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yet it is one the government’s opponents are always reluctant to admit because its logical corollary is that there will always be an incentive for those not included under the cap to try their luck in the Channel — unless they perceive a high risk of deportation. You cannot stop the boats while taking in the passengers.

Sunak’s policy, despite its logic, faces a tortuous road ahead. To ministers’ surprise, they won their case on the Rwanda scheme in British courts last year, only to have the first flight blocked in the middle of the night by an ECHR judge.

Yet as the home secretary recently suggested, the government still believes it can get its way. The ECHR, despite its reputation for inflexible and expansionist application of human rights law, can be expedient when its institutional reach is under threat

In 2012, for example, after an unmanageable surge of cases that provoked European governments’ wrath, the ECHR agreed to limit itself to intervening only where it believed national courts had not done their jobs properly. Its caseload quickly shrank.

With the UK outside the EU and therefore able to leave the ECHR with relative ease, the court’s survival instinct has kicked in. Its officials are said to have been taken aback by the hostility to its Rwanda injunction last June and are in a mood to compromise to avoid the risk of losing the UK altogether

Even assuming the legislation takes full effect, it may not work. Migrant arrivals are expected to reach 65,000 this year. The asylum backlog stands at 166,000 and counting, hotels are full to bursting and the government hasn’t yet sent a single person to Rwanda, which in turn hasn’t built the capacity to house more than 200. No wonder most think the policy is doomed.

Between the prospect of being deported, housed in unappealing lodgings such as barges and RAF bases rather than hotels, and caught by the French, who are being given large sums of money to step up their coastal policing, the government is hoping it can make trying to cross the Channel sufficiently unattractive

There has been a sharp drop in the number of Albanians arriving on our beaches since the government signed a co-operation agreement with Tirana, stepped up deportations and publicised both.

evidence from Canada in 2016, where a publicity campaign highlighting the deportation of failed asylum seekers from Hungary led to a dramatic drop in arrivals.

It all depends on what’s required to deter people from crossing. The aim, after all, isn’t to run a constant, high-volume travel service to Kigali, but to stop people from getting on boats in the first place. This may already be working

This leaves the final piece, which is the expansion of “safe and legal routes” to the UK. It has taken months of awkward media interviews, select committee hearings and the threat of a backbench rebellion, but the government has finally accepted it needs a better system for taking in legitimate refugees.

One way is a broader, Ukraine-style scheme, so households can bring in refugees if they agree to take them in

Another is to allow for more extended family reunifications for refugees who have relatives here

And another would be to expand the practice of assessing and accepting people at UN camps, like the Syrian resettlement scheme

After years of ineffectual government under Theresa May and Boris Johnson, we have become used to the idea that ministers never have any ability or intention of keeping their promises

If Mr. Kahlenberg had his way, college admissions would be upended.

His basic recipe: Get rid of preferences for alumni children, as well as children of faculty, staff and big donors. Say goodbye to recruited athletes in boutique sports like fencing. Increase community college transfers. Give a break to students who have excelled in struggling schools, who have grown up in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, in families with low income, or better yet, low net worth. Pump up financial aid. Look for applicants in towns that do not normally send students to highly selective colleges.

elite colleges have become fortresses for the rich, he said. Harvard had “23 times as many rich kids as poor kids,” Mr. Kahlenberg testified in 2018 at the federal court trial in the Harvard case, referring to a 2017 paper by Raj Chetty, then a Stanford economist, and colleagues.

his 2012 study that found seven of 10 leading universities were able to return to previous levels of diversity through race-neutral means.

In 2020, Berkeley boasted that it had admitted its most diverse class in 30 years, with offers to African American and Latino students rising to the highest numbers since at least the late-1980s, without sacrificing academic standards.

In a simulation of the class of 2019, he found that the share of Black students at Harvard would drop to 10 percent from 14 percent, but the share of white students would also drop, to 33 percent from percent from 40 percent, mainly because of the elimination of legacy and other preferences. The share of Hispanic students would rise to 19 percent from 14 percent and the Asian American share would rise to 31 percent from 24 percent.

The share of “advantaged” students (parents with a bachelor’s degree, family income over $80,000, living in a neighborhood not burdened by concentrated poverty) would make up about half of the class, from 82 percent. SAT scores would drop to the 98th percentile from the 99th.

In the affirmative action trial, Harvard said that Mr. Kahlenberg’s model would produce too little diversity, and water down academic quality. Its actual class of 2026 is 15.2 percent African American, 12.6 percent Hispanic and 27.9 percent Asian American.

