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There was nothing to do besides read, write, reflect on God and drink. It was a circumstance favorable to writing fiction. But it was also conducive to depravity, the old Calvinist definition thereof: a warping of the spirit.

When I socialized, it was often with poets, who confirmed by their very existence that I had landed in a better, vanished time. Even their physical ailments were of the 19th century. One day, in the depths of winter, I came upon one of them picking his way across the snow and ice on crutches, pausing to drag on his cigarette.

The disaster unfolded slowly. The professors and students were diplomatic, but a pall of boredom fell over the seminar table when my work was under discussion. I could see everyone struggling to care. And then, trying feverishly to write something that would engage people, I got worse. First my writing became overthought, and then it went rank with the odor of desperation. It got to the point that every chapter, short story, every essay was trash.

It took me a long time to realize that the utter domination of my consciousness by the desire to write well was itself the problem.

When good writing was my only goal, I made the quality of my work the measure of my worth. For this reason, I wasn’t able to read my own writing well. I couldn’t tell whether something I had just written was good or bad, because I needed it to be good in order to feel sane.

I purged myself of monomania — slowly, and somewhat unwittingly. I fell in love, an overpowering diversion, and began to spend more time at my girlfriend’s place, where she had Wi-Fi, a flat-screen TV and a DVD player.

One morning, after I diversified my mania, my writing no longer stank of decay.

I’m glad I went to 19th-century Russia. But I wish I had been more careful, more humble, and kept one foot in modernity. The thing about 19th-century Russia is that if you race in, heedless of all but conquest and glory, you get stuck.

This does not mean they will succeed in fixing every problem their tech creates — and in some cases their fixes may well raise other problems, like questions about their power over freedom of expression. But at least they can try to address the wide variety of externalities posed by tech, which may have been impossible for an internet more fragmented by smaller firms.

Rob Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a think tank, and co-author of “Big Is Beautiful,” a coming book that extols the social and economic virtues of big companies.

“As long as their innovation rents are recycled into research and development that leads to new products, then what’s to complain about?”

At the same time, they are all locked in intense battles for new markets and technologies. And not only do they keep creating new tech, but they are coming at it in diverse ways — with different business models, different philosophies and different sets of ethics.

it was perhaps inevitable that we would see the rise of a handful of large companies take control of much of the modern tech business.

But it wasn’t inevitable that these companies would be based in and controlled from the United States. And it’s not obvious that will remain the case — the top tech companies of tomorrow might easily be Chinese, or Indian or Russian or European. But for now, that means we are dealing with companies that feel constrained by American laws and values.

Streaming social media have an immediacy that is very different from, say, a conversation over lunch recounting the events of the previous weekend. When you see that your friends are sharing a bottle of wine without you — and at that very moment — “you can imagine how things could be different,” Professor Ariely said. It’s like a near miss in real life. “When would you be more upset?” he asked. “After missing your flight by two minutes or two hours?

“Social software is both the creator and the cure of FOMO,”

feedback, Mr. Systrom said, can be slightly addictive. People using Instagram “are rewarded when someone likes it and you keep coming back,”

“We aren’t used to seeing the world as it happens,” he said. “We as humans can only process so much data.”

as technology becomes ever more pervasive, our relationship to it becomes more intimate, granting it the power to influence decisions, moods and emotions.

Not surprisingly, the perception of financial security is a big deal for online Juliets. In one study, Ariely and his colleagues calculated that a man who's 5'9" must outearn a 5'10" suitor by at least $35,000 a year just to be seen as equally attractive.

The economics community just hasn't spent much time over the past couple of decades focusing on the effect that machine intelligence is likely to have on the labor marke

The Digital Revolution is different because computers can perform cognitive tasks too, and that means machines will eventually be able to run themselves. When that happens, they won't just put individuals out of work temporarily. Entire classes of workers will be out of work permanently. In other words, the Luddites weren't wrong. They were just 200 years too early

Slowly but steadily, labor's share of total national income has gone down, while the share going to capital owners has gone up. The most obvious effect of this is the skyrocketing wealth of the top 1 percent, due mostly to huge increases in capital gains and investment income.

Robotic pets are growing so popular that Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor who studies the way we interact with technology, is uneasy about it: "The idea of some kind of artificial companionship," she says, "is already becoming the new normal."

robots will take over more and more jobs. And guess who will own all these robots? People with money, of course. As this happens, capital will become ever more powerful and labor will become ever more worthless. Those without money—most of us—will live on whatever crumbs the owners of capital allow us.

