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People cumulatively watch more than a billion YouTube hours daily world-wide, a 10-fold increase from 2012

After the Journal this week provided examples of how the site still promotes deceptive and divisive videos, YouTube executives said the recommendations were a problem.

When users show a political bias in what they choose to view, YouTube typically recommends videos that echo those biases, often with more-extreme viewpoints.

Such recommendations play into concerns about how social-media sites can amplify extremist voices, sow misinformation and isolate users in “filter bubbles”

Unlike Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. sites, where users see content from accounts they choose to follow, YouTube takes an active role in pushing information to users they likely wouldn’t have otherwise seen.

“The editorial policy of these new platforms is to essentially not have one,”

“That sounded great when it was all about free speech and ‘in the marketplace of ideas, only the best ones win.’ But we’re seeing again and again that that’s not what happens. What’s happening instead is the systems are being gamed and people are being gamed.”

YouTube has been tweaking its algorithm since last autumn to surface what its executives call “more authoritative” news source

YouTube last week said it is considering a design change to promote relevant information from credible news sources alongside videos that push conspiracy theories.

The Journal investigation found YouTube’s recommendations often lead users to channels that feature conspiracy theories, partisan viewpoints and misleading videos, even when those users haven’t shown interest in such content.

YouTube engineered its algorithm several years ago to make the site “sticky”—to recommend videos that keep users staying to watch still more, said current and former YouTube engineers who helped build it. The site earns money selling ads that run before and during videos.

YouTube’s algorithm tweaks don’t appear to have changed how YouTube recommends videos on its home page. On the home page, the algorithm provides a personalized feed for each logged-in user largely based on what the user has watched.

There is another way to calculate recommendations, demonstrated by YouTube’s parent, Alphabet Inc.’s Google. It has designed its search-engine algorithms to recommend sources that are authoritative, not just popular.

Google spokeswoman Crystal Dahlen said that Google improved its algorithm last year “to surface more authoritative content, to help prevent the spread of blatantly misleading, low-quality, offensive or downright false information,” adding that it is “working with the YouTube team to help share learnings.”

In recent weeks, it has expanded that change to other news-related queries. Since then, the Journal’s tests show, news searches in YouTube return fewer videos from highly partisan channels.

YouTube’s recommendations became even more effective at keeping people on the site in 2016, when the company began employing an artificial-intelligence technique called a deep neural network that makes connections between videos that humans wouldn’t. The algorithm uses hundreds of signals, YouTube says, but the most important remains what a given user has watched.

Using a deep neural network makes the recommendations more of a black box to engineers than previous techniques,

“We don’t have to think as much,” he said. “We’ll just give it some raw data and let it figure it out.”

To better understand the algorithm, the Journal enlisted former YouTube engineer Guillaume Chaslot, who worked on its recommendation engine, to analyze thousands of YouTube’s recommendations on the most popular news-related queries

Mr. Chaslot created a computer program that simulates the “rabbit hole” users often descend into when surfing the site. In the Journal study, the program collected the top five results to a given search. Next, it gathered the top three recommendations that YouTube promoted once the program clicked on each of those results. Then it gathered the top three recommendations for each of those promoted videos, continuing four clicks from the original search.

The first analysis, of November’s top search terms, showed YouTube frequently led users to divisive and misleading videos. On the 21 news-related searches left after eliminating queries about entertainment, sports and gaming—such as “Trump,” “North Korea” and “bitcoin”—YouTube most frequently recommended these videos:

The algorithm doesn’t seek out extreme videos, they said, but looks for clips that data show are already drawing high traffic and keeping people on the site. Those videos often tend to be sensationalist and on the extreme fringe, the engineers said.

Repeated tests by the Journal as recently as this week showed the home page often fed far-right or far-left videos to users who watched relatively mainstream news sources, such as Fox News and MSNBC.

Searching some topics and then returning to the home page without doing a new search can produce recommendations that push users toward conspiracy theories even if they seek out just mainstream sources.

After searching for “9/11” last month, then clicking on a single CNN clip about the attacks, and then returning to the home page, the fifth and sixth recommended videos were about claims the U.S. government carried out the attacks. One, titled “Footage Shows Military Plane hitting WTC Tower on 9/11—13 Witnesses React”—had 5.3 million views.

Liu’s tomes—they tend to be tomes—have been translated into more than twenty languages, and the trilogy has sold some eight million copies worldwide. He has won China’s highest honor for science-fiction writing, the Galaxy Award, nine times, and in 2015 he became the first Asian writer to win the Hugo Award, the most prestigious international science-fiction prize

“The Three-Body Problem” takes its title from an analytical problem in orbital mechanics which has to do with the unpredictable motion of three bodies under mutual gravitational pull. Reading an article about the problem, Liu thought, What if the three bodies were three suns? How would intelligent life on a planet in such a solar system develop? From there, a structure gradually took shape that almost resembles a planetary system, with characters orbiting the central conceit like moons. For better or worse, the characters exist to support the framework of the story rather than to live as individuals on the page.

Concepts that seemed abstract to others took on, for him, concrete forms; they were like things he could touch, inducing a “druglike euphoria.” Compared with ordinary literature, he came to feel, “the stories of science are far more magnificent, grand, involved, profound, thrilling, strange, terrifying, mysterious, and even emotional

Pragmatic choices like this one, or like the decision his grandparents made when their sons were conscripted, recur in his fiction—situations that present equally unconscionable choices on either side of a moral fulcrum

The great flourishing of science fiction in the West at the end of the nineteenth century occurred alongside unprecedented technological progress and the proliferation of the popular press—transformations that were fundamental to the development of the genre

Joel Martinsen, the translator of the second volume of Liu’s trilogy, sees the series as a continuation of this tradition. “It’s not hard to read parallels between the Trisolarans and imperialist designs on China, driven by hunger for resources and fear of being wiped out,” he told me. Even Liu, unwilling as he is to endorse comparisons between the plot and China’s current face-off with the U.S., did at one point let slip that “the relationship between politics and science fiction cannot be underestimated.”