Edward Blum, the conservative activist behind the lawsuits against Harvard and U.N.C., said Mr. Kahlenberg came to his attention when “The Remedy” was published. The focus on class seemed like a powerful bridge between the left and the right, Mr. Blum said

Dr. Laycock, of the University of Virginia, expects that once the Supreme Court rules, conservative groups that are now promoting race-neutral alternatives will claim they are racial proxies and turn against them. “Everybody knows that’s why it’s being used,” he said. (Mr. Blum said his group will not, though other conservative groups could do so.)

There is no “We Believe” sign in the yard. But on the living room wall, a sign says, “Live simply, dream big, be grateful, give love, laugh lots.”

In that spirit, his stubborn campaign might be traced to being the son of a pastor whose family could afford to make him a Harvard graduate, twice over. “I do have some measure of class guilt,” he said. “I wish people who are far richer than I am had more class guilt.”

Then came 2016. The overreading began once again. The old electoral college “blue wall” had become a “red wall,” and Trump had supposedly unlocked the key to lasting control. But, well, you know the rest.

Everyone keeps looking for the political Battle of Yorktown—that moment when your opponents lose once and for all and they march out slowly before you while the band plays “The World Turned Upside Down.”

Instead, in a closely-divided nation that’s characterized mainly by negative polarization and calcification, the better analogy is to trench warfare—grinding, bloody attrition, with gains often measured in yards rather than miles and true breakthroughs few and far between. 

Thus, the question after any given election isn’t so much, “Who is ascendant?” Rather, it’s “In which direction did the lines move?” 

often the more important cultural changes can be harder to discern

in this instance one of those more important changes was the blow to the malice theory of American politics. 

The malice theory is a core element of Trumpism, and it’s a natural temptation of negative polarization. Negative polarization (or negative partisanship), as I’ve written many times, is the term for politics that is fundamentally motivated by animosity for the other side more than affection to your own party’s leaders or ideas. 

Under the malice theory, the key to electoral victory is unlocking that anger. That means highlighting everything wrong with your opponents. That means hyping their alleged mortal threat to the Republic.

who should be kind to the “godless communist orcs” who are “trying to ruin this great country”? 

then persuasion is a waste of time. Defeating the enemy isn’t about persuading the enemy, but rather about mobilizing the righteous.

inspiring people is hard. Scaring them is easy—especially when the internet gives you constant access to the worst and weirdest voices on the other side. 

here’s where the malice theory collides with human nature. Most people aren’t content with simply thinking their opponents are terrible. They still want to see themselves as good. They want to see the world as “good versus evil,” not “lesser evil versus evil.” 

That’s why the argument that voters should always swallow deep moral objections to vote for the lesser evil are ultimately unsustainable

When confronted with relentless wrongdoing from your own partisans, one of two things happens—over time you’ll either redefine evil as good, or you’ll abandon evil for the good. 

The first response is core to much of the MAGA movement. It’s how someone goes from holding their nose and voting for Trump in 2016 to being the first bass boat in the boat parade in 2020. We all watched it happen.

The ultimate expression of this faction was represented by what’s been called the “Stop the Steal” slate of Republican candidates. These were the folks who were all-in, not just on Trump, but on some of the most transparently, incandescently absurd political conspiracies in modern American history. 

I don’t want to make the very mistake I identified at the start of this newsletter and overstate my case. Talk of a true MAGA “repudiation” is overblown

remember, the question isn’t whether anyone achieved ultimate victory or faced a final defeat. It’s in which direction the lines moved in our nation’s political trench warfare. And they most definitely moved back towards reason and our most basic moral norms. 

since politicians so often follow voters far more than they lead voters, it is ultimately up to us to demonstrate to them that the malice theory of American politics is truly a dead political end

The worst thing for American politics would be for the Trumpist narrative—that decency is for the weak—to prevai

If cruelty truly is the sole or best path to partisan victory, then the continued temptation to yield to our worst impulses would grow overwhelming. The temptation was already strong enough to distort and transform the political culture of the right simply based on Trump’s single, narrow win.

the opposite message seems to be true

Ever since Trump beat Hillary Clinton, the Trumpist GOP lost and kept losing. A movement that prioritized vicious political combat lost the House in the 2018 midterms, lost the presidency and the Senate in 2020, and has likely blown a virtually unlosable election in 2022, despite the fact that the country is struggling under the great weight of the worst crime and inflation in at least a generation.

