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It’s easy to take the zipper for granted today, but before it was invented, getting (and staying) dressed involved securing clothing with ropes, ties, buttons or other fasteners.

After years of attempts, Bell achieved his goal of transmitting sound over a wire, and on March 7, 1876, obtained his first U.S. Patent for a device he labeled as “Improvement on Telegraphy”—now better known as the telephone.

The first World’s Fair to take place in the United States was held in Philadelphia in 1876, and also celebrated the 100th anniversary of the country’s founding.

Then, in 1893, inventor Whitcomb L. Judson received a patent for his “clasp locker” shoe fastener, and immediately partnered with businessman Colonel Lewis Walker to launch the Universal Fastener Company and manufacture his invention

Along with the zipper, the Garis-Cochran Dishwashing Machine was also first introduced to the public at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, in a display drawing crowds curious about the contraption capable of thoroughly washing and drying 240 dishes in two minutes. The crowd-pleasing exhibit was more than a decade in the making. In 1883, Ohio entrepreneur Josephine Garis Cochran grew frustrated with the amount of time it took to clean up after dinner parties, reportedly saying, “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself.” And she did.

One of the biggest challenges that arose during the early days of electricity was getting it from the power source to an individual device. By the 1880s, entire houses were being wired for electricity, but electrical appliances had to be connected to the home’s main power source directly, posing serious safety risks to members of the household.

April 30, 1939, New York City: This is the scene viewed on the television receivers in the metropolitan area, as the National Broadcasting Company inaugurated the first regular television service to the American public telecasting the ceremonies marking the opening of the New York World's Fair. Bettmann via Getty Images

May 1, 1939 saw another television milestone: the launch of a regular television broadcast schedule on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which was owned by RCA.

Fairgoers could take what was advertised as “America’s first television tour” (presented by NBC), where they would learn about the history of the medium, as well as the science and engineering that made its broadcast possible.

In the age of smartphones, it’s easy to identify the touchscreen demonstration at the World’s Fair as a significant technological turning point, but according to Jack Neely, executive director of the Knoxville History Project and crowd controller at the World’s Fair, that wasn’t apparent at the time. “It was...one of those things you had to look fast to notice,” Neely told the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon in a 2017 interview.

Among Latino, Black and Native American households, more than 50% had serious financial problems, while 29% of white households did.

53% of Houston renters reporting trouble paying rent.

31% reported losing all their savings. And among Latino and Native American families, just over a quarter of households report they depleted their savings.

19% of U.S. households report losing all of their savings during the COVID-19 crisis and currently having no savings to fall back on.

Half of households report at least one person in the home has had serious problems with depression, anxiety, stress or sleep in recent months.

More than two-thirds of American households with children in K-12 last school year said their children fell behind in their learning because of the COVID-19 outbreak. This includes 36% who said children "fell behind a lot."

A quarter of Asian American adults say that in the past few months they have feared someone might threaten or physically attack them or members of their household because of their race/ethnicity. The proportion of Native Americans fearing threats and attacks was 22%, and for Black households it was 21%

'Oh my gosh, I have kids, I have family, my wife is from Taiwan and I'm fearful for them,' " he says.

Our poll found that among the 1 in 5 households reporting a problem getting care for a serious medical condition, 76% of those reported that there was a negative health consequence as a result.

to carry the “great experiment of liberty” to the edge of the continent: to “overspread and to possess the whole of the [land] which Providence has given us,” O’Sullivan wrote. The survival of American freedom depended on it.

Meanwhile, the question of whether or not slavery would be allowed in the new western states shadowed every conversation about the frontier. In 1820, the Missouri Compromise had attempted to resolve this question: It had admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the fragile balance in Congress. More important, it had stipulated that in the future, slavery would be prohibited north of the southern boundary of Missouri (the 36º30’ parallel) in the rest of the Louisiana Purchase.

They did not necessarily object to slavery itself, but they resented the way its expansion seemed to interfere with their own economic opportunity.

In 1837, American settlers in Texas joined with their Tejano neighbors (Texans of Spanish origin) and won independence from Mexico. They petitioned to join the United States as a slave state.

This promised to upset the careful balance that the Missouri Compromise had achieved, and the annexation of Texas and other Mexican territories did not become a political priority until the enthusiastically expansionist cotton planter James K. Polk was elected to the presidency in 1844. Thanks to the maneuvering of Polk and his allies, Texas joined the union as a slave state in February 1846; in June, after negotiations with Great Britain, Oregon joined as a free state.

Wilmot’s measure failed to pass, but it made explicit once again the sectional conflict that haunted the process of westward expansion.

In 1848, the Treaty of Guadelupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican War and added more than 1 million square miles, an area larger than the Louisiana Purchase, to the United States. The acquisition of this land re-opened the question that the Missouri Compromise had ostensibly settled: What would be the status of slavery in new American territories? After two years of increasingly volatile debate over the issue, Kentucky Senator Henry Clay proposed another compromise. It had four parts: first, California would enter the Union as a free state; second, the status of slavery in the rest of the Mexican territory would be decided by the people who lived there; third, the slave trade (but not slavery) would be abolished in Washington, D.C.; and fourth, a new Fugitive Slave Act would enable Southerners to reclaim runaway slaves who had escaped to Northern states where slavery was not allowed.