Economist Paul Krugman recently remarked that our long-standing belief in skills and education as the keys to financial success may well be outdated. In a blog post titled "Rise of the Robots," he reviewed some recent economic data and predicted that we're entering an era where the prime cause of income inequality will be something else entirely: capital vs. labor.

while it's easy to believe that some jobs can never be done by machines—do the elderly really want to be tended by robots?—that may not be true.

In the economics literature, the increase in the share of income going to capital owners is known as capital-biased technological change

The question we want to answer is simple: If CBTC is already happening—not a lot, but just a little bit—what trends would we expect to see? What are the signs of a computer-driven economy?

if automation were displacing labor, we'd expect to see a steady decline in the share of the population that's employed.

Second, we'd expect to see fewer job openings than in the past.

Third, as more people compete for fewer jobs, we'd expect to see middle-class incomes flatten in a race to the bottom.

Fourth, with consumption stagnant, we'd expect to see corporations stockpile more cash and, fearing weaker sales, invest less in new products and new factories

Fifth, as a result of all this, we'd expect to see labor's share of national income decline and capital's share rise.

We're already seeing them, and not just because of the crash of 2008. They started showing up in the statistics more than a decade ago. For a while, though, they were masked by the dot-com and housing bubbles, so when the financial crisis hit, years' worth of decline was compressed into 24 months. The trend lines dropped off the cliff.

The modern economy is complex, and most of these trends have multiple causes.

in another sense, we should be very alarmed. It's one thing to suggest that robots are going to cause mass unemployment starting in 2030 or so. We'd have some time to come to grips with that. But the evidence suggests that—slowly, haltingly—it's happening already, and we're simply not prepared for it.

the first jobs to go will be middle-skill jobs. Despite impressive advances, robots still don't have the dexterity to perform many common kinds of manual labor that are simple for humans—digging ditches, changing bedpans. Nor are they any good at jobs that require a lot of cognitive skill—teaching classes, writing magazine articles

in the middle you have jobs that are both fairly routine and require no manual dexterity. So that may be where the hollowing out starts: with desk jobs in places like accounting or customer support.

In fact, there's even a digital sports writer. It's true that a human being wrote this story—ask my mother if you're not sure—but in a decade or two I might be out of a job too

Doctors should probably be worried as well. Remember Watson, the Jeopardy!-playing computer? It's now being fed millions of pages of medical information so that it can help physicians do a better job of diagnosing diseases. In another decade, there's a good chance that Watson will be able to do this without any human help at all.

Take driverless cars.

The next step might be passenger vehicles on fixed routes, like airport shuttles. Then long-haul trucks. Then buses and taxis. There are 2.5 million workers who drive trucks, buses, and taxis for a living, and there's a good chance that, one by one, all of them will be displaced

There will be no place to go but the unemployment lin

we'll need to let go of some familiar convictions. Left-leaning observers may continue to think that stagnating incomes can be improved with better education and equality of opportunity. Conservatives will continue to insist that people without jobs are lazy bums who shouldn't be coddled. They'll both be wrong.

Corporate executives should worry too. For a while, everything will seem great for them: Falling labor costs will produce heftier profits and bigger bonuses. But then it will all come crashing down. After all, robots might be able to produce goods and services, but they can't consume them

we'll probably have only a few options open to us. The simplest, because it's relatively familiar, is to tax capital at high rates and use the money to support displaced workers. In other words, as The Economist's Ryan Avent puts it, "redistribution, and a lot of it."

would we be happy in a society that offers real work to a dwindling few and bread and circuses for the rest?

Most likely, owners of capital would strongly resist higher taxes, as they always have, while workers would be unhappy with their enforced idleness. Still, the ancient Romans managed to get used to it—with slave labor playing the role of robots—and we might have to, as well.

 economist Noah Smith suggests that we might have to fundamentally change the way we think about how we share economic growth. Right now, he points out, everyone is born with an endowment of labor by virtue of having a body and a brain that can be traded for income. But what to do when that endowment is worth a fraction of what it is today? Smith's suggestion: "Why not also an endowment of capital? What if, when each citizen turns 18, the government bought him or her a diversified portfolio of equity?"

In simple terms, if owners of capital are capturing an increasing fraction of national income, then that capital needs to be shared more widely if we want to maintain a middle-class society.

it's time to start thinking about our automated future in earnest. The history of mass economic displacement isn't encouraging—fascists in the '20s, Nazis in the '30s—and recent high levels of unemployment in Greece and Italy have already produced rioting in the streets and larger followings for right-wing populist parties. And that's after only a few years of misery.