It turns out that there’s some life left in decency yet. Even when times are hard, there are voters who are unwilling to call good evil and evil good

It turns out that it’s hard to escape the need to persuade and inspire, and that might be the best—and most important—consequence of a midterm election that gave neither party a mandate but reminded the Republicans that malice and lies can do far more political harm than good. 

Looking through a political lens, James Piereson in “Shattered Consensus” observes a collapse of the postwar understanding of government’s role, namely to promote full employment and to police a disorderly world. He expects a “fourth revolution” around the end of this decade, following the Jeffersonian upheaval of 1800, the Civil War and the New Deal. Such a revolution, he writes, is required or else “the polity will begin to disintegrate for lack of fundamental agreement.”

In “The Fourth Turning Is Here,” published this summer, demographic historian Neil Howe arrived at a similar conclusion. His view springs from a conviction that human history follows highly predictable cycles based on the “saeculum,” or typical human life span of 80 years or so, and the differing experiences of four generations within that span. The next “turning,” he predicts, is due in about 2033

It will resemble those in the 1760s, 1850s and 1920s, Howe writes, that produced “bone-jarring Crises so monumental that, by their end, American society emerged wholly transformed.”

Others see disaster’s origins in economics

Failure to resume strong growth and to produce greater economic equality will bring forth authoritarian regimes both left and right. This year, in his book “The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism,” Financial Times editor Martin Wolf advocated for an array of reforms, including carbon taxation, a presumption against horizontal mergers, a virtual ban on corporate share buybacks, compulsory voting, and extra votes for younger citizens and parents of children. He fears that, absent such measures, “the light of political and personal freedom might once again disappear from the world.”

Then there’s that little matter of our unconscionable and unpayable national debt, current and committed

Bowles called what’s coming “the most predictable economic crisis” — there’s that word again, aptly applied — “in history.” And that was many trillions of borrowing ago.

Now, market guru John Mauldin has begun forecasting a “great reset” when these unsustainable bills cannot be paid, when “the economy comes crashing down around our ears.” Writing in August, he said he sees this happening “roughly 7-10 years from now.”

Encouragingly, if vaguely, most of these seers retain their optimism. Piereson closes by imagining “a new order on the foundations of the old.” Confessing that he doesn’t “know exactly how it will work,” Mauldin expects us to “muddle through” somehow.

Howe, because he sees his sweeping, socially driven generational cycles recurring all the way back to the Greeks, is the most cavalier. Although “the old American republic is collapsing,” he says, we will soon pass through a “great gate in history,” resolve our challenges and emerge with a “new collective identity.”

Paradoxically, these ominous projections can help worrywarts like me move through what might be called the stages of political grief.

A decade ago, an optimist could tell himself that a democratically mature people could summon the will or the leaders to stop plundering its children’s futures, and to reconcile or at least agree to tolerate sincerely held cultural disagreements.

For a while after that, it seemed plausible to hope for incremental reforms that would enable the keeping of most of our safety-net promises, and for a cooling or exhaustion of our poisonous polarization.

Now, I’m grudgingly ready to surrender and accept that the cliché must be true: Washington will not face up to its duty except in a genuine crisis. Then and only then will we, as some would say, focus on the existential threats to our iconic institutions.

So maybe we might as well get on with it, and hope that we at least “muddle through.” I’ve arrived at the final stage: Crisis? Ready when you are.

It’s dropping in developing countries, too. India surpassed China as the most populous country last year, yet its fertility is now below replacement.

“The demographic winter is coming,”

Smaller populations come with diminished global clout, raising questions in the U.S., China and Russia about their long-term standings as superpowers.

Some demographers think the world’s population could start shrinking within four decades—one of the few times it’s happened in history.

A year ago Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida declared that the collapse of the country’s birthrate left it “standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”

Had fertility stayed near 2.1, where it stood in 2007, the U.S. would have welcomed an estimated 10.6 million more babies since

In 2017, when the global fertility rate—a snapshot of how many babies a woman is expected to have over her lifetime—was 2.5, the United Nations thought it would slip to 2.4 in the late 2020s. Yet by 2021, the U.N. concluded, it was already down to 2.3—close to what demographers consider the global replacement rate of about 2.2

He has found that national birth registries are typically reporting births 10% to 20% below what the U.N. projected.

