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The whole thing -- the speech punctuated with talk of "law and order" and the need to "dominate," the walk across ground that had been the site of protests moments before -- was orchestrated to push back against a story that had broken over the weekend: That amid the protests on Friday night outside the White House, Trump had been taken to the bunker under the White House for his protection.

The image of Trump cowering in a bunker while people take to the streets to protest the death of a(nother) unarmed black man immediately became fodder for Trump's two preferred mediums of communication: cable TV and Twitter. "Trump's Bunker" trended on Twitter. Cable TV repeatedly ran the story of a President being whisked away to safety.

And the world is split between people willing to use their power over others and those too afraid to exert it.

On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump repeatedly defended the use of waterboarding and other methods of torture to get information out of enemy combatants. "Don't tell me it doesn't work — torture works,"

Trump urged officers to treat arrested gang members rougher. He said this: "When you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over? Like, don't hit their head, and they just killed somebody -- don't hit their head," Trump continued. "I said, you can take the hand away, OK?"

Throw them out into the cold," Trump famously/infamously said of protesters at a rally in Burlington, Vermont, in January 2016. "Don't give them their coats. No coats! Confiscate their coats."

Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors," Trump urged in response to the protests. "These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe. Is this what America wants? NO!!!"

There is nothing Trump cares more about -- and, of course, fears more -- than being perceived as weak and being mocked and laughed at for it. He is willing to say and do absolutely anything to keep from being put in that situation. So when he was being mocked for retreating to the White House bunker, his response was immediate: I'll show them. ... I'll walk right across the ground they were protesting on!

oughness is not always about exerting your dominance because you can. True strength is rooted in the actions you don't take, the ability to understand that brute force should be your last resort, not your first instinct.

But it's especially true for a President of the United States faced with protests on American streets driven by the death of yet another black man at the hands of the police. Truly tough people, truly strong people -- they don't need to show and tell everyone how strong and tough they are. It's in their restraint, in their understanding that might doesn't make right that their true strength shines through.Donald Trump doesn't know that.

Instead she stayed and would then escalate what Christian Cooper said had been a polite request into a conflict. That's an odd reaction for someone scared for her life.

Yet she walked toward him quickly, filling the video screen as she reaches toward his phone camera, with dog leash and her own phone in hand. He asked her to back away: "please don't come close to me," he said twice in a calm, firm voice.

"I'm going to tell them there's an African American man threatening my life." Christian Cooper responded, telling her to "please tell them whatever you like." And so she does: "There's a man, African American, he has a bicycle helmet," she said into her phone, her tone breathless and urgent. "He is recording me and threatening me and my dog."

"I'm being threatened by a man in the Ramble!" she cried into the phone. "Please send the cops immediately!"

Amy Cooper's decision to summon the police against a man who did nothing more than ask her to follow the rules reads as nothing short of a potential threat to his life.

She, a white woman (and she didn't have to even say that explicitly; she knew it would be grasped by whoever had answered the phone) would be seen as vulnerable and in need of protection, and her story would be believed on its face; he, a black man, would be seen as menacing and potentially dangerous, and his version of events would be doubted or disregarded.

Ahmaud Arbery, a black man in Georgia, was just out for a run last February when, authorities say, Gregory and Travis McMichael, two white men (one of them a former police officer, as it happened), grabbed their guns, chased him down, and shot him to death. They faced no criminal penalties and were simply let off the hook until a video emerged of their attack, and public outcry forced law enforcement to act. (The two have not been asked by a judge for a plea, and attorneys for the men have told reporters they committed no crimes, according to CNN reporting.) Without the video, the wheels of justice would likely never have even begun to turn.

We see again and again that African Americans who are victims of serious crimes need unimpeachable video evidence to be believed. Overwhelmingly, though, crimes are not caught on video. And even when they are, we have seen repeatedly that law enforcement often doesn't act until they are compelled by a huge public outcry. Without reliably fair law enforcement, there are simply few avenues for justice.

To be sure, it's easy to find legitimate criticism of Twitter "justice." But this only raises the more important question of why our formal mechanisms for justice are so often so inept at providing justice across racial lines -- why the very people and institutions we should be able to trust are instead often threats to the lives and safety of African Americans. When calling the cops is understood as a threat to a black person -- and sometimes even a threat to that person's life-- that's not just an indictment of the cop-caller, that's an indictment of the police, of prosecutors, of juries and of too many in a white American public willing to accept this reality.

Amy Cooper has issued an apology (she told CNN she wanted to "publicly apologize to everyone"), but in explaining her egregious actions, said "I'm not a racist. I did not mean to harm that man in any way." How do you not mean to harm someone when you call the police and falsely claim he is threatening you? "I think I was just scared," Amy Cooper said. "When you're alone in the Ramble, you don't know what's happening. It's not excusable, it's not defensible."