When the robot revolution finally starts to happen, it's going to happen fast, and it's going to turn our world upside down. It's easy to joke about our future robot overlords—R2-D2 or the Terminator?—but the challenge that machine intelligence presents really isn't science fiction anymore. Like Lake Michigan with an inch of water in it, it's happening around us right now even if it's hard to see

A robotic paradise of leisure and contemplation eventually awaits us, but we have a long and dimly lit tunnel to navigate before we get there.

I’m not even sure these new instruments are genuinely “social.” There is something decidedly faux about the camaraderie of Facebook, something illusory about the connectedness of Twitter.

In an actual discussion, the marshaling of information is cumulative, complication is acknowledged, sometimes persuasion occurs. In a Twitter discussion, opinions and our tolerance for others’ opinions are stunted. Whether or not Twitter makes you stupid, it certainly makes some smart people sound stupid.

The shortcomings of social media would not bother me awfully if I did not suspect that Facebook friendship and Twitter chatter are displacing real rapport and real conversation, just as Gutenberg’s device displaced remembering. The things we may be unlearning, tweet by tweet — complexity, acuity, patience, wisdom, intimacy — are things that matter.

there is a wistful passage about the high-school cohort my daughter is about to join. Wolitzer describes them this way: “The generation that had information, but no context. Butter, but no bread. Craving, but no longing.”

The implied readers of his work are men who feel fatherless, solitary, floating in a chaotic moral vacuum, constantly outperformed and humiliated by women, haunted by pain and self-contempt. At some level Peterson is offering assertiveness training to men whom society is trying to turn into emasculated snowflakes.

Peterson gives them a chance to be strong. He inspires their idealism by telling them that life is hard. His worldview begins with the belief that life is essentially a series of ruthless dominance competitions.

For much of Western history, he argues, Christianity restrained the human tendency toward barbarism. But God died in the 19th century, and Christian dogma and discipline died with him

That gave us the age of ideology, the age of fascism and communism — and with it, Auschwitz, Dachau and the gulag.

Since then we’ve tried another way to pacify the race. Since most conflict is over values, we’ve decided to not have any values. We’ll celebrate relativism and tolerance

We deny the true nature of humanity and naïvely pretend everyone is nice. The upside is we haven’t blown ourselves up; the downside is we live in a world of normlessness, meaninglessness and chaos.

All of life is perched, Peterson continues, on the point between order and chaos

In his videos, he analyzes classic and biblical texts, he eviscerates identity politics and political correctness and, most important, he delivers stern fatherly lectures to young men on how to be honorable, upright and self-disciplined — how to grow up and take responsibility for their own lives.

Don’t be fooled by the naïve optimism of progressive ideology. Life is about remorseless struggle and pain. Your instinct is to whine, to play the victim, to seek vengeance.

Peterson tells young men to never do that. Rise above the culture of victimization you see all around you

“The individual must conduct his or her life in a manner that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike.”

Instead, choose discipline, courage and self-sacrifice. “To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life.” Never lie. Tell your boss what you really think. Be strict with your children.

His recipe for self-improvement is solitary, nonrelational, unemotional. I’d say the lives of young men can be improved more through loving attachment than through Peterson’s joyless and graceless calls to self-sacrifice.

But the emphasis on strength of will, the bootstrap, the calls to toughness and self-respect — all of this touches some need in his audience. He doesn’t comfort

And Peterson personifies the strong, courageous virtues he champions. His most recent viral video, with over four million views, is an interview he did with Cathy Newman of Britain’s Channel 4 News.

, as Conor Friedersdorf noted in The Atlantic, she did what a lot of people do in argument these days. Instead of actually listening to Peterson, she just distorted, simplified and restated his views to make them appear offensive and cartoonish.

Peterson calmly and comprehensibly corrected and rebutted her. It is the most devastatingly one-sided media confrontation you will ever see. He reminded me of a young William F. Buckley.

The Peterson way is a harsh way, but it is an idealistic way — and for millions of young men, it turns out to be the perfect antidote to the cocktail of coddling and accusation in which they are raised

But Marshall demonstrated that capitalism advances not by immiserating the poor, but by boosting productivity. Factory owners make relentless small improvements that allow them to produce both higher wages and lower prices, thereby spreading the gains of material progress throughout society.

Schumpeter further expanded the idea of productivity increases. The economy doesn't simply get bigger and bigger. It goes through a constant process of discombobulation as entrepreneurs invent new products and processes.

Marx got it upside down: capitalism's recurrent crises actually make it stronger.

Overall, emissions from the sector fell by 45% in 2020, the equivalent of taking 100 million cars off the road. Car, bus and motorcycle transportation accounted for 50% of the year’s total drop in CO2 emissions. Demand for oil fell by 8.6% in 2020. Demand for coal was down by 4%.