Speculative fiction is the art of imagining alternative worlds, and the same political establishment that permits it to be used as propaganda for the existing regime is also likely to recognize its capacity to interrogate the legitimacy of the status quo.

Liu has been criticized for peopling his books with characters who seem like cardboard cutouts installed in magnificent dioramas. Liu readily admits to the charge. “I did not begin writing for love of literature,” he told me. “I did so for love of science.”

Liu believes that this trend signals a deeper shift in the Chinese mind-set—that technological advances have spurred a new excitement about the possibilities of cosmic exploration.

Liu’s imagination is dauntingly capacious, his narratives conceived on a scale that feels, at times, almost hallucinogenic. The time line of the trilogy spans 18,906,450 years, encompassing ancient Egypt, the Qin dynasty, the Byzantine Empire, the Cultural Revolution, the present, and a time eighteen million years in the future

The first book is set on Earth, though some of its scenes take place in virtual reality; by the end of the third book, the scope of the action is interstellar and annihilation unfolds across several dimensions. The London Review of Books has called the trilogy “one of the most ambitious works of science fiction ever written.”

Although physics furnishes the novels’ premises, it is politics that drives the plots. At every turn, the characters are forced to make brutal calculations in which moral absolutism is pitted against the greater good

In Liu’s fictional universe, idealism is fatal and kindness an exorbitant luxury. As one general says in the trilogy, “In a time of war, we can’t afford to be too scrupulous.” Indeed, it is usually when people do not play by the rules of Realpolitik that the most lives are lost.

“I know what you are thinking,” he told me with weary clarity. “What about individual liberty and freedom of governance?” He sighed, as if exhausted by a debate going on in his head. “But that’s not what Chinese people care about. For ordinary folks, it’s the cost of health care, real-estate prices, their children’s education. Not democracy.”

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.”

Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,”

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes

“I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.

Chinese people of his generation were lucky, he said. The changes they had seen were so huge that they now inhabited a world entirely different from that of their childhood. “China is a futuristic country,” he said. “I realized that the world around me became more and more like science fiction, and this process is speeding up.”

“We have statues of a few martyrs, but we never—We don’t memorialize those, the individuals.” He took off his glasses and blinked, peering into the wide expanse of green and concrete. “This is how we Chinese have always been,” he said. “When something happens, it passes, and time buries the stories.”

Conservative historians asserted that relativists were ruining everything, that truth did exist. They criticized post-modernism as a mask for moral relativism, connected this immorality with the popular movements of the 1960s, and asserted their own moral primacy (the Moral Majority).

The platform of the Republican Party about climate change and health care, two of our most pressing issues, is just one big lie

The intersection of a Republican Party which sees no value in distinguishing between truth and lies and an emerging technology that makes spreading lies incredibly easy is a great political danger. Is there truth? Not if those in power in America don’t care.

The use of a fabricated story about Ukraine and Joe Biden is a set of lies, that then led to one of the greatest scenes of collective public lying in American history, the response of Republican Representatives and Senators to the impeachment.

We are being bombarded with carefully crafted lies throughout cyberspace, designed to distort the results of the 2020 election. False stories about Joe Biden and Ukraine have already spread virally to millions of people.

Disinformation spread by bots can come from anywhere on the globe. The technology is non-partisan.

today we suffer from a multiplication of lies as a Republican tactic to win elections.

Does this mean that there is no truth? That any statement can be shown to be untrue by people with a different point of view? Objectivity is impossible, so there is no objective truth

This line of thinking was taken up especially by literary scholars, who argued that every text has multiple, perhaps infinite meanings. There is no true interpretation of a piece of writing

When this was expanded into other disciplines, it became more confusing. Some historians argued that it is impossible to make a true historical statement. Every statement can have multiple, even contradictory meanings. Excellent examples of this would be stat

 The problem is that we humans didn’t evolve to live in the world in which we find ourselves.  As the social scientists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby put it, the human mind was “designed to solve the day-to-day problems of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. These stone age priorities produced a brain far better at solving some problems than others.” 

there are four failings common to human beings as a result of our Stone-Age brain that hinder us in politics.

why are we this way?  Science suggests that one reason is that we evolved to win in social settings and in such situations the truth doesn't matter as much as sheer doggedness

Second, we find it hard to size up politicians correctly.  The reason for this is that we rely on instant impressions. 

This stops voters from worrying that they need to bolster their impressions by consulting experts and reading news stories from a broad array of ideological viewpoints.  Why study when you can rely on your gut instinct?

Third, we aren’t inclined to reward politicians who tell us hard truths.

First, most people find it easy to ignore politics because it usually involves people they don’t know.  As human beings we evolved to care about people in our immediate vicinity.  Our nervous system kicks into action usually only when we meet people face-to-face

 This has left millions of voters on their own.  Lacking information, millions do what you would expect.  They go with their gut

We don't want the truth to prevail, as Harvard's Steven Pinker informs us, we want our version of the truth to prevail, for in the end what we're really concerned with is maintaining our status or enhancing it.

Fourth, we frequently fail to show empathy in circumstances that clearly cry out for it.

We evolved to show empathy for people we know.  It takes special effort to empathize with people who don’t dress like us or look like us.

long-term we need to teach voters not to trust their instincts in politics because our instincts often don’t work.

Doing politics in a modern mass democracy, in other words, is an unnatural act.

Teaching this lesson doesn’t sound like a job for historians, but in one way it is.  Studying history is all about putting events into context. And as it turns out, voters need to learn the importance of context.

Given the mismatch between our Stone-Age brain and the problems we face in the 21st century, we should only trust our political instincts when those instincts are serviceable in a modern context.  If they aren’t (and most of the time they aren't), then higher order cognitive thinking is required.