Her woe-is-me complaints are a bit hard to swallow given her own actions, which could have damaged or destroyed the life of an innocent man.

let's keep our eyes on the prize: a justice system that works, rather than one which so often accepts the word of white people at the expense of black lives and freedom.

The capsule, named CST-100 Starliner, is part of a NASA program called Commercial Crew, an effort to launch astronauts to the ISS from the U.S. The agency has not had that capability since the space-shuttle program ended in 2011 under the weight of cost, safety, and political factors.

According to NASA officials, after Starliner separated from the rocket, the capsule missed the moment it needed to ignite its engines for a carefully timed and fully automated process known as an orbital insertion burn. Without that step, the spacecraft couldn’t fire the thrusters to shove itself into the correct orbit.

But the craft was flying just out of reach of communication, between two satellites. When engineers could finally contact Starliner, they made the spacecraft thrust itself higher, but it was too late. The confused capsule had been burning fuel to maintain its position, and didn’t have enough left to execute that crucial push toward the ISS.

Jim Chilton, the senior vice president of Boeing Space and Launch, said engineers don’t know why the clock went off track. Nicole Mann, who would have made her first trip to space on the next mission, said that the astronauts “train extensively for this type of contingency, and had we been on board, there could have been actions that we could have taken,” such as manually controlling the spacecraft.

Now the future of the program is uncertain, particularly for Boeing. It’s unclear what additional tests NASA might now require from Boeing before letting astronauts fly, including, perhaps, another attempt at an uncrewed mission. The capsule’s failure will certainly reshuffle schedules and could contribute to further delays for Boeing, already under scrutiny for its sluggishness in a recent report from NASA’s inspector general.

The spacecraft failure means yet another cycle of bad news for Boeing. The company has a long history with NASA; it was the prime contractor for the ISS and also worked on the space shuttles. But the company is better known for its airplanes, and in recent months the flaws of its 737 Max, which contributed to two deadly crashes, have put Boeing under intense pressure to prove that its aircraft are safe.

In the coming days, NASA and Boeing teams will review data from Starliner’s short-lived mission. And the space agency will continue its negotiations to buy more seats on the Soyuz, Russia’s transportation system, which can cost as much as $86 million. NASA’s last trip on the Soyuz system is scheduled for April. If neither company’s crew capsule is ready by then, NASA will have to buy more slots to ensure that American astronauts can launch to space.

The frequency and severity of domestic abuse will likely increase while Americans stay home for weeks or months during the pandemic, said Katie Ray-Jones, president and CEO of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, a service that connects victims of domestic violence with local resources.

The calls National Hotline staff have received since the start of state shutdowns are startling, Ray-Jones said: One woman said when she tried to go to work at an essential business, her abusive partner began to load his firearm to scare her into staying. Another said that her partner threatened to expose her to the virus on purpose and swore he wouldn't pay for treatment if she fell ill.

Domestic violence cases spike in times of prolonged stress and disruption, like financial crises and natural disasters.

"Many of the options that battered women and their children use as safety valves to get away from violence are no longer available," he told CNN.

And once the stay-at-home orders are lifted, Ray-Jones said she expects victims to flood hotlines. They may not know how many victims there are until the coronavirus pandemic is over.

The day-to-day work of a pilot is unstable, and often unpredictable. They’re away from home, and from their families, for long stretches of time. The job isn’t a typical 9-to-5— instead, pilots fly overnight from timezone to timezone, at strange hours.

To reduce fatigue, which is linked to stress, rules and regulations from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) limit the number of hours a pilot can fly and how much rest they need. During a 24-hour period, a pilot flying alone can’t log more than eight hours, for example, and they have a ten-hour minimum rest period before taking off.

But if stress creeps past that midpoint, performance starts to drop off. Too-high levels of stress mean exhaustion, panic, and blunted brain power. That’s when mistakes happen.

CRM training is designed to help pilots and crew members develop efficiency communication and decision-making skills. “It was also saying, this is what fatigue looks like, and this is how to recognize it in your co-pilot,” Bowen says. From that point on, she says, the airlines worked to develop a culture where pilots would hold other pilots accountable when they weren’t fit to fly. “It was about not protecting their buddy, but protecting overall safety,” Bowen says.

Pilot mental health is another big issue to tackle, says Quay Snyder, a former Air Force flight surgeon and a member of the Aerospace Medical Association Working Group on Pilot Mental Health. Pilots are often reluctant to acknowledge the effect that emotional stressors might have on their ability to fly, he says.

“They’re slow to recognize mental health issues,” he says, “and they might think there’s a stigma against asking for help.”