A decade later, the civil war in Kansas over the expansion of slavery was followed by a national civil war over the same issue. As Thomas Jefferson had predicted, it was the question of slavery in the West–a place that seemed to be the emblem of American freedom–that proved to be “the knell of the union.”

They also provided up to three meals a day for children, with some offering prepared meals for mothers to take with them when they picked up their kids.

“The ones that we often hear about were the ‘model’ day nurseries that were set up at airplane factories [on the West coast],” says Michel. “Those were ones where the federal funding came very quickly, and some of the leading voices in the early childhood education movement…became quickly involved in setting [them] up,” she says. 

For these centers, organizers enlisted architects to build attractive buildings that would cater to the needs of childcare, specifically. “There was a lot of publicity about those, but those were unusual. Most of the childcare centers were kind of makeshift. They were set up in [places like] church basements.”

When the World War II childcare centers first opened, many women were reluctant to hand their children over to them. According to Chris M. Herbst, a professor of public affairs at Arizona State University who has written about these programs in the Journal of Labor Economics, a lot of these women ended up having positive experiences.

As the war ended in August 1945, the Federal Works Agency announced it would stop funding childcare as soon as possible. Parents responded by sending the agency 1,155 letters, 318 wires, 794 postcards and petitions with 3,647 signatures urging the government to keep them open. In response, the U.S. government provided additional funding for childcare through February 1946. After that, it was over.

This was during the Cold War, a time when anti-childcare activists pointed to the fact that the Soviet Union funded childcare as an argument for why the United States shouldn’t. President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, arguing that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”

U.S. history that the country came close to instituting universal childcare.

Ukraine is also receiving vital private-sector assistance, notably the delivery of Starlink internet terminals, which are helping maintain communications

All I can do is to apply history, as there is no model from political science or economics that can really help us here.

1. Do the Russians manage to take Kyiv in a matter of two, three, four weeks or never?

At least one military analyst I respect said late last week that the Russian invasion force has around two weeks left before serious logistical and supply problems force Putin seriously to the negotiating table.

On the other hand, Western media seem over-eager to cover news of Russian reverses, and insufficiently attentive to the harsh fact that the invaders continue to advance on more than one front.

A better analogy than the Winter War with Finland may be the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that began in December 1979.

Economic warfare between 1914 and 1918 was not a substitute for sending British armies to fight on the European continent, just as it had not been in the Napoleonic Wars against France.

What I cannot tell is whether or not these weapons and other equipment will suffice to sustain Ukrainian resistance over the coming weeks.

But the Ukrainians have no real answers to higher-altitude bombardment and missile attacks.

2. Do the sanctions precipitate such a severe economic contraction in Russia that Putin cannot achieve victory?

I have heard it said that the breadth and depth of the sanctions imposed on Russia make them unprecedented. I disagree

recalls but does not quite match the sanctions that Britain and its allies imposed on Germany at the outbreak of World War

It seems there are seven distinct historical processes at work and it’s not clear which is going fastest.

Then, as now, it was possible for an increasingly authoritarian government to impose economic controls and divert resources away from civilian consumption to the war effort, while blaming the resulting deprivation on the enemy

We should remember that those measures did not defeat Germany, however, because — like Russia today — it had the resources to be self-sufficient

no one should forget that self-sufficiency is possible for Russia, albeit at the price of severe austerity, whether it is a choice or a consequence of war.

China is able to help Russia in ways that could mitigate the economic shock, just as for years it has helped Iran to circumvent U.S. sanctions by buying its oil.

Unlike Soviet citizens, who were accustomed to a state monopoly on communications, today’s Russians have come to rely as much as we do on Big Tech. Being cut off from the metaverse may prove a more psychologically painful deprivation than shortages of imported foods.

even a 35% quarterly decline in gross domestic product does not condemn a country to military defeat if its planes can still fly and its tanks still fire rounds.

3. Does the combination of military and economic crisis precipitate a palace coup against Putin?

4. Does the risk of downfall lead Putin to desperate measures (carrying out his nuclear threat)? 

The people with the power to arrest Putin are the people he counts on to execute his arrest orders: Nikolai Patrushev, the head of the Security Council and, like Putin, a long-serving KGB officer; Sergei Naryshkin, the head of foreign intelligence; and Alexander Bortnikov, who heads the Federal Security Service, the successor to the KGB.

6. Does the West’s attention deficit disorder kick in before any of this?

If Putin’s goal was to deter members of NATO from offering direct military assistance to Ukraine, it seemed to have some effect.

Russian casualties are being caused by Ukrainians using arms supplied by multiple NATO countries, including the U.S. and Turkey, but they are mostly crossing into Ukraine from Poland. Might Putin therefore strike a target in eastern Poland — Lublin, say, or Przemysl?

he is surely more likely to do so if believes the U.S. would not immediately retaliate in kind against a Russian target. A key lesson of this entire crisis has been that indications of weakness on the U.S. side, which I discussed here last week, have emboldened Putin.

5. Do the Chinese keep Putin afloat but on the condition that he agrees to a compromise peace that they offer to broker?

My guess is that the Chinese make no serious diplomatic move until they are convinced Putin’s invasion is thoroughly bogged down in Ukraine’s spring mud.

I would not bet the fate of Ukraine on Russian internal politics.

Remarkably, one U.S. legislator told me last week that he “couldn’t recall an issue more obsessively followed and more unifying among” his constituents.