China reported 9 million births last year, 16% less than projected in the U.N.’s central scenario. In the U.S., 3.59 million babies were born last year, 4% less than the U.N. projected. In other countries, the undershoot is even larger: Egypt reported 17% fewer births last year. In 2022, Kenya reported 18% fewer.

In 2017 the U.N. projected world population, then 7.6 billion, would keep climbing to 11.2 billion in 2100. By 2022 it had lowered and brought forward the peak to 10.4 billion in the 2080s. That, too, is likely out of date

the University of Washington now thinks it will peak around 9.5 billion in 2061 then start declining. 

The falling birthrates come with huge implications for the way people live, how economies grow and the standings of the world’s superpowers.

In the U.S., a short-lived pandemic baby boomlet has reversed. The total fertility rate fell to 1.62 last year, according to provisional government figures, the lowest on record.

In 2017, when the fertility rate was 1.8, the Census Bureau projected it would converge over the long run to 2.0. It has since revised that down to 1.5. “It has snuck up on us,”

Historians refer to the decline in fertility that began in the 18th century in industrializing countries as the demographic transition. As lifespans lengthened and more children survived to adulthood, the impetus for bearing more children declined. As women became better educated and joined the workforce, they delayed marriage and childbirth, resulting in fewer children. 

Some demographers see this as part of a “second demographic transition,” a societywide reorientation toward individualism that puts less emphasis on marriage and parenthood, and makes fewer or no children more acceptable. 

In research published in 2021, the University of Maryland’s Kearney and two co-authors looked for possible explanations for the continued drop. They found that state-level differences in parental abortion notification laws, unemployment, Medicaid availability, housing costs, contraceptive usage, religiosity, child-care costs and student debt could explain almost none of the decline

“We suspect that this shift reflects broad societal changes that are hard to measure or quantify,” they conclude.

while raising children is no more expensive than before, parents’ preferences and perceived constraints have changed

“If people have a preference for spending time building a career, on leisure, relationships outside the home, that’s more likely to come in conflict with childbearing.” 

Once a low fertility cycle kicks in, it effectively resets a society’s norms and is thus hard to break, said Jackson. “The fewer children you see your colleagues and peers and neighbors having, it changes the whole social climate,”

Fertility is below replacement in India even though the country is still poor and many women don’t work—factors that usually sustain fertility.

Urbanization and the internet have given even women in traditional male-dominated villages a glimpse of societies where fewer children and a higher quality of life are the norm. “People are plugged into the global culture,

mothers and fathers, especially those that are highly educated, spend more time with their children than in the past. “The intensity of parenting is a constraint,”

Sub-Saharan Africa once appeared resistant to the global slide in fertility, but that too is changing. The share of all women of reproductive age using modern contraception grew from 17% in 2012 to 23% in 2022

Jose Rimon, a professor of public health at Johns Hopkins University, credits that to a push by national leaders in Africa which, he predicted, would drive fertility down faster than the U.N. projects. 

Mae Mariyam Thomas, 38, who lives in Mumbai and runs an audio production company, said she’s opted against having children because she never felt the tug of motherhood. She sees peers struggling to meet the right person, getting married later and, in some instances, divorcing before they have kids. At least three of her friends have frozen their eggs,

Danielle Vermeer grew up third in a family of four children on Chicago’s North Side, where her neighborhood was filled with Catholics of Italian, Irish and Polish descent and half her close friends had as many siblings as her or more.

Her Italian-American father was one of four children who produced 14 grandchildren. Now her parents have five grandchildren, including Vermeer’s two children, ages 4 and 7.

The 35-year-old, who is the co-founder of a fashion thrifting app, said that before setting out to have children, she consulted dozens of other couples and her Catholic church and read at least eight books on the subject, including one by Pope Paul VI. She and her husband settled on two as the right number.“The act of bringing a child into this world is an incredible responsibility,” she said.

Perhaps no country has been trying longer than Japan. After fertility fell to 1.5 in the early 1990s, the government rolled out a succession of plans that included parental leave and subsidized child care. Fertility kept falling.

In 2005, Kuniko Inoguchi was appointed the country’s first minister responsible for gender equality and birthrate. The main obstacle, she declared, was money: People couldn’t afford to get married or have children. Japan made hospital maternity care free and introduced a stipend paid upon birth of the child. 

Japan’s fertility rate climbed from 1.26 in 2005 to 1.45 in 2015. But then it started declining again, and in 2022 was back to 1.26.

