform.” Plenty of non-celebrities feel the same way; I can’t count the number of interesting people who were once active on the site but aren’t anymore.

An influx of Trumpists is not going to improve the vibe. Twitter can’t be saved. Maybe, if we’re lucky, it can be destroyed.

In 1972, using duct tape and spare parts in the basement on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, Dr. Clauser and a graduate student, Stuart Freedman, who died in 2012, endeavored to perform Bell’s experiment to measure quantum entanglement. In a series of experiments, he fired thousands of light particles, or photons, in opposite directions to measure a property known as polarization, which could have only two values — up or down. The result for each detector was always a series of seemingly random ups and downs. But when the two detectors’ results were compared, the ups and downs matched in ways that neither “classical physics” nor Einstein’s laws could explain. Something weird was afoot in the universe. Entanglement seemed to be real.

in 2002, Dr. Clauser admitted that he himself had expected quantum mechanics to be wrong and Einstein to be right. “Obviously, we got the ‘wrong’ result. I had no choice but to report what we saw, you know, ‘Here’s the result.’ But it contradicts what I believed in my gut has to be true.” He added, “I hoped we would overthrow quantum mechanics. Everyone else thought, ‘John, you’re totally nuts.’”

the correlations only showed up after the measurements of the individual particles, when the physicists compared their results after the fact. Entanglement seemed real, but it could not be used to communicate information faster than the speed of light.

In 1982, Dr. Aspect and his team at the University of Paris tried to outfox Dr. Clauser’s loophole by switching the direction along which the photons’ polarizations were measured every 10 nanoseconds, while the photons were already in the air and too fast for them to communicate with each other. He too, was expecting Einstein to be right.

Quantum predictions held true, but there were still more possible loopholes in the Bell experiment that Dr. Clauser had identified

For example, the polarization directions in Dr. Aspect’s experiment had been changed in a regular and thus theoretically predictable fashion that could be sensed by the photons or detectors.

Anton Zeilinger

added even more randomness to the Bell experiment, using random number generators to change the direction of the polarization measurements while the entangled particles were in flight.

Once again, quantum mechanics beat Einstein by an overwhelming margin, closing the “locality” loophole.

as scientists have done more experiments with entangled particles, entanglement is accepted as one of main features of quantum mechanics and is being put to work in cryptology, quantum computing and an upcoming “quantum internet

One of its first successes in cryptology is messages sent using entangled pairs, which can send cryptographic keys in a secure manner — any eavesdropping will destroy the entanglement, alerting the receiver that something is wrong.

, with quantum mechanics, just because we can use it, doesn’t mean our ape brains understand it. The pioneering quantum physicist Niels Bohr once said that anyone who didn’t think quantum mechanics was outrageous hadn’t understood what was being said.

In his interview with A.I.P., Dr. Clauser said, “I confess even to this day that I still don’t understand quantum mechanics, and I’m not even sure I really know how to use it all that well. And a lot of this has to do with the fact that I still don’t understand it.”