The only real significance of Western public outrage at Putin’s actions is the political pressure it exerts on Biden and other leaders to take a tougher line with Russia.

7. What is the collateral damage?

History shows that wars (much more than pandemics) are the most common cause of jumps in inflation.

The best-known recent illustration is the way wars in 1973 (Yom Kippur) and 1979 (Iran-Iraq) contributed to the great inflation of the Seventies

these price spikes are not confined to oil and gas but involve a host of other commodities. The prospect of this year’s Ukrainian grain harvest being disrupted means a significant surge in food prices, with all kinds of consequences, especially in developing countries.

A tsunami of war has struck Ukraine. Whether the Russian tide flows or ebbs in the coming weeks will do much to determine the course of world history for the rest of our lives.

Nor can we ignore the risks that may be lurking within the international financial system.

This is the first big crisis of Cold War II, which is in many ways like a mirror image of Cold War I, with China the senior partner, Russia the junior, and a hot war in Eastern Europe rather than East Asia (it was Korea’s turn in 1950).

I do not know how the crisis will turn out, but I do know it will have profound consequences for the course of the superpower contest.

If the invasion of Ukraine ends in disaster for the heroic defenders of Kyiv and their comrades, another disaster may well follow — and it could occur as far away as Taiwan. Conversely, if there is justice in the world and the disaster befalls the architect of this war, that too will give birth to some fresh and unforeseeable event.

Add these seven imponderables together and you see how profoundly important the next few weeks will be.

The failure of the administration to signal that it would retaliate is of a piece with last year’s reports that Biden’s national security team was considering ruling out first use of nuclear weapons in its new national military strategy. Nuclear missiles cease to be a deterrent if one side is unwilling to use them.

Today, however, the boot is on the other foot. Not only is Putin intimidating NATO; he may have achieved something more, namely a tacit admission by the Biden administration that it would not necessarily retaliate with nuclear weapons if Russia used them.

The message is not that we should expect to bow to every misdeed or atrocity. It is that the “good guys” — granted the impossibility that we can ever reach global consensus about who these are — cannot and should not intervene militarily whenever they see bad stuff happen.

I am just completing a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of its most important lessons is that while Kennedy played a masterly diplomatic hand, it is most unlikely that America’s will could have prevailed — the Soviet nuclear weapons withdrawn from Cuba — without the underpinning threat of American force.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and even his most hawkish generals knew that America possessed an overwhelming superiority, both of conventional weapons in the Caribbean region and nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Soviet Union. US superiority of the latter was on the order of 17 to 1. And thanks to the intelligence officer Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who slipped his nation’s secrets to the West, the Americans knew that the Soviets recognized their own weakness.

Moreover, the will and solidarity of the US and its allies to confront the Soviets remained strong in the Cold War. American presidents often found themselves having to restrain the eagerness not only of the military brass, but also of some ordinary citizens, to go head to head with “the Russkies.”

The bipolar Cold War planet has been replaced by a multipolar one, in which a tenuous American superiority persists, but is no longer unchallengeable.

If you think this represents appeasement, watch the new Netflix movie “Munich: The Edge of War,” which stars Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain.

A well-briefed military friend of mine believes that the Chinese are not yet quite ready for a showdown over Taiwan, but he thinks they will seek one within a few years, confident of a local victory.

Biden deserves more sympathy than he is currently receiving for his vacillation on Ukraine. The old, moth-eaten allegation of appeasement is being levelled by his foes both at home and abroad. Yet the US cannot be expected to face down Putin alone, far less to go to war with him.

Most of America’s European “allies” — the quotation marks are emphatic — are too fearful that the Kremlin will cut off their gas supplies to provide Washington with meaningful backing. Europe’s attitude to serious foreign policy and security issues is frankly decadent.

Thus, the likelihood is that if Putin attacks Ukraine, he can secure the territory he wants without suffering serious military consequences, beyond whatever losses the courageous Ukrainians can inflict on Russian forces.

The real challenge for the West is to summon the will to punish Putin and his friends in the language they understand best — that of money. Economic sanctions against Russia as a country are right, but not remotely sufficient. The only meaningful weapon is an assault upon the fortunes and lifestyles of the Kremlin’s gangster clique, held and invested around the world.

As for the US, the only party to the confrontation that matters, it seems absolutely right to do everything possible to deter Putin, and to punish him if he goes ahead with his cold-blooded plan to kill thousands of people, to score a victory that shores up his unpopular domestic polity. But one should not resort to threats, nor offer promises to the Ukrainians, that there is no intention of fulfilling.

Today we live in an entirely different strategic environment

by cutting his 1938 deal with Hitler, he bought vital time for Britain to re-arm before the war that he recognized was coming.

Harris makes a good additional point, that Hitler thought himself cheated out of a military assault on Czechoslovakia that he wanted, and expected to get. In other words, appeasement was clever.

As a historian, I do not go all the way with Harris about this. He seems right that Britain could not realistically have fought in 1938.

I still think that Chamberlain was a weak, foolish old man who shrank from unwelcome realities.

His worst contribution to history is that Munich gave appeasement — which some of us would call a recognition of realities — a bad name. My hero among historical and strategic gurus, the Oxford professor Michael Howard, often said, “If you are dealing with foreign leaders less monstrous than was Hitler, appeasement can be a very sensible policy.”

We must reluctantly acknowledge that both Russia’s Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping can commit acts of aggression in their own backyards that we are unable to prevent, and which are not worth a general war.