This year, Prime Minister Fumio Kishida rolled out yet another program to increase births that extends monthly allowances to all children under 18 regardless of income, free college for families with three children, and fully paid parental leave.

noguchi, now a member of parliament’s upper house, said the constraint on would-be parents is no longer money, but time. She has pressed the government and businesses to adopt a four-day workweek

If you’re a government official or manager of a big corporation, you should not worry over questions of salary now, but that in 20 years time you will have no customers, no clients, no applicants to the Self-Defense Forces.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban has pushed one of Europe’s most ambitious natality agendas. Last year he expanded tax benefits for mothers so that women under the age of 30 who have a child are exempt from paying personal income tax for life. That’s on top of housing and child-care subsidies as well as generous maternity leaves. 

Hungary’s fertility rate, though still well below replacement, has risen since 2010. But the Vienna Institute of Demography attributed this primarily to women delaying childbirth because of a debt crisis that hit around 2010. Adjusted for that, fertility has risen only slightly, it concluded.

The usual prescription in advanced countries is more immigration, but that has two problems.

With no reversal in birthrates in sight, the attendant economic pressures are intensifying. Since the pandemic, labor shortages have become endemic throughout developed countries. That will only worsen in coming years as the postcrisis fall in birthrates yields an ever-shrinking inflow of young workers, placing more strain on healthcare and retirement systems.

worsening demographics could make this a second consecutive “lost decade” for global economic growth.

The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation found little evidence that pronatalist policies lead to sustained rebounds in fertility. A woman may get pregnant sooner to capture a baby bonus, researchers say, but likely won’t have more kids over the course of her lifetime.

As more countries confront stagnant population, immigration between them is a zero-sum gam

Historically, host countries have sought skilled migrants who enter through formal, legal channels, but recent inflows have been predominantly unskilled migrants often entering illegally and claiming asylum.

High levels of immigration have also historically aroused political resistance,

Many of the leaders keenest to raise birthrates are most resistant to immigratio

As birthrates fall, more regions and communities experience depopulation, with consequences ranging from closed schools to stagnant property values. Less selective colleges will soon struggle to fill classrooms because of the plunge in birthrates that began in 2007, said Fernández-Villaverde. Vance said rural hospitals can’t stay open because of the falling local population.

An economy with fewer children will struggle to finance pensions and healthcare for growing ranks of elderly. South Korea’s national pension fund, one of the world’s largest, is on track to be depleted by 2055

There’s been little public pressure to act, said Sok Chul Hong, an economist at Seoul National University. “The elderly are not very interested in pension reform, and the youth are apathetic towards politics,” he said. “It is truly an ironic situation.”

Understanding how empathy can immobilize us like that is a critical step for helping others — and ourselves.

Empathic distress explains why many people have checked out in the wake of these tragedies

Having concluded that nothing they do will make a difference, they start to become indifferent.

The symptoms of empathic distress were originally diagnosed in health care, with nurses and doctors who appeared to become insensitive to the pain of their patients.

Early researchers labeled it compassion fatigue and described it as the cost of caring.

when two neuroscientists, Olga Klimecki and Tania Singer, reviewed the evidence, they discovered that “compassion fatigue” is a misnomer. Caring itself is not costly. What drains people is not merely witnessing others’ pain but feeling incapable of alleviating it.

In times of sustained anguish, empathy is a recipe for more distress, and in some cases even depression. What we need instead is compassion.

empathy and compassion aren’t the same. Empathy absorbs others’ emotions as your own: “I’m hurting for you.”

Compassion focuses your action on their emotions: “I see that you’re hurting, and I’m here for you.”

“Empathy is biased,” the psychologist Paul Bloom writes. It’s something we usually reserve for our own group, and in that sense, it can even be “a powerful force for war and atrocity.”

Dr. Singer and their colleagues trained people to empathize by trying to feel other people’s pain. When the participants saw someone suffering, it activated a neural network that would light up if they themselves were in pain. It hurt. And when people can’t help, they escape the pain by withdrawing.

To combat this, the Klimecki and Singer team taught their participants to respond with compassion rather than empathy — focusing not on sharing others’ pain but on noticing their feelings and offering comfort.

A different neural network lit up, one associated with affiliation and social connection. This is why a growing body of evidence suggests that compassion is healthier for you and kinder to others than empathy:

When you see others in pain, instead of causing you to get overloaded and retreat, compassion motivates you to reach out and help

The most basic form of compassion is not assuaging distress but acknowledging it.

in my research, I’ve found that being helpful has a secondary benefit: It’s an antidote to feeling helpless.