In the U.S., the scattershot, state-by-state lockdown rules meant less dramatic fluctuations in output, with year-over-year emissions drops never reaching 20%, and a 10% reduction overall for 2020. And there, too, emissions approached 2019 levels by December.

“In March 2020, the IEA urged governments to put clean energy at the heart of their economic stimulus plans to ensure a sustainable recovery,” said Birol. “But our numbers show we are returning to carbon-intensive business-as-usual.”

NewCo will emulate the founders of The Atlantic. At some point "independent from" turned into "objective about." That was the wrong turn, made long ago, by professional journalism, American-style.

You've written that The View From Nowhere is, in part, a defense mechanism against charges of bias originating in partisan politics. If you won't be invoking it, what will your defense be when those charges happen? There are two answers to that. 1) We told you where we're coming from. 2) High standards of verification. You need both.

What about ideological diversity? The View from Somewhere obviously permits it. You've said you'll have it. Is that because it is valuable in itself?

The basic insight is correct: Since "news judgment" is judgment, the product is improved when there are multiple perspectives at the table ... But, if the people who are recruited to the newsroom because they add perspectives that might otherwise be overlooked are also taught that they should leave their politics at the door, or think like professional journalists rather than representatives or their community, or privilege something called "news values" over the priorities they had when they decided to become journalists, then these people are being given a fatally mixed message, if you see what I mean. They are valued for the perspective they bring, and then told that they should transcend that perspective.

When people talk about objectivity in journalism they have many different things in mind. Some of these I have no quarrel with. You could even say I’m a “fan.” For example, if objectivity means trying to ground truth claims in verifiable facts, I am definitely for that. If it means there’s a “hard” reality out there that exists beyond any of our descriptions of it, sign me up. If objectivity is the requirement to acknowledge what is, regardless of whether we want it to be that way, then I want journalists who can be objective in that sense. Don’t you? If it means trying to see things in that fuller perspective Thomas Nagel talked about–pulling the camera back, revealing our previous position as only one of many–I second the motion. If it means the struggle to get beyond the limited perspective that our experience and upbringing afford us… yeah, we need more of that, not less. I think there is value in acts of description that do not attempt to say whether the thing described is good or bad. Is that objectivity? If so, I’m all for it, and I do that myself sometimes. 

By "we can do better than that" I mean: We can insist on the struggle to tell it like it is without also insisting on the View from Nowhere. The two are not connected. It was a mistake to think that they necessarily are. But why was this mistake made? To control people in the newsroom from "above." That's a big part of objectivity. Not truth. Control.

If it works out as you hope, if things are implemented well, etc., what's the potential payoff for readers? I think it's three things: First, this is a news site that is born into the digital world, but doesn't have to return profits to investors. That's not totally unique

Second: It's going to be a technology company as much as a news organization. That should result in better service.

a good formula for innovation is to start with something people want to do and eliminate some of the steps required to do it

The third upside is news with a human voice restored to it. This is the great lesson that blogging gives to journalism

Modern academic science, he complains, has overvalued topics such as multiple dimensions and multiple universes, for which there is no evidence, and undervalued the search for life out there, not just in the form of extraterrestrial radio signals but in the form of chemical “biosignatures,” or even technological artifacts — such as, Loeb believes, Oumuamua.

This habituation stems from a principle well-known in psychological therapy: The more we’re exposed to a given threat, the less intimidating it seems.

As the pandemic drags on, people are unknowingly performing a kind of exposure therapy on themselves, said University of Oregon psychologist Paul Slovic, author of “The Perception of Risk” — and the results can be deadly.

“You have an experience and the experience is benign. It feels okay and comfortable. It’s familiar. Then you do it again,” Slovic said. “If you don’t see anything immediately bad happening, your concerns get deconditioned.”

The end result of all this desensitizing is a kind of overriding heedlessness decoupled from evidence — the anti-mask movements, the beach gatherings, the overflowing dance parties

One of the best ways to reinforce a certain behavior is to make sure that behavior is rewarded and that deviations from it are punished (or ignored).

But when it comes to lifesaving behaviors such as mask-wearing or staying home from parties, this reward-punishment calculus gets turned on its head.

With parties, when you do the right thing and stay home, “you feel an immediate cost: You’re not able to be with your friends,

while there is an upside to this decision — helping to stop the spread of the virus — it feels distant. “The benefit is invisible, but the costs are very tangible.”

By contrast, Slovic said, when you flout guidelines about wearing masks or avoiding gatherings, you get an immediate reward: You rejoice at not having to breathe through fabric, or you enjoy celebrating a close friend’s birthday in person.