Just why mass ignorance seems to be afflicting our politics at this moment is a complicated question.  But here again history can be helpful.  The answer seems to be that the institutions voters formerly could turn to for help have withered.

most of the time we return to a state of well-being by simply ignoring the evidence we find discomforting.  This is known as Disconfirmation Bias and it afflicts all of us

ut cultural norms can be established that help us overcome our natural inclinations.

don’t have much confidence that people in general will be willing on their own to undertake the effort.

He shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.

Last October, he listened to an audiobook by the Hardcore History podcaster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and plagues in my head,” the Australian said. “In December, I started seeing the first articles about this wet-market thing going on in China, and then in early January there was a lot on Twitter about the shit in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a ski holiday with his family, and he bought all the surgical masks and gloves he could find.

The Australian, who spoke on the condition that his name not be used, is a voluble redhead just shy of fifty.

The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path.

perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.

I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s

they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus

They mocked Jim Cramer, the host of the market program “Mad Money,” on CNBC, for predicting a great depression and wondering if anyone would ever board an airplane again. Anecdotes, hyperbole: the talking chuckleheads sowing and selling fear.

it’s hard for a coldhearted capitalist to know just how cold the heart must go. Public-health professionals make a cost-benefit calculation, too, with different weightings.

This brutal shock is attacking a body that was already vulnerable. In the event of a global depression, a postmortem might identify COVID-19 as the cause of death, but, as with so many of the virus’s victims, the economy had a preëxisting condition—debt, instead of pulmonary disease.

“It’s as if the virus is almost beside the point,” a trader I know told me. “This was all set up to happen.”

the “smart money,” like the giant asset-management firms Blackstone and the Carlyle Group, was now telling companies to draw down their bank lines, and borrow as much as they could, in case the lenders went out of business or found ways to say no. Sure enough, by March’s end, corporations had reportedly tapped a record two hundred and eight billion dollars from their revolving-credit lines

In a world where we talk, suddenly, of trillions, two hundred billion may not seem like a lot, but it is: in 2007, the subprime-mortgage lender Countrywide Financial, in drawing down “just” $11.5 billion, helped bring the system to its knees.

It is hard to navigate out of the debt trap. Creditors can forgive debtors, but that process, especially at this level, would be almost impossibly laborious and fraught. Meanwhile, defaults flood the market with collateral, be it buildings, stocks, or aircraft. The price of that collateral collapses—haircuts for baldheads—leading to more defaults.

In New York State, where nearly half a million new claims had been filed in two weeks, the unemployment-insurance trust began to teeter toward insolvency. Come summer, there would be no money left to pay unemployment benefits.

As April arrived, businesses, large and small, decided not to pay rent, either because they didn’t have the cash on hand or because, with a recession looming, they wanted to preserve what cash they had. Furloughed or fired employees, meanwhile, faced similar decisions

On March 20th, Goldman Sachs spooked the world, by predicting a twenty-four-per-cent decline in G.D.P. in the second quarter, a falloff in activity that seemed at once both unthinkable and inevitable. Subsequent predictions grew even more disma

Trust in American institutions, however, has been in decline for some time. Trump is merely feeding on that sentiment.

olitical scientist Ron Inglehart proposed in the 1970s that as societies grow wealthier and less concerned about basic survival, we should expect a shift from communal to individual values: People express themselves more and trust authorities less.

The Watergate scandal caused Americans to lose faith in their government. Conversely, after the country was attacked on 9/11, trust in government soared and people went back to church. After the impact of scandal and threat faded, however, the long-term trends returned.

As far back as the 1600s, travelers confronted by new cultures and novel deities began to question their own societies’ rules and institutions

In 1964, 3 out of 4 Americans trusted their government to do the right thing most of the time. By 1976, that number had dropped to 33 percent.

And technology offers everyone the chance to be one’s own reporter, broadcaster and commentator.

In some Los Angeles schools, so many parents opt out of the vaccination regime that inoculation rates are on a par with South Sudan’s as people make their own scientific judgments.

Political scientists tell us that democracies require a little faith. To engage with others, you have to believe that if you lose a contest or a debate, the winner will treat you equitably; that if the other side wins, it will act within the law and not send its opponents off to jail. You have to assume that institutions will be fair and that leaders will act in the country’s best interest.

The reality is that science touches everything we do, and everyone we love

Do we want to be the America that embraces science and the pursuit of knowledge to advance our health, safety, prosperity, and security, making America the leader of the civilized world? Or do want America to mimic failed regimes of the past, where knowledge and science were deliberately suppressed to benefit a few, to funnel more profits into dying industries, and placate the prejudices of a mob

Traditionally, scientists have been coached to steer clear of the political fray. But if the past few weeks have taught us anything, it’s that now is the time for a quantum leap of political relevance.

You cannot isolate science from politics, or politics from science

That is precisely why scientists shouldn’t shy away from engaging in political conversations. Now more than ever, it is necessary to be participating in them

At the very least, we all share a deeply-held fascination with our natural world. The search for meaning, the understanding of something bigger than ourselves, is of universal significance.

In today’s world, facts alone are not enough to win debates, let alone people’s hearts and minds. Research shows that increasing scientific knowledge can often deepen the divide between people on polarizing issues. “Individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values,” a recent study points out

America has a choice to make. A choice between advancing civilization or bringing it down. A choice between knowledge and chaos. Now, everyone must choose which side they are on.

But we’re not happier.

Technology alone is not to blame, as in many ways our uneasiness with our condition seems an old trait.

Given how few we encounter on a regular basis, this threat detection system has been co-opted by the luxury of security, causing Harari to realize that: The most common reaction of the human mind to achievement is not satisfaction, but craving for more.

The Buddha actually warned against such a chase, deciding contentment was more worthwhile (and saner). The pursuit of pleasure is the root of suffering.

As Trentmann points out, the Latin consumere meant a “physical exhaustion of matter.” For example, the wasting disease, tuberculosis, was referred to as consumption. While we’ve redefined that word in modern times the original intention seems destined to win out.