“Pilots trust pilots,” he says. “Hearing from a peer could help a pilot recognize that they may not be fit to fly. Hearing it from a physician doesn’t carry much weight, but hearing it from a peer does.”

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.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Berns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour

Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists

why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women

I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended i

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility

ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said: ‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves.

the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens

The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls.

From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive

It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class.

It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember.

the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’

I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it

I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces

The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

As the Ajinomoto campaign points out, the public scare over MSG unfairly placed the blame on Chinese food -- and is partly why many in the United States still think of Chinese food as processed, unclean, or unhealthy.

Some also pointed out that "ethnic" foods -- a controversy in itself, because what is "ethnic" anyway? -- hold stories that have been erased or unacknowledged completely. For many, "Americanized" Chinese food was born from desperation and adapted for American tastes -- a way for immigrant families to survive in a society that demanded assimilation. To have that food, and its history of immigrant struggle, dismissed as "icky" or "oily" felt like a slap in the face for many in the Asian American community.

Then there's Ajinomoto, one of the biggest voices in the MSG market and the leader of the Redefine CRS campaign. You can find Ajinomoto's MSG seasoning packets and spice mixes in many American supermarkets, and it has been working for years to raise awareness about both the safety of consuming MSG and the ways it can be used to add flavor to dishes.

Bourdain, who traveled the world and showcased an extraordinary diversity of cultures and cuisines, was more explicit. "I think (MSG) is good stuff," he said in a 2016 episode of "Parts Unknown" filmed in China. "I don't react to it -- nobody does. It's a lie."

"You know what causes Chinese restaurant syndrome?" he added as he walked through the streets of Sichuan. "Racism."

More than 136 million Americans voted in 2016, and a record number of them cast early ballots. But nearly 60% of voters still showed up on Election Day, waited in long lines, used communal pens and touched the same voting machines -- all dangerous moves in the coronavirus era.

Instead, it is their contribution to the spread of misinformation, hate speech and conspiracy theories.

digital platforms, since the marginal cost of serving additional consumers is essentially zero. Because the initial costs of producing a platform’s content are substantial, and because any company’s first goal is to remain solvent, it cannot just give stuff away. Even so, when price exceeds marginal cost, competition relentlessly pressures rival publishers to cut prices — eventually all the way to zero. This, in a nutshell, is the publisher’s dilemma in the digital age.

These firms make money not by charging for access to content but by displaying it with finely targeted ads based on the specific types of things people have already chosen to view. If the conscious intent were to undermine social and political stability, this business model could hardly be a more effective weapon.

The algorithms that choose individual-specific content are crafted to maximize the time people spend on a platform

As the developers concede, Facebook’s algorithms are addictive by design and exploit negative emotional triggers. Platform addiction drives earnings, and hate speech, lies and conspiracy theories reliably boost addiction.

the subscription model isn’t fully efficient: Any positive fee would inevitably exclude at least some who would value access but not enough to pay the fee

a conservative think tank, says, for example, that government has no business second-guessing people’s judgments about what to post or read on social media.

That position would be easier to defend in a world where individual choices had no adverse impact on others. But negative spillover effects are in fact quite common

individual and collective incentives about what to post or read on social media often diverge sharply.

There is simply no presumption that what spreads on these platforms best serves even the individual’s own narrow interests, much less those of society as a whole.

a simpler step may hold greater promise: Platforms could be required to abandon that model in favor of one relying on subscriptions, whereby members gain access to content in return for a modest recurring fee.

Major newspapers have done well under this model, which is also making inroads in book publishing. The subscription model greatly weakens the incentive to offer algorithmically driven addictive content provided by individuals, editorial boards or other sources.

Careful studies have shown that Facebook’s algorithms have increased political polarization significantly

More worrisome, those excluded would come disproportionately from low-income groups. Such objections might be addressed specifically — perhaps with a modest tax credit to offset subscription fees — or in a more general way, by making the social safety net more generous.

Adam Smith, the 18th-century Scottish philosopher widely considered the father of economics, is celebrated for his “invisible hand” theory, which describes conditions under which market incentives promote socially benign outcomes. Many of his most ardent admirers may view steps to constrain the behavior of social media platforms as regulatory overreach.

But Smith’s remarkable insight was actually more nuanced: Market forces often promote society’s welfare, but not always. Indeed, as he saw clearly, individual interests are often squarely at odds with collective aspirations, and in many such instances it is in society’s interest to intervene. The current information crisis is a case in point.

But critics of the critics of cancel culture make a powerful retort. Accusing others of canceling can, they claim, be a way to stigmatize legitimate criticism. As Hannah Giorgis writes in the Atlantic, “critical tweets are not censorship.”

So what, exactly, does a cancellation consist of? And how does it differ from the exercise of free speech and robust critical debate?