“This communication elevates progress on renewable energy and efficiency to a matter of energy security,” said Lisa Fischer, a programme leader at E3G,  an independent climate change think tank. “This may transform politics – geopolitical interests will no longer come at the expense of climate policy, but climate policy as a response to geopolitical challenges.”

The strategy includes importing more gas from non-Russian suppliers, boosting volumes of biomethane and renewable hydrogen production and imports, and reducing the use of fossil fuels in homes, buildings and industry more quickly by increasing energy efficiency, renewables and electrification.

The European Union has said the answer to ensure greater energy resilience is to invest in renewables, while in the meantime diversifying gas supplies and boosting underground gas storage to at least 90 per cent across the EU by 1 October

Anthony Browne, Conservative chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on the Environment, said the Ukraine crisis had shown that net zero was a matter of the UK’s national security.

the UK is significantly less reliant on Russian fossil fuels than the European Union.  The EU imports 90 percent of its gas consumption, with Russia providing around 45 percent of those imports and some countries like Germany particularly reliant. Russia also accounts for around 25 percent of oil imports and 45 percent of coal imports.

The proposal is not a done deal, however, and will need to be implemented by European member states.“It is largely unclear whether they will do so and how such measures can be financed,” said Michael Pahle, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Pahle also said there is a risk that if scaled-up targets end up not being met, failure could be attributed to overly ambitious climate policy, rather than energy security.

Factcheckers have pointed out that the main cause of increasing gas prices over the past year is disruptions to global supply and demand following the coronavirus pandemic. Only a 10th of the Keystone XL pipeline was complete when Biden cancelled it and it was not likely to become operational until 2023 at the earliest.

He added that Republicans, in thrall to “big oil”, have spent the past two decades opposing the very measures that would have made America less dependent on foreign oil and fossil fuels in general. Green technology would have shielded the US from the effects of the Ukraine crisis on global markets.

Bardella, a former senior adviser for Republicans on the House oversight committee, added: “Republicans were so vocal about how the Biden administration needed to do sanctions on Russian oil and then they start attacking him. You can’t win because everything that they do is basically an illustration of how they operate in bad faith.”

Ed Rogers, a political consultant and veteran of the Ronald Reagan and George H W Bush administrations, said: “‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ Biden is going to own whatever the economy is come November. Republicans don’t have to do anything to make that happen. People feel it for themselves, they observe for themselves.

“You don’t have to remind people too much of gas prices and overall inflation is a big macro political issue. Doing well as an incumbent is all about peace and prosperity, and prosperity is being eroded by inflation, with gas prices being a focal point.”

Democratic strategists are aware that the issue could weigh heavily on midterm voters. Bob Shrum acknowledged: “The facts don’t matter much here. If gas prices are really high, that becomes a problem for Democrats in the midterms because they’re in office. It’s just a natural tendency to blame someone under those circumstances.”

My boyfriend was supportive of my focus, but he didn’t share it. When I brought up global warming, he’d often try to comfort me: to wrap me in a hug, cue up an old episode of “Seinfeld,” offer a CBD gummy. I struggled to tell him that I didn’t need anesthesia or answers, I just wanted a relationship where we shared more of the same inquiries.

“if you do care about the same questions, it doesn’t necessarily matter if you arrive at the same answers.” Soon it wasn’t just the far-off future we’d stopped talking about, it was our dreams for the weekend. Outside of quarantine, our lives had slipped onto different rails. We broke up when it became easier not to talk about feelings at all.

relationships succeed not because you like holding hands but because you like looking in the same direction.

When another man told me he was looking for a woman with whom to visit places like Venice, in part because they were sinking into the sea, I didn’t know what to say except that I wasn’t her. As someone drawn to gray areas, I was put off by the guy who quipped that only “dumb” people were still having children.

If relationships depend on a shared fantasy of the future, then global warming does more than unsettle our environment; it creates uncertainty in our interpersonal ones.

I’ve started dating again. This time, I am swallowing my fear of sounding too anxious and am talking about climate change early on. After all, it is hard to fall in love with a person if we are not also falling in love with the future we want to create together.

I’ve found that talking about how global warming affects our lives, however casually, becomes a sort of canary in the coal mine for learning about people’s broader beliefs and behaviors. How black-and-white they see the world, how they view their role in the community, how they engage with science and systemic inequality.

I knew I wouldn’t mesh with the man who texted me “Life is better if you’re cheerful. I don’t read the news :)” but neither did I want to be with the one scheming up a walled compound of canned goods in Idaho.

She and my father had married while facing a horizon of stability. As middle-class white Americans, they saw a future of homeownership, health care and retirement funds

I don’t presume my own perspective is right, but I do know from my last relationship that I’m tired of trying to be chill. I can’t care any less than I do.

Chatting about climate change within the first few dates might not be standard yet, but the issue was the No. 1 concern for OkCupid daters in 2022, with a 368 percent increase in environmental and climate-change-related terms on profiles over the last five years

Tinder released a new campaign featuring a rendering of two people holding hands before a giant monster made of trash. “Someone to save the planet with,” it says.

I don’t think those daters just want a partner who believes in global warming: We want someone willing to grapple with it, to do the inconvenient work of reimagining our own lives in the face of it

It’s not just about when or whether to have a baby. Because global warming and pandemics go hand in hand — the progression of the first may increase the likelihood of the second — it seems likely that new long-term relationships could include both prolonged periods of staying inside and snap judgments about hitting the road.