Because risk perception fails as we learn to live with covid-19, Griffin and other researchers are calling for the renewal of tough government mandates to curb virus spread. They see measures such as strict social distancing, enforced masking outside the home and stay-at-home orders as perhaps the only things that can protect us from our own faulty judgment.

But these kinds of measures aren’t enough on their own, Griffin said. It’s also important for authorities to supply in-your-face reminders of those mandates, especially visual cues, so people won’t draw their own erroneous conclusions about what’s safe.

“A few parks have drawn circles [on their lawns]: ‘Don’t go out of the circle,’ ” Griffin said. “We need to take those kinds of metaphors and put them throughout the entire day.”

“The first step is awareness that sometimes you can’t trust your feelings.”

For people considering how to assess covid-19 risks, Slovic advised pivoting from emotionally driven gut reactions to what psychologist Daniel Kahneman — winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics for his integration of psychological research into economic science — calls “slow thinking.” That means making decisions based on careful analysis of the evidence. “You need to either do the slow thinking yourself,” Slovic said, “or trust experts who do the slow thinking and understand the situation.”

Thousands of us are less afraid than we were at the pandemic’s outset, even though in many parts of the country mounting case counts have increased the danger of getting the virus. We’re swarming the beaches and boardwalks, often without masks.

When what we’re doing feels fascinating, such as reading a book we can’t put down, we’re propelled by intrinsic motivation; when we pay attention in a class or meeting by promising ourselves 10 minutes of online shopping for seeing it through, we’re summoning extrinsic motivation.

Should adults be cheerleaders for our teenagers? Opinion is split. Some researchers contend that praise helps to cultivate intrinsic motivation, while others say that it undermines it by introducing an extrinsic reward

It’s also true that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation aren’t mutually exclusive

In practice, this means that young people should be given as much say over their learning as possible, such as giving them options for how to solve problems, approach unfamiliar topics or practice new skills.

Young people may find themselves intrinsically motivated on Mondays, but not Fridays, or at the start of an evening study session but not as the night wears o

There is, however, an area of consensus: the utility of praise depends on how it’s done. Specifically, praise fosters intrinsic motivation when it’s sincere, celebrates effort rather than talent (“you worked really hard,” vs. “you’re so smart”) and communicates encouragement, not pressure (“you’re doing really well,” vs. “you’re doing really well, as I hoped you would”)

Adults should be ready to stand back and admire the fantastic solutions that young people land upon themselves.

I recently learned of a 10th-grader who makes time-lapse videos of herself while she does her homework. Knowing that she’s on camera keeps her focused, and having a record of her efforts (and the amusing faces she makes while concentrating) turns out to be a powerful reward. While intrinsic motivation has its upsides, there should be no shame in the external motivation game. It’s about getting the work done.

I performed this "Top 10 Worries" exercise many times over the course of five years. Of my 100 total worries, 60 didn't happen. That's a lot of needless attention, and I could have used that time in better ways.

Even more edifying was that of the 40 worries that did occur, most of them fell into two categories: Either they happened but didn't seem nearly as bad as I worried they would be (such as needing to dip into savings), or they happened but there was nothing I could have done to prevent them (such as whether a friend broke up with his significant other).

The idea that some circumstances we call "bad" can, over time, turn out favorable is a Taoist philosophy I've written about before. Sometimes, there is a big upside to what seemed bad (such as a horrible breakup that leads to finding your true love). And the wisdom of knowing the difference between the things you can and can't change is famously covered by the words of pastor Reinhold Niebuhr's Serenity Prayer. Recognizing those two kinds of needless worries is just as helpful as learning that we too often worry about fiction.

The algorithms are showing you things to see what you react to and showing you more of the things that prompt an emotional response, that make it harder to leave Facebook or Instagram or any of the other social networks.

really if your goal is to maximize engagement that is of course what you’d do since anger is a far more compelling and powerful emotion than appreciation.

Facebook didn’t do that. That’s coded into our neurology. Facebook really is an extremism generating machine. It’s really an inevitable part of the core engine.

it’s not just Facebook. Or perhaps you could say it’s not even Facebook at all. It’s the mix of machine learning and the business models of all the social networks

They have real upsides. They connect us with people. Show us fun videos. But they are also inherently destructive. And somehow we have to take cognizance of that – and not just as a matter of the business decisions of one company.

the social networks – meaning the mix of machine learning and advertising/engagement based business models – are really something new under the sun. They’re addiction and extremism generating systems. It’s what they’re designed to do.