By the end of World War II, however, American corporations were facing severe talent shortages. Their senior executives were growing old, and a dearth of hiring from the Depression through the war had resulted in a shortfall of able, well-trained managers. Finding people who had the potential to rise quickly through the ranks became an overriding preoccupation of American businesses. They began to devise a formal hiring-and-management system based in part on new studies of human behavior, and in part on military techniques developed during both world wars, when huge mobilization efforts and mass casualties created the need to get the right people into the right roles as efficiently as possible. By the 1950s, it was not unusual for companies to spend days with young applicants for professional jobs, conducting a battery of tests, all with an eye toward corner-office potential.

But companies abandoned their hard-edged practices for another important reason: many of their methods of evaluation turned out not to be very scientific.

this regime, so widespread in corporate America at mid-century, had almost disappeared by 1990. “I think an HR person from the late 1970s would be stunned to see how casually companies hire now,”

Many factors explain the change, he said, and then he ticked off a number of them: Increased job-switching has made it less important and less economical for companies to test so thoroughly. A heightened focus on short-term financial results has led to deep cuts in corporate functions that bear fruit only in the long term. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, which exposed companies to legal liability for discriminatory hiring practices, has made HR departments wary of any broadly applied and clearly scored test that might later be shown to be systematically biased.

about a quarter of the country’s corporations were using similar tests to evaluate managers and junior executives, usually to assess whether they were ready for bigger roles.

He has encouraged the company’s HR executives to think about applying the games to the recruitment and evaluation of all professional workers.

Knack makes app-based video games, among them Dungeon Scrawl, a quest game requiring the player to navigate a maze and solve puzzles, and Wasabi Waiter, which involves delivering the right sushi to the right customer at an increasingly crowded happy hour. These games aren’t just for play: they’ve been designed by a team of neuroscientists, psychologists, and data scientists to suss out human potential. Play one of them for just 20 minutes, says Guy Halfteck, Knack’s founder, and you’ll generate several megabytes of data, exponentially more than what’s collected by the SAT or a personality test. How long you hesitate before taking every action, the sequence of actions you take, how you solve problems—all of these factors and many more are logged as you play, and then are used to analyze your creativity, your persistence, your capacity to learn quickly from mistakes, your ability to prioritize, and even your social intelligence and personality. The end result, Halfteck says, is a high-resolution portrait of your psyche and intellect, and an assessment of your potential as a leader or an innovator.

When the results came back, Haringa recalled, his heart began to beat a little faster. Without ever seeing the ideas, without meeting or interviewing the people who’d proposed them, without knowing their title or background or academic pedigree, Knack’s algorithm had identified the people whose ideas had panned out. The top 10 percent of the idea generators as predicted by Knack were in fact those who’d gone furthest in the process.

What Knack is doing, Haringa told me, “is almost like a paradigm shift.” It offers a way for his GameChanger unit to avoid wasting time on the 80 people out of 100—nearly all of whom look smart, well-trained, and plausible on paper—whose ideas just aren’t likely to work out.

Aptitude, skills, personal history, psychological stability, discretion, loyalty—companies at the time felt they had a need (and the right) to look into them all. That ambit is expanding once again, and this is undeniably unsettling. Should the ideas of scientists be dismissed because of the way they play a game? Should job candidates be ranked by what their Web habits say about them? Should the “data signature” of natural leaders play a role in promotion? These are all live questions today, and they prompt heavy concerns: that we will cede one of the most subtle and human of skills, the evaluation of the gifts and promise of other people, to machines; that the models will get it wrong; that some people will never get a shot in the new workforce.

scoring distance from work could violate equal-employment-opportunity standards. Marital status? Motherhood? Church membership? “Stuff like that,” Meyerle said, “we just don’t touch”—at least not in the U.S., where the legal environment is strict. Meyerle told me that Evolv has looked into these sorts of factors in its work for clients abroad, and that some of them produce “startling results.”

consider the alternative. A mountain of scholarly literature has shown that the intuitive way we now judge professional potential is rife with snap judgments and hidden biases, rooted in our upbringing or in deep neurological connections that doubtless served us well on the savanna but would seem to have less bearing on the world of work.

We may like to think that society has become more enlightened since those days, and in many ways it has, but our biases are mostly unconscious, and they can run surprisingly deep. Consider race. For a 2004 study called “Are Emily and Greg More Employable Than Lakisha and Jamal?,” the economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Marianne Bertrand put white-sounding names (Emily Walsh, Greg Baker) or black-sounding names (Lakisha Washington, Jamal Jones) on similar fictitious résumés, which they then sent out to a variety of companies in Boston and Chicago. To get the same number of callbacks, they learned, they needed to either send out half again as many résumés with black names as those with white names, or add eight extra years of relevant work experience to the résumés with black names.

a sociologist at Northwestern, spent parts of the three years from 2006 to 2008 interviewing professionals from elite investment banks, consultancies, and law firms about how they recruited, interviewed, and evaluated candidates, and concluded that among the most important factors driving their hiring recommendations were—wait for it—shared leisure interests.

Lacking “reliable predictors of future performance,” Rivera writes, “assessors purposefully used their own experiences as models of merit.” Former college athletes “typically prized participation in varsity sports above all other types of involvement.” People who’d majored in engineering gave engineers a leg up, believing they were better prepared.

the prevailing system of hiring and management in this country involves a level of dysfunction that should be inconceivable in an economy as sophisticated as ours. Recent survey data collected by the Corporate Executive Board, for example, indicate that nearly a quarter of all new hires leave their company within a year of their start date, and that hiring managers wish they’d never extended an offer to one out of every five members on their team

In the late 1990s, as these assessments shifted from paper to digital formats and proliferated, data scientists started doing massive tests of what makes for a successful customer-support technician or salesperson. This has unquestionably improved the quality of the workers at many firms.