I see now that it was not only conversations about our planet’s future that I struggled to have with my ex; it was conversations about our own future, too. It can be easy to feel as if the question of whether to have children, like rising sea levels, will be dealt with down the road.

But the future, as with the sea, does not obey its supposed bounds. If being alive right now sometimes feels like standing on a cliff, I want to be with someone who’s not afraid to peer at the frothing tides.

Not because I need to solve anything but because I don’t want a relationship built on looking away.

romantic relationships are not just distractions; they’re places for nourishment, bolstering us to face what’s outside the door.

They had become disillusioned with what they saw as an outmoded way of working. “It wasn’t how I imagined the future of architecture,” says He, who worked in OMA’s Rotterdam office before moving to China to oversee construction of the Shenzhen Stock Exchange building. “The design and construction processes were so traditional and lacking in innovation.”

XKool is at the bleeding edge of architectural AI. And it’s growing fast: over 50,000 people are already using it in China, and an English version of its image-to-image AI tool, LookX, has just been launched. Wanyu He founded the company in 2016, with others who used to work for OMA

“The problem with architects is that we almost entirely focus on images,” says Neil Leach, author of Architecture in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. “But the most revolutionary change is in the less sexy area: the automation of the entire design package, from developing initial options right through to construction. In terms of strategic thinking and real-time analysis, AI is already way beyond what human architects are capable of. This could be the final nail in the coffin of a struggling profession.”

It’s early days and, so far, the results are clunky: the Shenzhen hotel looks very much like it was designed by robots for an army of robot guests.

XKool aims to provide an all-in-one platform, using AI to assist with everything from generating masterplan layouts, using given parameters such as daylight requirements, space standards and local planning regulations, right down to generating interiors and construction details. It has also developed a tool to transform a 2D image of a building into a 3D model, and turn a given list of room sizes into floor plans

She and her colleagues were inspired to launch their startup after witnessing AlphaGo, the first computer program to defeat a human champion at the Chinese board game Go in 2016. “What if we could introduce this intelligence to our way of working with algorithmic design?” she says. “CAD [computer aided design] dates from the 70s. BIM [building information modelling] is from the 90s. Now that we have the power of cloud computing and big data, it’s time for something new.”

“We have to be careful,” says Martha Tsigkari, head of applied research and development at Foster + Partners in London. “It can be dangerous if you don’t know what data was used to train the model, or if you haven’t classified it properly. Data is everything: if you put garbage in, you’ll get garbage out

The implications for data privacy and intellectual property are huge – is our data secured from other users? Is it being used to retrain these models in the background?”

Although the actual science needed to make such things possible is a long way off, AI does enable the kind of calculations and predictive modelling that was impossibly time-consuming before

Tsigkari’s team has also developed a simulation engine that allows realtime analysis of floor plans – showing how well connected one part of a building is to another – giving designers instant feedback on the implications of moving a wall or piece of furniture.

One told me they now regularly use ChatGPT to summarise local planning policies and compare the performance of different materials for, say, insulation. “It’s the kind of task you would have given a junior to do,” they say. “It’s not perfect, but it makes fewer mistakes than someone who hasn’t written a specification before.”

Others say their teams regularly use Midjourney to help brainstorm ideas during the concept phase. “We had a client wanting to build mosques in Abu Dhabi,” one architect told me. “I could quickly generate a range of options to show them, to get the conversation going. It’s like an instant mood board.”

“I like to think we are augmenting, not replacing, architects,” says Carl Christiansen, a Norwegian software engineer who in 2016 co-founded AI tool Spacemaker, which was acquired by tech giant Autodesk in 2021 for $240m, and then rebranded as Forma. “I call it ‘AI on the shoulder’ to emphasise that you’re still in control.” Forma can rapidly evaluate a large range of factors – from sun and wind to noise and energy needs – and create the perfect site layout. What’s more, its interface is designed to be legible to non-experts.

The former federal judge and Stanford law professor Michael McConnell cautions that “we are talking about empowering partisan politicians such as state Secretaries of State to disqualify their political opponents from the ballot … If abused, this is profoundly anti-democratic.” He also believes, as we do, that insurrection and rebellion are “demanding terms, connoting only the most serious of uprisings against the government,” and that Section 3 “should not be defined down to include mere riots or civil disturbances.” McConnell worries that broad definitions of insurrection and rebellion, with the “lack of concern about enforcement procedure … could empower partisans to seek disqualification every time a politician supports or speaks in support of the objectives of a political riot.”

We share these concerns, and we concur that the answer to them lies in the wisdom of judicial decisions as to what constitutes “insurrection,” “rebellion,” or “aid or comfort to the enemies” of the Constitution under Section 3.

When a secretary of state or other state official charged with the responsibility of approving the placement of a candidate’s name on an official ballot either disqualifies Trump from appearing on a ballot or declares him eligible, that determination will assuredly be challenged in court by someone with the standing to do so, whether another candidate or an eligible voter in the relevant jurisdiction. Given the urgent importance of the question, such a case will inevitably land before the Supreme Court, where it will in turn test the judiciary’s ability to disentangle constitutional interpretation from political temptation

(Additionally, with or without court action, the second sentence of Section 3 contains a protection against abuse of this extraordinary power by these elections officers: Congress’s ability to remove an egregious disqualification by a supermajority of each House.)