To figure out who needs your support after something terrible happens, the psychologist Susan Silk suggests picturing a dart board, with the people closest to the trauma in the bull’s-eye and those more peripherally affected in the outer rings.

Once you’ve figured out where you belong on the dart board, look for support from people outside your ring, and offer it to people closer to the center.

Even if people aren’t personally in the line of fire, attacks targeting members of a specific group can shatter a whole population’s sense of security.

If you notice that people in your life seem disengaged around an issue that matters to you, it’s worth considering whose pain they might be carrying.

Instead of demanding that they do more, it may be time to show them compassion — and help them find compassion for themselves, too.

Your small gesture of kindness won’t end the crisis in the Middle East, but it can help someone else. And that can give you the strength to help more.

Donor-advised funds are categorized by law as public charities, rather than private foundations, so they have no payout requirements and few disclosure requirements.

And wealthy residents of Silicon Valley are donating large sums to such funds

critics say that in part because of its structure as a warehouse of donor-advised funds, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation has not had a positive impact on the community it is meant to serve. Some people I talked to say the foundation has had little interest in spending money, because its chief executive, Emmett Carson, who was placed on paid administrative leave after the Chronicle’s report, wanted it to be known that he had created one of the biggest foundations in the country. Carson was “aggressive” about trying to raise money, but “unaggressive about suggesting what clients would do with it,”

“Most of us in the local area have seen our support from the foundation go down and not up,” he said.

The amount of money going from the Silicon Valley Community Foundation to the nine-county Bay Area actually dropped in 2017 by 46 percent, even as the amount of money under management grew by 64 percent, to $13.5 billion

“They got so drunk on the idea of growth that they lost track of anything smacking of mission,” he said. It did not help perceptions that the foundation opened offices in New York and San Francisco at the same time local organizations were seeing donations drop.

The foundation now gives her organization some grants, but they don’t come from the donor-advised funds, she told me. “I haven’t really cracked the code of how to access those donor-advised funds,” she said. Her organization had been getting between $50,000 and $100,000 a year from United Way that it no longer gets, she said,

Rob Reich, the co-director of the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, set up a donor-advised fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation as an experiment. He spent $5,000—the minimum amount accepted—and waited. He received almost no communication from the foundation, he told me. No emails or calls about potential nonprofits to give to, no information about whether the staff was out looking for good opportunities in the community, no data about how his money was being managed.

One year later, despite a booming stock market, his account was worth less than the $5,000 he had put in, and had not been used in any way in the community. His balance was lower because the foundation charges hefty fees to donors who keep their money there. “I was flabbergasted,” he told me. “I didn’t understand what I, as a donor, was getting for my fees.”

Though donors receive a big tax break for donating to donor-advised funds, the funds have no payout requirements, unlike private foundations, which are required to disperse 5 percent of their assets each year. With donor-advised funds, “there’s no urgency and no forced payout,”

he had met wealthy individuals who said they were setting up donor-advised funds so that their children could disperse the funds and learn about philanthropy—they had no intent to spend the money in their own lifetimes.

Fund managers also receive fees for the amount of money they have under management, which means they have little incentive to encourage people to spend the money in their accounts,

Transparency is also an issue. While foundations have to provide detailed information about where they give their money, donor-advised funds distributions are listed as gifts made from the entire charitable fund—like the Silicon Valley Community Foundation—rather than from individuals.

Donor-advised funds can also be set up anonymously, which makes it hard for nonprofits to engage with potential givers. They also don’t have websites or mission statements like private foundations do, which can make it hard for nonprofits to know what causes donors support.

Public charities—defined as organizations that receive a significant amount of their revenue from small donations—were saddled with less oversight, in part because Congress figured that their large number of donors would make sure they were spending their money well, Madoff said. But an attorney named Norman Sugarman, who represented the Jewish Community Federation of Cleveland, convinced the IRS to categorize a certain type of asset—charitable dollars placed in individually named accounts managed by a public charity—as donations to public, not private, foundations.