At a conceptual level, the difference is clear. Criticism marshals evidence and arguments in a rational effort to persuade.

Canceling, by contrast, seeks to organize and manipulate the social or media environment in order to isolate, deplatform or intimidate ideological opponents

its intent—or at least its predictable outcome—is to coerce conformity and reduce the scope for forms of criticism that are not sanctioned by the prevailing consensus of some local majority.

In practice, however, telling canceling apart from criticism can be difficult because both take the form of criticizing others.

The more signs you see, the more certain you can be that you are looking at a cancel campaign.

A better approach might therefore be diagnostic. Like the symptoms of cancer, the hallmarks of a cancellation are many. Though not all instances involve every single characteristic, they all involve some of its key attribute

Six warning signs make up my personal checklist for cancel culture.

Punitiveness

A critical culture seeks to correct rather than punish. In science, the penalty for being wrong is not that you lose your job or your friends. Normally, the only penalty is that you lose the argument

Canceling, by contrast, seeks to punish rather than correct—and often for a single misstep rather than a long track record of failure

Deplatforming

A critical culture tolerates dissent rather than silencing it. It understands that dissent can seem obnoxious, harmful, hateful and, yes, unsafe.

Canceling, by contrast, seeks to shut up and shout down its targets. Cancelers often define the mere act of disagreeing with them as a threat to their safety or even an act of violence

Organization

Critical culture relies on persuasion. The way to win an argument is to convince others that you are right.

By contrast, it’s common to see cancelers organize hundreds of petition-signers or thousands of social media users to dig up and prosecute an indictment.

Secondary Boycotts

With its commitments to exploring a wide range of ideas and correcting rather than coercing the errant, a critical culture sees no value in instilling a climate of fear

But instilling fear is what canceling is all about. By choosing targets unpredictably (almost anything can trigger a campaign), providing no safe harbors (even conformists can get hit), and implicitly threatening anyone who sides with those who are targeted, canceling sends the message: “you could be next.”

Moral Grandstanding

Precisely because speech can be hurtful, critical culture discourages extreme rhetoric. It encourages people to listen to each other, to use evidence and argumentation, to behave reasonably and to avoid personal attacks.

Cancel culture is much more invested in what philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke call “moral grandstanding”: the display of moral outrage to impress one’s peer group, dominate others, or both

Truthiness

Concern for accuracy is the north star of a critical culture. Not everyone gets every fact right, nor do people always agree on what is true; and yet people in a critical culture try to present their own and others’ viewpoints honestly and accurately.

canceling is not about seeking truth or persuading others; it is a form of information warfare, in which truthiness suffices if it serves the cause.

Those are my six warning signs. If you spot one or two, you should fear that a canceling may be happening; if you see five or six, you can be sure.

Though our critics like to claim that those of us who worry about cancel culture just don’t like being criticized on the internet, cancel culture is all too real. And though it may at times bear a superficial resemblance to critical culture, the two are diametrically opposed—and not so very difficult to tell apart.

I don’t know if that sounds too complicated. But the point is, it’s not just giving up domination. It’s giving up this sense of separateness in favor of a sense of kinship. And those people who do often wonder how they failed to see how much continuity there is in the more-than-human world with the human world.

to go from terror into being and into that sense that the experiment is sacred, not this one outcome of the experiment, is to immediately transform the way that you think even about very fundamental social and economic and cultural things. If the experiment is sacred, how can we possibly justify our food systems, for instance?

when I first went to the Smokies and hiked up into the old growth in the Southern Appalachians, it was like somebody threw a switch. There was some odd filter that had just been removed, and the world sounded different and smelled different.

richard powersYeah. In human exceptionalism, we may be completely aware of evolutionary continuity. We may understand that we have a literal kinship with the rest of creation, that all life on Earth employs the same genetic code, that there is a very small core of core genes and core proteins that is shared across all the kingdoms and phyla of life. But conceptually, we still have this demented idea that somehow consciousness creates a sanctity and a separation that almost nullifies the continuous elements of evolution and biology that we’ve come to understand.

if we want to begin this process of rehabilitation and transformation of consciousness that we are going to need in order to become part of the living Earth, it is going to be other kinds of minds that give us that clarity and strength and diversity and alternative way of thinking that could free us from this stranglehold of thought that looks only to the maximizing return on investment in very leverageable ways.

richard powersIt amazed me to get to the end of the first draft of “Bewilderment” and to realize how much Buddhism was in the book, from the simplest things.

I think there is nothing more science inflected than being out in the living world and the more-than-human world and trying to understand what’s happening.

And of course, we can combine this with what we were talking about earlier with death. If we see all of evolution as somehow leading up to us, all of human, cultural evolution leading up to neoliberalism and here we are just busily trying to accumulate and make meaning for ourselves, death becomes the enemy.