The entire process, with all its sometimes frail but thus far essentially effective constitutional guardrails, will frame the effort to determine whether the threshold of “insurrection” or “rebellion” was reached and which officials, executive or legislative, were responsible for the January 6 insurrection and the broader efforts to reverse the election’s results.

The process that will play out over the coming year could give rise to momentary social unrest and even violence. But so could the failure to engage in this constitutionally mandated process. For our part, we would pray for neither unrest nor violence from the American people during a process of faithful application and enforcement of their Constitution.

f Donald Trump were to be reelected, how could any citizen trust that he would uphold the oath of office he would take upon his inauguration? As recently as last December, the former president posted on Truth Social his persistent view that the last presidential election was a “Massive Fraud,” one that “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

No person who sought to overthrow our Constitution and thereafter declared that it should be “terminated” and that he be immediately returned to the presidency can in good faith take the oath that Article II, Section 1 demands of any president-elect

The “authoritarian impasse” model focuses on property rights and the supposed inevitability that at some point an authoritarian regime will succumb to the temptation to abuse them unleashing a downward spiral into a condition Posen compares to that of Russia, Turkey or Venezuela.

In Pettis’s model, based on macroeconomic flows - investment, consumption, government spending - what ultimately sets the limit on growth is the rate at which the economy can productively absorb new physical assets. When that limit is reached, the investment-driven growth model becomes dysfunctional. This too provides a powerful way of understanding China’s current impasse.

What both these strong models also have in common is that neither has a very precise account of the particular recessionary dynamics that China is currently suffering or why they emerged when they did.

we need a more particular policy narrative to explain how China and Xi’s regime have ended up in the particular impasse they face in the summer of 2023

The key theme of that narrative is not authoritarianism, or fixation on growth, but overconfidence and hubris.

There is much to be said about the failure of Beijing to prepare adequately for Omicron, notably the failure to vaccinate adequately - an instance of the regime shrinking from coercion when it might have yielded benefits. The important points to make here are twofold:

First, it was the development of the virus over time that turned Zero Covid from a spectacular success in 2020 into an oppressive debacle two years later. It was the virus that mutated and not Xi’s regime.

Secondly, the seriousness of the blow to the Chinese economy in 2022 resulted from the coincidence of the desperate effort to uphold zero COVID with the high-risk effort to deflate the real estate bubble.

The current acute sense of crisis, which both Posen and Pettis claim as confirming their structural interpretation of China’s problems, in fact resulted not from deep authoritarianism so much as over-confidence and slowness to react to changing circumstances, and it resulted not so much from the relentless pursuit of growth as a bold decision to prioritize medium and long-term stability and security.

if we say that it is authoritarianism that explains clumsy policy on the part of Beijing since 2020, what counterfactual are we invoking? How many governments around the world - democratic, populist or authoritarian - actually have much to be proud of in their COVID response?

In light of the track-record of economic policy-makers in Japan, Europe and the US, faced with much smaller real estate booms, why would we jump to the conclusion that China’s main problem is its authoritarianism?

China’s current crisis cannot be understood unless we also allow for the role of overconfidence, risk-taking and, possibly, miscalculation on the part of a regime facing an unprecedented array of challenges.

It isn’t hard to understand why prophets of doom get so much public attention, but how does one explain famous ones being so unimpressive after they become famous?

Numerous studies of expert opinion have shown that pundits are, as a group, as accurate as a coin flip.

The explanation is simple, according to “Predicting the Next Big Thing,” a 2010 study by Jerker Denrell and Christina Fang. People who got rich and famous on extreme bets tend to follow up with more of them, and outlier predictions typically fail.

in any given month, about 11 percent of Americans younger than 65 are uninsured. But more than twice that number — one in four — will be uninsured for at least some time over a two-year period.

Perversely, health insurance — the very purpose of which is to provide a measure of stability in an uncertain world — is itself highly uncertain. And while the Affordable Care Act substantially reduced the share of Americans who are uninsured at a given time, we found that it did little to reduce the risk of insurance loss among the currently insured.

them do. The experience with the health insurance mandate under the Affordable Care Act makes that clear.

The risk of losing coverage is an inevitable consequence of a lack of universal coverage. Whenever there are varied pathways to eligibility, there will be many people who fail to find their path.

About six in 10 uninsured Americans are eligible for free or heavily discounted insurance coverage. Yet they remain uninsured. Lack of information about which of the array of programs they are eligible for, along with the difficulties of applying and demonstrating eligibility, mean that the coverage programs are destined to deliver less than they could.

incremental reforms won’t work. Over a half-century of such well-intentioned, piecemeal policies has made clear that continuing this approach represents the triumph of hope over experience,

The only solution is universal coverage that is automatic, free and basic.

Coverage needs to be free at the point of care — no co-pays or deductibles — because leaving patients on the hook for large medical costs is contrary to the purpose of insurance.

But it turns out there’s an important practical wrinkle with asking patients to pay even a very small amount for some of their universally covered care: There will always be people who can’t manage even modest co-pays.

Finally, coverage must be basic because we are bound by the social contract to provide essential medical care, not a high-end experience.