In 2010, however, Xerox switched to an online evaluation that incorporates personality testing, cognitive-skill assessment, and multiple-choice questions about how the applicant would handle specific scenarios that he or she might encounter on the job. An algorithm behind the evaluation analyzes the responses, along with factual information gleaned from the candidate’s application, and spits out a color-coded rating: red (poor candidate), yellow (middling), or green (hire away). Those candidates who score best, I learned, tend to exhibit a creative but not overly inquisitive personality, and participate in at least one but not more than four social networks, among many other factors. (Previous experience, one of the few criteria that Xerox had explicitly screened for in the past, turns out to have no bearing on either productivity or retention

When Xerox started using the score in its hiring decisions, the quality of its hires immediately improved. The rate of attrition fell by 20 percent in the initial pilot period, and over time, the number of promotions rose. Xerox still interviews all candidates in person before deciding to hire them, Morse told me, but, she added, “We’re getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don’t even want to interview anymore”

Gone are the days, Ostberg told me, when, say, a small survey of college students would be used to predict the statistical validity of an evaluation tool. “We’ve got a data set of 347,000 actual employees who have gone through these different types of assessments or tools,” he told me, “and now we have performance-outcome data, and we can split those and slice and dice by industry and location.”

Evolv’s tests allow companies to capture data about everybody who applies for work, and everybody who gets hired—a complete data set from which sample bias, long a major vexation for industrial-organization psychologists, simply disappears. The sheer number of observations that this approach makes possible allows Evolv to say with precision which attributes matter more to the success of retail-sales workers (decisiveness, spatial orientation, persuasiveness) or customer-service personnel at call centers (rapport-building)

There are some data that Evolv simply won’t use, out of a concern that the information might lead to systematic bias against whole classes of people

the idea that hiring was a science fell out of favor. But now it’s coming back, thanks to new technologies and methods of analysis that are cheaper, faster, and much-wider-ranging than what we had before

what most excites him are the possibilities that arise from monitoring the entire life cycle of a worker at any given company.

Now the two companies are working together to marry pre-hire assessments to an increasing array of post-hire data: about not only performance and duration of service but also who trained the employees; who has managed them; whether they were promoted to a supervisory role, and how quickly; how they performed in that role; and why they eventually left.

What begins with an online screening test for entry-level workers ends with the transformation of nearly every aspect of hiring, performance assessment, and management.

I turned to Sandy Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT. In recent years, Pentland has pioneered the use of specialized electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees’ interactions as they go about their days. The badges capture all sorts of information about formal and informal conversations: their length; the tone of voice and gestures of the people involved; how much those people talk, listen, and interrupt; the degree to which they demonstrate empathy and extroversion; and more. Each badge generates about 100 data points a minute.

he tried the badges out on about 2,500 people, in 21 different organizations, and learned a number of interesting lessons. About a third of team performance, he discovered, can usually be predicted merely by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. (Too many is as much of a problem as too few.) Using data gathered by the badges, he was able to predict which teams would win a business-plan contest, and which workers would (rightly) say they’d had a “productive” or “creative” day. Not only that, but he claimed that his researchers had discovered the “data signature” of natural leaders, whom he called “charismatic connectors” and all of whom, he reported, circulate actively, give their time democratically to others, engage in brief but energetic conversations, and listen at least as much as they talk.

His group is developing apps to allow team members to view their own metrics more or less in real time, so that they can see, relative to the benchmarks of highly successful employees, whether they’re getting out of their offices enough, or listening enough, or spending enough time with people outside their own team.

Torrents of data are routinely collected by American companies and now sit on corporate servers, or in the cloud, awaiting analysis. Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction). E‑mail, of course, presents an especially rich vein to be mined for insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior.

people analytics will ultimately have a vastly larger impact on the economy than the algorithms that now trade on Wall Street or figure out which ads to show us. He reminded me that we’ve witnessed this kind of transformation before in the history of management science. Near the turn of the 20th century, both Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford famously paced the factory floor with stopwatches, to improve worker efficiency.

“The quantities of data that those earlier generations were working with,” he said, “were infinitesimal compared to what’s available now. There’s been a real sea change in the past five years, where the quantities have just grown so large—petabytes, exabytes, zetta—that you start to be able to do things you never could before.”

People analytics will unquestionably provide many workers with more options and more power. Gild, for example, helps companies find undervalued software programmers, working indirectly to raise those people’s pay. Other companies are doing similar work. One called Entelo, for instance, specializes in using algorithms to identify potentially unhappy programmers who might be receptive to a phone cal

He sees it not only as a boon to a business’s productivity and overall health but also as an important new tool that individual employees can use for self-improvement: a sort of radically expanded The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, custom-written for each of us, or at least each type of job, in the workforce.

the most exotic development in people analytics today is the creation of algorithms to assess the potential of all workers, across all companies, all the time.

The way Gild arrives at these scores is not simple. The company’s algorithms begin by scouring the Web for any and all open-source code, and for the coders who wrote it. They evaluate the code for its simplicity, elegance, documentation, and several other factors, including the frequency with which it’s been adopted by other programmers. For code that was written for paid projects, they look at completion times and other measures of productivity. Then they look at questions and answers on social forums such as Stack Overflow, a popular destination for programmers seeking advice on challenging projects. They consider how popular a given coder’s advice is, and how widely that advice ranges.

The algorithms go further still. They assess the way coders use language on social networks from LinkedIn to Twitter; the company has determined that certain phrases and words used in association with one another can distinguish expert programmers from less skilled ones. Gild knows these phrases and words are associated with good coding because it can correlate them with its evaluation of open-source code, and with the language and online behavior of programmers in good positions at prestigious companies.

having made those correlations, Gild can then score programmers who haven’t written open-source code at all, by analyzing the host of clues embedded in their online histories. They’re not all obvious, or easy to explain. Vivienne Ming, Gild’s chief scientist, told me that one solid predictor of strong coding is an affinity for a particular Japanese manga site.