And you’re making the point in different ways throughout the book that it is the minds we think of as unusual, that we would diagnose as having some kind of problem or dysfunction that are, in some cases, are the only ones responding to the moment in the most common sense way it deserves. It is almost everybody else’s brain that has been broken.

it isn’t surprising. If you think of the characteristics of this dominant culture that we’ve been talking about — the fixation on control, the fixation on mastery, the fixation on management and accumulation and the resistance of decay — it isn’t surprising that that culture is also threatened by difference and divergence. It seeks out old, stable hierarchies — clear hierarchies — of control, and anything that’s not quite exploitable or leverageable in the way that the normal is terrifying and threatening.

And the more I looked for it, the more it pervaded the book.

ezra kleinI’ve heard you say that it has changed the way you measure a good day. Can you tell me about that?richard powersThat’s true.I suppose when I was still enthralled to commodity-mediated individualist market-driven human exceptionalism — we need a single word for this

And since moving to the Smokies and since publishing “The Overstory,” my days have been entirely inverted. I wake up, I go to the window, and I look outside. Or I step out onto the deck — if I haven’t been sleeping on the deck, which I try to do as much as I can in the course of the year — and see what’s in the air, gauge the temperature and the humidity and the wind and see what season it is and ask myself, you know, what’s happening out there now at 1,700 feet or 4,000 feet or 5,000 feet.

let me talk specifically about the work of a scientist who has herself just recently published a book. It’s Dr. Suzanne Simard, and the book is “Finding the Mother Tree.” Simard has been instrumental in a revolution in our way of thinking about what’s happening underground at the root level in a forest.

it was a moving moment for me, as an easterner, to stand up there and to say, this is what an eastern forest looks like. This is what a healthy, fully-functioning forest looks like. And I’m 56 years old, and I’d never seen it.

the other topics of that culture tend to circle back around these sorts of trends, human fascinations, ways of magnifying our throw weight and our ability and removing the last constraints to our desires and, in particular, to eliminate the single greatest enemy of meaning in the culture of the technological sublime that is, itself, such a strong instance of the culture of human separatism and commodity-mediated individualist capitalism— that is to say, the removal of death.

Why is it that we have known about the crisis of species extinction for at least half a century and longer? And I mean the lay public, not just scientists. But why has this been general knowledge for a long time without public will demanding some kind of action or change

And when you make kinship beyond yourself, your sense of meaning gravitates outwards into that reciprocal relationship, into that interdependence. And you know, it’s a little bit like scales falling off your eyes. When you do turn that corner, all of the sources of anxiety that are so present and so deeply internalized become much more identifiable. And my own sense of hope and fear gets a much larger frame of reference to operate in.

I think, for most of my life, until I did kind of wake up to forests and to trees, I shared — without really understanding this as a kind of concession or a kind of subscription — I did share this cultural consensus that meaning is a private thing that we do for ourselves and by ourselves and that our kind of general sense of the discoveries of the 19th and 20th century have left us feeling a bit unsponsored and adrift beyond the accident of human existence.

The largest single influence on any human being’s mode of thought is other human beings. So if you are surrounded by lots of terrified but wishful-thinking people who want to believe that somehow the cavalry is going to come at the last minute and that we don’t really have to look inwards and change our belief in where meaning comes from, that we will somehow be able to get over the finish line with all our stuff and that we’ll avert this disaster, as we have other kinds of disasters in the past.

I think what was happening to me at that time, as I was turning outward and starting to take the non-human world seriously, is my sense of meaning was shifting from something that was entirely about me and authored by me outward into this more collaborative, reciprocal, interdependent, exterior place that involved not just me but all of these other ways of being that I could make kinship with.

And I think I was right along with that sense that somehow we are a thing apart. We can make purpose and make meaning completely arbitrarily. It consists mostly of trying to be more in yourself, of accumulating in one form or another.

I can’t really be out for more than two or three miles before my head just fills with associations and ideas and scenes and character sketches. And I usually have to rush back home to keep it all in my head long enough to get it down on paper.

for my journey, the way to characterize this transition is from being fascinated with technologies of mastery and control and what they’re doing to us as human beings, how they’re changing what the capacities and affordances of humanity are and how we narrate ourselves, to being fascinated with technologies and sciences of interdependence and cooperation, of those sciences that increase our sense of kinship and being one of many, many neighbors.

And that’s an almost impossible persuasion to rouse yourself from if you don’t have allies. And I think the one hopeful thing about the present is the number of people trying to challenge that consensual understanding and break away into a new way of looking at human standing is growing.