Keeping universal coverage basic will keep the cost to the taxpayer down as well.

as a share of its economy, the United States spends about twice as much on health care as other high-income countries. But in most other wealthy countries, this care is primarily financed by taxes, whereas only about half of U.S. health care spending is financed by taxes. For those of you following the math, half of twice as much is … well, the same amount of taxpayer-financed spending on health care as a share of the economy. In other words, U.S. taxes are already paying for the cost of universal basic coverage. Americans are just not getting it. They could be.

at a high level, the key elements of our proposal are ones that every high-income country (and all but a few Canadian provinces) has embraced: guaranteed basic coverage and the option for people to purchase upgrades.

Literacy rates rose alongside industrialization, although those who decided what the newspapers printed and what people were allowed to say on the radio, and then on television, were hugely powerful. But with the rise of scientific knowledge and the spread of telecommunications came a time of multiple sources of information and many rival ways to process facts and reason out implications.

With the emergence of A.I., we are about to regress even further. Some of this has to do with the nature of the technology. Instead of assessing multiple sources, people are increasingly relying on the nascent technology to provide a singular, supposedly definitive answer.

This technology is in the hands of two companies that are philosophically rooted in the notion of “machine intelligence,” which emphasizes the ability of computers to outperform humans in specific activities.

This philosophy was naturally amplified by a recent (bad) economic idea that the singular objective of corporations should be to maximize short-term shareholder wealth.

Combined together, these ideas are cementing the notion that the most productive applications of A.I. replace humankind.

Congress needs to assert individual ownership rights over underlying data that is relied on to build A.I. systems

Fortunately, Marx was wrong about the 19th-century industrial age that he inhabited. Industries emerged much faster than he expected, and new firms disrupted the economic power structure. Countervailing social powers developed in the form of trade unions and genuine political representation for a broad swath of society.

History has repeatedly demonstrated that control over information is central to who has power and what they can do with it.

Generative A.I. requires even deeper pockets than textile factories and steel mills. As a result, most of its obvious opportunities have already fallen into the hands of Microsoft, with its market capitalization of $2.4 trillion, and Alphabet, worth $1.6 trillion.

At the same time, powers like trade unions have been weakened by 40 years of deregulation ideology (Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, two Bushes and even Bill Clinton

For the same reason, the U.S. government’s ability to regulate anything larger than a kitten has withered. Extreme polarization and fear of killing the golden (donor) goose or undermining national security mean that most members of Congress would still rather look away.

To prevent data monopolies from ruining our lives, we need to mobilize effective countervailing power — and fast.

Today, those countervailing forces either don’t exist or are greatly weakened

Rather than machine intelligence, what we need is “machine usefulness,” which emphasizes the ability of computers to augment human capabilities. This would be a much more fruitful direction for increasing productivity. By empowering workers and reinforcing human decision making in the production process, it also would strengthen social forces that can stand up to big tech companies

We also need regulation that protects privacy and pushes back against surveillance capitalism, or the pervasive use of technology to monitor what we do

Finally, we need a graduated system for corporate taxes, so that tax rates are higher for companies when they make more profit in dollar terms

Our future should not be left in the hands of two powerful companies that build ever larger global empires based on using our collective data without scruple and without compensation.

as the editor of The Washington Post’s Sunday Outlook section several years ago, I assigned and edited dozens of “5 Myths” articles

This regular exercise forced me to wrestle with the form’s basic challenges: How entrenched and widespread must a misconception be to count as an honest-to-badness myth? What is the difference between a conclusive debunking and a conflicting interpretation? And who is qualified to upend a myth or disqualified from doing so?

“Myth America: Historians Take On the Biggest Legends and Lies About Our Past,” a collection published this month and edited by Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer, historians at Princeton

All of our national delusions should be exposed, but I’m not sure all should be excised. Do not some myths serve a valid purpose?

Several contributors to “Myth America” successfully eviscerate tired assumptions about their subjects.

the persistent notion of extensive voter fraud in U.S. election

the idea that the United States historically has lacked imperial ambitions

that a civil-rights protest or movement sparked or fomented or provoked a white backlash, as if such a response is instinctive and unavoidable.

The collection raises worthy arguments about the use of history in the nation’s political discourse, foremost among them that the term “revisionist history” should not be a slur.

“All good historical work is at heart ‘revisionist’ in that it uses new findings from the archives or new perspectives from historians to improve, to perfect — and yes, to revise — our understanding of the past,”

this revisionist impulse at times makes the myths framework feel somewhat forced, an excuse to cover topics of interest to the authors.

“Efforts to reshape narratives about the U.S. past thus became a central theme of the conservative movement in general and the Trump administration in particular,”

overwhelmingly, the myths covered in “Myth America” originate or live on the right

Do left-wing activists and politicians in the United States never construct and propagate their own self-affirming versions of the American story? If such liberal innocence is real, let’s hear more about it

the ur-myth of the nation: American exceptionalism

Phoenix, our hottest city, endured 53 days above 110 degrees and suffered more than 300 heat-related deaths in 2020. But Phoenix exists as a major American city only because the popularization of air conditioning after World War II spurred a population explosion there — from fewer than 250,000 in 1950 to more than 4.5 million in 2022

We have to treat air conditioning like the necessity it’s become, making sure that everyone who needs it has access to it.