Gild’s CEO, Sheeroy Desai, told me he believes his company’s approach can be applied to any occupation characterized by large, active online communities, where people post and cite individual work, ask and answer professional questions, and get feedback on projects. Graphic design is one field that the company is now looking at, and many scientific, technical, and engineering roles might also fit the bill. Regardless of their occupation, most people leave “data exhaust” in their wake, a kind of digital aura that can reveal a lot about a potential hire.

professionally relevant personality traits can be judged effectively merely by scanning Facebook feeds and photos. LinkedIn, of course, captures an enormous amount of professional data and network information, across just about every profession. A controversial start-up called Klout has made its mission the measurement and public scoring of people’s online social influence.

Mullainathan expressed amazement at how little most creative and professional workers (himself included) know about what makes them effective or ineffective in the office. Most of us can’t even say with any certainty how long we’ve spent gathering information for a given project, or our pattern of information-gathering, never mind know which parts of the pattern should be reinforced, and which jettisoned. As Mullainathan put it, we don’t know our own “production function.”

Over time, better job-matching technologies are likely to begin serving people directly, helping them see more clearly which jobs might suit them and which companies could use their skills. In the future, Gild plans to let programmers see their own profiles and take skills challenges to try to improve their scores. It intends to show them its estimates of their market value, too, and to recommend coursework that might allow them to raise their scores even more. Not least, it plans to make accessible the scores of typical hires at specific companies, so that software engineers can better see the profile they’d need to land a particular job

Knack, for its part, is making some of its video games available to anyone with a smartphone, so people can get a better sense of their strengths, and of the fields in which their strengths would be most valued. (Palo Alto High School recently adopted the games to help students assess careers.) Ultimately, the company hopes to act as matchmaker between a large network of people who play its games (or have ever played its games) and a widening roster of corporate clients, each with its own specific profile for any given type of job.

When I began my reporting for this story, I was worried that people analytics, if it worked at all, would only widen the divergent arcs of our professional lives, further gilding the path of the meritocratic elite from cradle to grave, and shutting out some workers more definitively. But I now believe the opposite is likely to happen, and that we’re headed toward a labor market that’s fairer to people at every stage of their careers

For decades, as we’ve assessed people’s potential in the professional workforce, the most important piece of data—the one that launches careers or keeps them grounded—has been educational background: typically, whether and where people went to college, and how they did there. Over the past couple of generations, colleges and universities have become the gatekeepers to a prosperous life. A degree has become a signal of intelligence and conscientiousness, one that grows stronger the more selective the school and the higher a student’s GPA, that is easily understood by employers, and that, until the advent of people analytics, was probably unrivaled in its predictive powers.

the limitations of that signal—the way it degrades with age, its overall imprecision, its many inherent biases, its extraordinary cost—are obvious. “Academic environments are artificial environments,” Laszlo Bock, Google’s senior vice president of people operations, told The New York Times in June. “People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment,” which is often quite different from the workplace.

because one’s college history is such a crucial signal in our labor market, perfectly able people who simply couldn’t sit still in a classroom at the age of 16, or who didn’t have their act together at 18, or who chose not to go to graduate school at 22, routinely get left behind for good. That such early factors so profoundly affect career arcs and hiring decisions made two or three decades later is, on its face, absurd.

I spoke with managers at a lot of companies who are using advanced analytics to reevaluate and reshape their hiring, and nearly all of them told me that their research is leading them toward pools of candidates who didn’t attend college—for tech jobs, for high-end sales positions, for some managerial roles. In some limited cases, this is because their analytics revealed no benefit whatsoever to hiring people with college degrees; in other cases, and more often, it’s because they revealed signals that function far better than college history,

Google, too, is hiring a growing number of nongraduates. Many of the people I talked with reported that when it comes to high-paying and fast-track jobs, they’re reducing their preference for Ivy Leaguers and graduates of other highly selective schools.

This process is just beginning. Online courses are proliferating, and so are online markets that involve crowd-sourcing. Both arenas offer new opportunities for workers to build skills and showcase competence. Neither produces the kind of instantly recognizable signals of potential that a degree from a selective college, or a first job at a prestigious firm, might. That’s a problem for traditional hiring managers, because sifting through lots of small signals is so difficult and time-consuming.

all of these new developments raise philosophical questions. As professional performance becomes easier to measure and see, will we become slaves to our own status and potential, ever-focused on the metrics that tell us how and whether we are measuring up? Will too much knowledge about our limitations hinder achievement and stifle our dreams? All I can offer in response to these questions, ironically, is my own gut sense, which leads me to feel cautiously optimistic.

Google’s understanding of the promise of analytics is probably better than anybody else’s, and the company has been changing its hiring and management practices as a result of its ongoing analyses. (Brainteasers are no longer used in interviews, because they do not correlate with job success; GPA is not considered for anyone more than two years out of school, for the same reason—the list goes on.) But for all of Google’s technological enthusiasm, these same practices are still deeply human. A real, live person looks at every résumé the company receives. Hiring decisions are made by committee and are based in no small part on opinions formed during structured interviews.

Your brain engages in the same sort of prospection to provide its own instant answers, which come in the form of emotions. The main purpose of emotions is to guide future behavior and moral judgments, according to researchers in a new field called prospective psychology. Emotions enable you to empathize with others by predicting their reactions.

paid special attention to unexpected novelties because that was how they learned to avoid punishment and win rewards.