And when you do subscribe to a culture like that and you are confronted with the reality of your own mortality, as I was when I was living in Stanford, that sense of stockpiling personal meaning starts to feel a little bit pointless.

And I just head out. I head out based on what the day has to offer. And to have that come first has really changed not only how I write, but what I’ve been writing. And I think it really shows in “Bewilderment.” It’s a totally different kind of book from my previous 12.

the marvelous thing about the work, which continues to get more sophisticated and continues to turn up newer and newer astonishments, is that there was odd kind of reciprocal interdependence and cooperation across the species barrier, that Douglas firs and birches were actually involved in these sharing back and forth of essential nutrients. And that’s a whole new way of looking at forest.

she began to see that the forests were actually wired up in very complex and identifiable ways and that there was an enormous system of resource sharing going on underground, that trees were sharing not only sugars and the hydrocarbons necessary for survival, but also secondary metabolites. And these were being passed back and forth, both symbiotically between the trees and the fungi, but also across the network to other trees so that there were actually trees in wired up, fungally-connected forests where large, dominant, healthy trees were subsidizing, as it were, trees that were injured or not in favorable positions or damaged in some way or just failing to thrive.

so when I was still pretty much a card-carrying member of that culture, I had this sense that to become a better person and to get ahead and to really make more of myself, I had to be as productive as possible. And that meant waking up every morning and getting 1,000 words that I was proud of. And it’s interesting that I would even settle on a quantitative target. That’s very typical for that kind of mindset that I’m talking about — 1,000 words and then you’re free, and then you can do what you want with the day.

there will be a threshold, as there have been for these other great social transformations that we’ve witnessed in the last couple of decades where somehow it goes from an outsider position to absolutely mainstream and common sense.

I am persuaded by those scholars who have showed the degree to which the concept of nature is itself an artificial construction that’s born of cultures of human separatism. I believe that everything that life does is part of the living enterprise, and that includes the construction of cities. And there is no question at all the warning that you just gave about nostalgia creating a false binary between the built world and the true natural world is itself a form of cultural isolation.

Religion is a technology to discipline, to discipline certain parts of the human impulse. A lot of the book revolves around the decoded neurofeedback machine, which is a very real literalization of a technology, of changing the way we think

one of the things I think that we have to take seriously is that we have created technologies to supercharge some parts of our natural impulse, the capitalism I think should be understood as a technology to supercharge the growth impulse, and it creates some wonders out of that and some horrors out of that.

richard powersSure. I base my machine on existing technology. Decoded neurofeedback is a kind of nascent field of exploration. You can read about it; it’s been publishing results for a decade. I first came across it in 2013. It involves using fMRI to record the brain activity of a human being who is learning a process, interacting with an object or engaged in a certain emotional state. That neural activity is recorded and stored as a data structure. A second subsequent human being is then also scanned in real time and fed kinds of feedback based on their own internal neural activity as determined by a kind of software analysis of their fMRI data structures.

And they are queued little by little to approximate, to learn how to approximate, the recorded states of the original subject. When I first read about this, I did get a little bit of a revelation. I did feel my skin pucker and think, if pushed far enough, this would be something like a telepathy conduit. It would be a first big step in answering that age-old question of what does it feel like to be something other than we are

in the book I simply take that basic concept and extend it, juke it up a little bit, blur the line between what the reader might think is possible right now and what they might wonder about, and maybe even introduce possibilities for this empathetic transference

ezra kleinOne thing I loved about the role this played in the book is that it’s highlighting its inverse. So a reader might look at this and say, wow, wouldn’t that be cool if we had a machine that could in real time change how we think and change our neural pathways and change our mental state in a particular direction? But of course, all of society is that machine,

Robin and Theo are in an airport. And you’ve got TVs everywhere playing the news which is to say playing a constant loop of outrage, and disaster, and calamity. And Robbie, who’s going through these neural feedback sessions during this period, turns to his dad and says, “Dad, you know how the training’s rewiring my brain? This is what is rewiring everybody else.”

ezra kleinI think Marshall McLuhan knew it all. I really do. Not exactly what it would look like, but his view and Postman’s view that we are creating a digital global nervous system is a way they put it, it was exactly right. A nervous system, it was such the exact right metaphor.

the great insight of McLuhan, to me, what now gets called the medium is the message is this idea that the way media acts upon us is not in the content it delivers. The point of Twitter is not the link that you click or even the tweet that you read; it is that the nature and structure of the Twitter system itself begins to act on your system, and you become more like it.If you watch a lot of TV, you become more like TV. If you watch a lot of Twitter, you become more like Twitter, Facebook more like Facebook. Your identities become more important to you — that the content is distraction from the medium, and the medium changes you

it is happening to all of us in ways that at least we are not engaging in intentionally, not at that level of how do we want to be transformed.

richard powersI believe that the digital neural system is now so comprehensive that the idea that you could escape it somewhere, certainly not in the Smokies, even more remotely, I think, becomes more and more laughable. Yeah, and to build on this idea of the medium being the message, not the way in which we become more like the forms and affordances of the medium is that we begin to expect that those affordances, the method in which those media are used, the physiological dependencies and castes of behavior and thought that are required to operate them and interact with them are actual — that they’re real somehow, and that we just take them into human nature and say no, this is what we’ve always wanted and we’ve simply been able to become more like our true selves.