A few years ago, the federal Energy Star program recommended setting home thermostats to 78 degrees, a recommendation that was not well received. The consensus seemed to be that a warmer house wasn’t worth the savings on energy costs. But what if we thought of a little extra sweat as saving the planet — and ourselves — from the cost of energy?

he continued to follow key elements of the game plan outlined in “Transformative Politics.” When Mr. Obama scolded pundits for slicing America into red states and blue states, it wasn’t a dopey celebration of national harmony. It was a strategic attempt to drain the venom out of the culture wars, allowing Democrats to win back working-class voters who had been polarized into the G.O.P. And it elected him president, twice.

he warned against retreating in the battle for civil rights. Moderates scrambling for the middle ground were just as misguided, he argued, as anti-racists implicitly pinning their hopes on a collective racial epiphany.

bringing the conversation back to economics was the best way to beat the right. Instead of trimming their ambitions to court affluent suburbanites, Democrats had to embrace “long-term, structural change, change that might break the zero-sum equation that pits powerless blacks [against] only slightly less powerless whites.”

All the pieces of Mr. Obama’s plan fit together: an electoral strategy designed to make Democrats the party of working people; a policy agenda oriented around comprehensive economic reform; and a faith that American democracy could deliver real change. By mixing political calculation with moral vision, Democrats could resurrect the March on Washington coalition and — finally — transform politics.

Economics were a safer bet. Blue-collar workers of all races, Mr. Obama and Mr. Fisher wrote, “understood in concrete ways the fact that America’s individualist mythology covers up a game that is fixed against them.

Rebuilding the March on Washington coalition requires an all-out war against polarization. That larger project begins with a simple message: Democrats exist because the country belongs to all of us, not just the 1 percent. With this guiding principle in mind, everything else becomes easier — picking fights that focus the media spotlight on a game that’s rigged in favor of the rich; calling the bluff of right-wing populists who can’t stomach a capital-gains-tax hike; corralling activists in support of the needs of working people; and, ultimately, putting power back in the hands of ordinary Americans.

The party’s record in the midterms has been even shakier. Democrats held unified control of Congress for all of Mr. Roosevelt’s presidency. In the Obama era, divided government has been the norm. And no, that’s not just because of gerrymandering. House Republicans won the national popular vote three times in the past 12 years — 2010, 2014 and 2016 — and there’s a good chance they’ll do it again this November.

the party is facing the same basic problem that has bedeviled Democrats since the breakdown of the New Deal coalition in the 1960s. An electorate divided by culture isn’t going to deliver the votes that Democrats need to build a lasting majority.

The crisis of democracy, then, is really a problem of the Democratic coalition. So long as elections keep being decided by wafer-thin margins, the odds of a divergence between the popular vote and the Electoral College will stay high, voters in small rural states will continue to hold the balance of power in the Senate, and Republican election deniers will get new grist for conspiracy theorizing. Even if Democrats manage to take office, they won’t have the numbers to push through reforms that might break this electoral stalemate.

What’s missing from all this is a vision for transcending the divide between the party’s rival sects, a plan for both winning elections and securing lasting change — in short, a program for transforming politics.

Mr. Rustin’s vision — the same vision that once upon a time drew a young Barack Obama into politics — remains the best starting point for coming up with a truly democratic solution to the crisis of democracy. Only 27 percent of registered voters identify as liberal. But 62 percent of Americans want to raise taxes on millionaires. An even greater number — 71 percent — approve of labor unions. And 83 percent support raising the federal minimum wage.

Today we are living in the world the Obama coalition has made. Yes, Democrats have won the popular vote in each of the past four presidential elections. But thanks to continued losses among blue-collar voters — including Latinos and a smaller but significant number of African Americans — the Obama coalition has remained a pipsqueak by historical standards. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the average Democratic margin of victory was 14.9 percentage points. Since 2008, it’s been 4.4 percentage points.

the road to freedom that Bayard Rustin dreamed of still goes through a majority movement — a coalition rooted in the working class, bound together by shared economic interests and committed to drawing out the best in the American political tradition.

in its brevity—and its provenance—it offers hints of where this is coming from and where they want it to go. “Risk of extinction” leaps straight to the usual Defcon 1 hysteria that demands immediate action. “Global priority” establishes the proper regulatory geography. Bracketing AI with the familiar nightmares of “pandemics and nuclear war” points to the sorts of authority required.

Many of the signatories also represent something of a giveaway: Oodles of Google execs, Bill Gates, a Democratic politician or two, many of the same people who have breathed the rarefied West Coast air of progressive technocratic orthodoxy for decades.

many of those who share their sentiments, are genuinely concerned about the risks of AI and are simply trying to raise a red flag about a matter of real concern—though we should probably note that techno-hysteria through history has rarely proved to be justified

nuclear annihilation has failed to materialize.

I suspect attempts to impose a world government would have been much more likely to result in an extinction-level nuclear war than the exercise by nations of their right to self-determination to resolve conflicts through the usual combination of diplomacy and force.

Climate change is the ne plus ultra of justifications for global regulation. It probably isn’t a coincidence that climate extremism and the demands for mandatory global controls exploded at exactly the moment old-fashioned Marxism was discredited for good in the 1990

the left suddenly found a climate threat it could use as a golden opportunity to regulate economic activity on a scale larger than anything Karl Marx could have imagined.

As for pandemics, our public-health masters showed by their actions over the past three years that they would like to encase us in a rigid panoply of rules to remediate a supposed extinction-level threat.

None of this is to diminish the challenges posed by AI. Thorough investigation into it, and healthy debate about how to maximize its opportunities and minimize its risks, are essential.