If traditional psychological theory had been correct, these people would have spent a lot of time ruminating. But they actually thought about the future three times more often than the past,

If Homo prospectus takes the really long view, does he become morbid? That was a longstanding assumption in psychologists’ “terror management theory,” which held that humans avoid thinking about the future because they fear death. The theory was explored in hundreds of experiments assigning people to think about their own deaths. One common response was to become more assertive about one’s cultural values, like becoming more patriotic.

er parents divorced when she was a toddler, and she was raised in a crowded Brooklyn apartment by her mother, her mother’s sister and her grandparents, all of whom unstintingly adored her

“Four loving adults had made me the center of their lives

Always the smartest kid in the room (she was a remarkable test-taker), Turkle flourished early as an intellectually confident person, easily winning a scholarship to Radcliffe, support for graduate school at Harvard

Newly graduated from Radcliffe, she was in Paris during the May 1968 uprising and was shocked by the responses of most French thinkers to what was happening in the streets

Each in turn, she observed, filtered the originality of the scene through his own theories.

Few saw these galvanizing events as the demonstration they so clearly were of a hungry demand for new relations between the individual and society.

The anecdotes that illustrate this marriage encapsulate, in an inspired way, the dilemma Turkle has spent her whole life exploring:

My interests were moving from ideas in the abstract to the impact of ideas on personal identity. How did new political ideas change how people saw themselves? And what made some ideas more appealing than others?”

For the people around her, it embodied “the science of getting computers to do things that would be considered intelligent if done by people.” Nothing more exciting. Who could resist such a possibility? Who would resist it? No one, it turned out.

“The worst thing, to Seymour,” she writes, would have been “to give children a computer that presented them only with games or opaque applications. … A learning opportunity would be missed because you would have masked the intellectual power of the machine. Sadly, this is what has happened.”

In a memoir written by a person of accomplishment, the interwoven account of childhood and early influences is valuable only insofar as it sheds light on the evolution of the individual into the author of the memoir we are reading.

with Turkle’s story of her marriage to Seymour Papert her personal adventures struck gold.

“good conversation” was valued “more highly than common courtesy. … To be interesting, Seymour did not have to be kind. He had to be brilliant.” And if you weren’t the sort of brilliant that he was, you were something less than real to him.

electrified

the rupture in understanding between someone devoted to the old-fashioned practice of humanist values and someone who doesn’t know what the word “human” really means.

But it’s only a short-term measure, mainly designed to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic and its immediate aftermath.

everyone says that turning those longer-term plans into law will be much harder than passing the ARP.

But what if everyone is wrong?

Just about every analyst I follow asserted, almost until the last moment, that $1.9 trillion was an opening bid for the rescue plan and that the eventual bill would be substantially smaller

Instead, Democrats — who, by standard media convention, are always supposed to be in “disarray” — held together and did virtually everything they had promised. How did that happen?

Much of the post-stimulus commentary emphasizes the lessons Democrats learned from the Obama years, when softening policies in an attempt to win bipartisan support achieved nothing but a weaker-than-needed economic recovery

only part of the story

Republicans have lost their knack for demonizing progressive policies.

There’s certainly plenty of demonization out there: Vast numbers of Republican voters believe that Biden is president thanks only to invisible vote fraud, and some even buy the story that it was masterminded by a global conspiracy of pedophiles.

unsuccessful in convincing voters that they’ll be hurt by Biden’s spending and taxing plans.

Part of the answer, surely, is that this time around Republican politicians and pundits have been remarkably low energy in criticizing Biden’s policies.

Where are the bloodcurdling warnings about runaway inflation and currency debasement, not to mention death panels?

the most important reason Trump failed to repeal the Affordable Care Act was that Republicans have largely forgotten how to govern.

They couldn’t do the hard thinking required to settle on a plausible line of attack

while Democrats were pushing through tax credits that will cut child poverty nearly in half and subsidies that will make health insurance more affordable, Republicans were focused on cancel culture and Dr. Seuss.

Bear in mind that both infrastructure spending and raising taxes on the rich are very popular.

Republicans will have to come up with something beyond boilerplate denunciations of socialists killing jobs. Will they? Probably not.

Democrats know what they want to achieve and are willing to put in the work to make it happen — while Republicans don’t and aren’t.

This insight goes a long way to explaining the current fetishization of experience, especially if it is (redundantly) “lived.” Black people from all walks of life find themselves deferred to by non-blacks

black people certainly don’t all “feel” or “experience” the same things. Nor do they all "experience" the same event in an identical way. Finally, even when their experiences are similar, they don’t all think about or interpret their experiences in the same way.

we must begin to attend in a serious way to heterodox black voices

This need is especially urgent given the ideological homogeneity of the “antiracist” outlook and efforts of elite institutions, including media, corporations, and an overwhelmingly progressive academia. For the arbiters of what it means to be black that dominate these institutions, there is a fairly narrowly prescribed “authentic” black narrative, black perspective, and black position on every issue that matters.

When we hear the demand to “listen to black voices,” what is usually meant is “listen to the right black voices.”

Many non-black people have heard a certain construction of “the black voice” so often that they are perplexed by black people who don’t fit the familiar model.

Similarly, many activists are not in fact “pro-black”: they are pro a rather specific conception of “blackness” that is not necessarily endorsed by all black people.

This is where our new website, Free Black Thought (FBT), seeks to intervene in the national conversation. FBT honors black individuals for their distinctive, diverse, and heterodox perspectives, and offers up for all to hear a polyphony, perhaps even a cacophony, of different and differing black voices.

The practical effects of the new antiracism are everywhere to be seen, but in few places more clearly than in our children’s schools

one might reasonably question what could be wrong with teaching children “antiracist” precepts. But the details here are full of devils.

To take an example that could affect millions of students, the state of California has adopted a statewide Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum (ESMC) that reflects “antiracist” ideas. The ESMC’s content inadvertently confirms that contemporary antiracism is often not so much an extension of the civil rights movement but in certain respects a tacit abandonment of its ideals.

It has thus been condemned as a “perversion of history” by Dr. Clarence Jones, MLK’s legal counsel, advisor, speechwriter, and Scholar in Residence at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Institute at Stanford University:

Essentialist thinking about race has also gained ground in some schools. For example, in one elite school, students “are pressured to conform their opinions to those broadly associated with their race and gender and to minimize or dismiss individual experiences that don’t match those assumptions.” These students report feeling that “they must never challenge any of the premises of [the school’s] ‘antiracist’ teachings.”