Well, the warpage in our sense of time, the warpage in our sense of place, are profound. The ways in which digital feedback and the affordances of social media and all the rest have changed our expectations with regard to what we need to concentrate on, what we need to learn for ourselves, are changing profoundly.

If you look far enough back, you can find Socrates expressing great anxiety and suspicion about the ways in which writing is going to transform the human brain and human expectation. He was worried that somehow it was going to ruin our memories. Well, it did up to a point — nothing like the way the digital technologies have ruined our memories.

my tradition is Jewish, the Sabbath is a technology, is a technology to create a different relationship between the human being, and time, and growth, and productive society than you would have without the Sabbath which is framed in terms of godliness but is also a way of creating separation from the other impulses of the weak.

Governments are a technology, monogamy is a technology, a religiously driven technology, but now one that is culturally driven. And these things do good and they do bad. I’m not making an argument for any one of them in particular. But the idea that we would need to invent something wholly new to come up with a way to change the way human beings act is ridiculous

My view of the story of this era is that capitalism was one of many forces, and it has become, in many societies, functionally the only one that it was in relationship with religion, it was in relationship with more rooted communities.

it has become not just an economic system but a belief system, and it’s a little bit untrammeled. I’m not an anti-capitalist person, but I believe it needs countervailing forces. And my basic view is that it doesn’t have them anymore.

the book does introduce this kind of fable, this kind of thought experiment about the way the affordances that a new and slightly stronger technology of empathy might deflect. First of all, the story of a little boy and then the story of his father who’s scrambling to be a responsible single parent. And then, beyond that, the community of people who hear about this boy and become fascinated with him as a narrative, which again ripples outward through these digital technologies in ways that can’t be controlled or whose consequences can be foreseen.

I’ve talked about it before is something I’ve said is that I think a push against, functionally, materialism and want is an important weight in our society that we need. And when people say it is the way we’ll deal with climate change in the three to five year time frame, I become much more skeptical because to the point of things like the technology you have in the book with neural feedback, I do think one of the questions you have to ask is, socially and culturally, how do you move people’s minds so you can then move their politics?

You’re going to need something, it seems to me, outside of politics, that changes humans’ sense of themselves more fundamentally. And that takes a minute at the scale of billions.

richard powersWell, you are correct. And I don’t think it’s giving away any great reveal in the book to say that a reader who gets far enough into the story probably has this moment of recursive awareness where they, he or she comes to understand that what Robin is doing in this gradual training on the cast of mind of some other person is precisely what they’re doing in the act of reading the novel “Bewilderment” — by living this act of active empathy for these two characters, they are undergoing their own kind of neurofeedback.

The more we understand about the complexities of living systems, of organisms and the evolution of organisms, the more capable it is to feel a kind of spiritual awe. And that certainly makes it easier to have reverence for the experiment beyond me and beyond my species. I don’t think those are incommensurable or incompatible ways of knowing the world. In fact, I think to invoke one last time that Buddhist precept of interbeing, I think there is a kind of interbeing between the desire, the true selfless desire to understand the world out there through presence, care, measurement, attention, reproduction of experiment and the desire to have a spiritual affinity and shared fate with the world out there. They’re really the same project.

richard powersWell, sure. If we turn back to the new forestry again and researchers like Suzanne Simard who were showing the literal interconnectivity across species boundaries and the cooperation of resource sharing between different species in a forest, that is rigorous science, rigorous reproducible science. And it does participate in that central principle of practice, or collection of practices, which always requires the renunciation of personal wish and ego and prior belief in favor of empirical reproduction.

I’ve begun to see people beginning to build out of the humbling sciences a worldview that seems quite spiritual. And as you’re somebody who seems to me to have done that and it has changed your life, would you reflect on that a bit?

So much of the book is about the possibility of life beyond Earth. Tell me a bit about the role that’s playing. Why did you make the possibility of alien life in the way it might look and feel and evolve and act so central in a book about protecting and cherishing life here?

richard powersI’m glad that we’re slipping this in at the end because yes this framing of the book around this question of are we alone or does the universe want life it’s really important. Theo, Robin’s father, is an astrobiologist.

Imagine that everything happens just right so that every square inch of this place is colonized by new forms of experiments, new kinds of life. And the father trying to entertain his son with the story of this remarkable place in the sun just stopping him and saying, Dad, come on, that’s asking too much. Get real, that’s science fiction. That’s the vision that I had when I finished the book, an absolutely limitless sense of just how lucky we’ve had it here.

one thing I kept thinking about that didn’t make it into the final book but exists as a kind of parallel story in my own head is the father and son on some very distant planet in some very distant star, many light years from here, playing that same game. And the father saying, OK, now imagine a world that’s just the right size, and it has plate tectonics, and it has water, and it has a nearby moon to stabilize its rotation, and it has incredible security and safety from asteroids because of other large planets in the solar system.

they make this journey across the universe through all kinds of incubators, all kinds of petri dishes for life and the possibilities of life. And rather than answer the question — so where is everybody? — it keeps deferring the question, it keeps making that question more subtle and stranger

For the purposes of the book, Robin, who desperately believes in the sanctity of life beyond himself, begs his father for these nighttime, bedtime stories, and Theo gives him easy travel to other planets. Father and son going to a new planet based on the kinds of planets that Theo’s science is turning up and asking this question, what would life look like if it was able to get started here?

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.

Dunning-Kruger “offers an explanation for a kind of hubris,” said Steven Sloman, a cognitive psychologist at Brown University. “The fact is, that’s Trump in a nutshell. He’s a man with zero political skill who has no idea he has zero political skill. And it’s given him extreme confidence.”

What happens when the incompetent are unwilling to admit they have shortcomings? Are they so confident in their own perceived knowledge that they will reject the very idea of improvement? Not surprisingly (though no less concerning), Dunning’s follow-up research shows the poorest performers are also the least likely to accept criticism or show interest in self improvement.

Someone who has very little knowledge in a subject claims to know a lot.

the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s not a disease, syndrome or mental illness; it is present in everybody to some extent, and it’s been around as long as human cognition, though only recently has it been studied and documented in social psychology

“Obviously it has to do with Trump and the various treatments that people have given him,” Dunning said, “So yeah, a lot of it is political. People trying to understand the other side. We have a massive rise in partisanship and it’s become more vicious and extreme, so people are reaching for explanations."

Even though President Trump’s statements are rife with errors, falsehoods or inaccuracies, he expresses great confidence in his aptitude. He says he does not read extensively because he solves problems “with very little knowledge other than the knowledge I [already] had.” He has said in interviews he doesn’t read lengthy reports because “I already know exactly what it is.”

the Dunning-Kruger effect has become popular outside of the research world because it is a simple phenomenon that could apply to all of us

The ramifications of the Dunning-Kruger effect are usually harmless. If you’ve ever felt confident answering questions on an exam, only to have the teacher mark them incorrect, you have firsthand experience with Dunning-Kruger.

he also thought that this approach was not enough. “What are we to make of a civilization,” he asked in 1959, a few years after von Neumann’s death, “which has always regarded ethics as an essential part of human life, and…which has not been able to talk about the prospect of killing almost everybody, except in prudential and game-theoretical terms?”

to design a “fairness algorithm” we need to know what fairness is. Fairness is not a mathematical constant or even a variable. It is a human value, meaning that there are many often competing and even contradictory visions of it on offer in our societies.

Hence Oppenheimer set out to make the Institute for Advanced Study a place for thinking about humanistic subjects like Russian culture, medieval history, or ancient philosophy, as well as about mathematics and the theory of the atom. He hired scholars like George Kennan, the diplomat who designed the Cold War policy of Soviet “containment”; Harold Cherniss, whose work on the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle influenced many Institute colleagues; and the mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson, who had been one of the youngest collaborators in the Manhattan Project. Traces of their conversations and collaborations are preserved not only in their letters and biographies, but also in their research, their policy recommendations, and in their ceaseless efforts to help the public understand the dangers and opportunities technology offers the world.

In their biography “American Prometheus,” which inspired Nolan’s film, Martin Sherwin and Kai Bird document Oppenheimer’s conviction that “the safety” of a nation or the world “cannot lie wholly or even primarily in its scientific or technical prowess.” If humanity wants to survive technology, he believed, it needs to pay attention not only to technology but also to ethics, religions, values, forms of political and social organization, and even feelings and emotions.

Preserving any human value worthy of the name will therefore require not only a computer scientist, but also a sociologist, psychologist, political scientist, philosopher, historian, theologian. Oppenheimer even brought the poet T.S. Eliot to the Institute, because he believed that the challenges of the future could only be met by bringing the technological and the human together. The technological challenges are growing, but the cultural abyss separating STEM from the arts, humanities, and social sciences has only grown wider. More than ever, we need institutions capable of helping them think together.