In contrast, the non-white students were taught that they were “folx (sic) who do not benefit from their social identities,” and “have little to no privilege and power.”

The children with “white” in their identity map were taught that they were part of the “dominant culture” which has been “created and maintained…to hold power and stay in power.” They were also taught that they had “privilege” and that “those with privilege have power over others.

Or consider the third-grade students at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School in Cupertino, California

Or take New York City’s public school system, one of the largest educators of non-white children in America. In an effort to root out “implicit bias,” former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza had his administrators trained in the dangers of “white supremacy culture.”

A slide from a training presentation listed “perfectionism,” “individualism,” “objectivity” and “worship of the written word” as white supremacist cultural traits to be “dismantled,”

Finally, some schools are adopting antiracist ideas of the sort espoused by Ibram X. Kendi, according to whom, if metrics such as tests and grades reveal disparities in achievement, the project of measuring achievement must itself be racist.

Parents are justifiably worried about such innovations. What black parent wants her child to hear that grading or math are “racist” as a substitute for objective assessment and real learning? What black parent wants her child told she shouldn’t worry about working hard, thinking objectively, or taking a deep interest in reading and writing because these things are not authentically black?

Clearly, our children’s prospects for success depend on the public being able to have an honest and free-ranging discussion about this new antiracism and its utilization in schools. Even if some black people have adopted its tenets, many more, perhaps most, hold complex perspectives that draw from a constellation of rather different ideologies.

So let’s listen to what some heterodox black people have to say about the new antiracism in our schools.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, points to a self-defeating feature of Kendi-inspired grading and testing reforms: If we reject high academic standards for black children, they are unlikely to rise to “those same rejected standards” and racial disparity is unlikely to decrease

Chloé Valdary, the founder of Theory of Enchantment, worries that antiracism may “reinforce a shallow dogma of racial essentialism by describing black and white people in generalizing ways” and discourage “fellowship among peers of different races.”

We hope it’s obvious that the point we’re trying to make is not that everyone should accept uncritically everything these heterodox black thinkers say. Our point in composing this essay is that we all desperately need to hear what these thinkers say so we can have a genuine conversation

We promote no particular politics or agenda beyond a desire to offer a wide range of alternatives to the predictable fare emanating from elite mainstream outlets. At FBT, Marxists rub shoulders with laissez-faire libertarians. We have no desire to adjudicate who is “authentically black” or whom to prefer.

As violence continues to escalate, so too do fears that armed groups who oppose the military coup are positioning themselves to join the fray.

In a statement on Twitter, the U.S. Ambassador to Myanmar, Thomas L. Vajda, denounced what he described as "horrifying" bloodshed and called for "an immediate end to the violence and the restoration of the democratically elected government." "These are not the actions of a professional military or police force," Vajda said. "Myanmar's people have spoken clearly: they do not want to live under military rule."

This 76th Myanmar armed forces day will stay engraved as a day of terror and dishonour," wrote the bloc's delegation to the country.

"A failed state in Myanmar has the potential to draw in all the big powers - including the US, China, India, Russia, and Japan - in a way that could lead to a serious international crisis," he wrote on Twitter.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A surge in border crossings by migrant children appeared to catch a White House focused on the pandemic off guard and offered Republicans an opening as they seek to slow his momentum -- and build their 2022 attack lines against Biden's narrow Democratic congressional majority.

And with its customary sense of timing, North Korea is testing the new commander-in-chief with missile launches that are ratcheting up tensions in a showdown that no president in the last 70 years has managed to solve.

The President has maintained approval ratings above 50% in his early months in office because he arrived with a mandate to tackle the pandemic head on and executed his agenda with a steady approach that was the antithesis of the erratic

Unlike the coronavirus crisis that has killed more than half-a-million Americans, the issues that are now at the top of the nightly newscasts have defied bipartisan consensus for decades -- and will provide a severe test of the President's calls for national unity and cooperation between Democrats and Republicans.

Two years ago, Democrats excoriated Trump administration officials for its handling of the crisis at the border. Now the problem is squarely within Biden's domain and government resources are once again strained to the brink as more than 600 unaccompanied children cross the Mexico border each day.

"We're not seeing any action. Our experience has taught us that now is the time to act. We need Congress to get on board. We need a recognition of the fact that there's a crisis on the Southwest border," Roy Villareal, who served as chief patrol agent in the Tucson sector from 2018 to 2020, told CNN's Priscilla Alvarez.

"This is just the first step in a process of providing greater access to the media," Psaki said during a news briefing.

"It's a huge problem. I'm not going to pretend that it's not. It's a huge problem," Harris said in remarks that appeared to be somewhat of a do-over of the administration's initial downplaying of the situation.

"I asked her, the VP today, because she's the most qualified person to do it, to lead our efforts with Mexico and the Northern Triangle, and the countries that can help, need help in stemming the movement of so many folks, stemming the migration to our southern border," Biden said on Wednesday.

If there were a prize for the busiest language, then a language like Kabardian, also known as Circassian and spoken in the Caucasus, would win

The prize for most economical language could go to certain colloquial dialects of Indonesian that are rarely written but represent the daily reality of Indonesian in millions of mouths

Experiments have shown that this is often true to a faint, flickering degree a psychologist can detect in the artifice of experimental conditions

In a language where final sounds take the accent, such sounds tend to hold on longer because they are so loud and clear—you’re less likely to mumble it and people listening are more likely to hear it

When a language seems especially telegraphic, usually another factor has come into play: Enough adults learned it at a certain stage in its history that, given the difficulty of learning a new language after childhood, it became a kind of stripped-down “schoolroom” version of itself

Even if languages’ differences in busyness can’t be taken as windows on psychological alertness, the differences remain awesome