Donor-advised funds have been growing nationally as the amount of money made by the top 1 percent has grown: Contributions to donor-advised funds grew 15.1 percent in fiscal year 2016, according to The Chronicle of Philanthropy, while overall charitable contributions grew only 1.4 percent that year

Six of the top 10 philanthropies in the country last year, in terms of the amount of nongovernmental money raised, were donor-advised funds,

In addition, those funds with high payout rates could just be giving to another donor-advised fund, rather than to a public charity, Madoff says. One-quarter of donor-advised fund sponsors distribute less than 1 percent of their assets in a year,

Groups that administer donor-advised funds defend their payout rate, saying distributions from donor-advised funds are around 14 percent of assets a year. But that number can be misleading, because one donor-advised fund could give out all its money, while many more could give out none, skewing the data.

Donor-advised funds are especially popular in places like Silicon Valley because they provide tax advantages for donating appreciated stock, which many start-up founders have but don’t necessarily want to pay huge taxes on

Donors get a tax break for the value of the appreciated stock at the time they donate it, which can also spare them hefty capital-gains taxes. “Anybody with a business interest can give their business interest before it goes public and save huge amounts of taxes,”

Often, people give to donor-advised funds right before a public event like an initial public offering, so they can avoid the capital-gains taxes they’d otherwise have to pay, and instead receive a tax deduction. Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan gave $500 million in stock to the foundation in 2012, when Facebook held its initial public offering, and also donated $1 billion in stock in 2013

Wealthy donors can also donate real estate and deduct the value of real estate at the time of the donation—if they’d given to a private foundation, they’d only be able to deduct the donor’s basis value (typically the purchase price) of the real estate at the time they acquired it. The difference can be a huge amount of money in the hot market of California.

The result is that less energy is being produced overall, and Germany is loath to buy it from France—where power is much cleaner, because it’s mostly nuclear.

So who absorbed the adjustment? Easy: industry, the old backbone of the German manufacturing state, which has been closing production facilities in significant numbers.

This does not, of course, reduce the overall atmospheric pollution generated in the world, as the old clients of German firms turn to alternatives in other locations that are, almost always, fueled with high carbon sources. The Indonesian, Brazilian, Indian and Chinese companies that will now manufacture the products that German workers used to make are largely run on fossil fuels.

Part of the problem is that there are inherent technical limitations to how high a country can drive wind and solar in its energy mix. State of the art lithium-ion batteries can only store energy in the range of megawatts, up to the low gigawatts. In order to store electricity to survive a German winter with next to no sunlight and long low-wind periods, the country would need to increase its storage capacity by orders of magnitude.

There are only three presently known energy sources that can be used at scale to balance a natural grid: hydroelectricity, nuclear and fossil fuels

hey decided to simply make do with less power: economic degrowth in action. Of course, people depended on those power sources for jobs: good, well-paid, stable union jobs that guys without university degrees could get. The government closed down the factories—can they really be surprised some of these people now want to vote for the far right?

Germany didn’t adopt degrowth by choice, but through a series of blunders. The comic edge of its misfortunes is that so many of them occurred because of miscalculation or just sheer bloody-mindedness on the part of the Greens and Social Democrats. First, a few months before becoming a Russian energy lobbyist in 2005, then-Chancellor Gerhard Schröder insisted on putting Russian natural gas at the core of Germany’s energy grid, continuing a Social Democratic tradition of entwining Germany’s future with Russia’s. Then, a Green Party with its roots in 1970s anti-nuclear weapons activism carried this atavistic policy into the 21st century when it entered government, insisting that Germany decommission the backbone of its zero-emission energy matrix. Then the war in Ukraine happened, and the pipelines were cut. Oooops. Guess who’s digging for coal now?

But only a handful of cancers—of the breast, lung, colon and cervix—have screening tests recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force

Many companies are developing blood tests that can detect cancer signals before symptoms occur, and Grail’s is the most advanced. A study found it can identify more than 50 types of cancer 52% of the time and the 12 deadliest cancers in Stages I through III 68% of the time.

There’s a hitch. The test costs $949 and isn’t covered by Medicare or most private insurance.

The trouble is that this cancer is almost never caught early. There’s no routine screening for it, and symptoms don’t develop until it is advanced. Mr. Royse, 64, had no idea he was sick until he took a blood test called Galleri, produced by the Menlo Park, Calif., startup Grail. He had surgery and chemotherapy and is now cancer-free.

Mr. Royse visited Grail’s website, which referred him to a telemedicine provider who ordered a test. Another telemedicine doctor walked him through his results, which showed a cancer signal likely emanating from the pancreas, gallbladder, stomach or esophagus.

An MRI revealed a suspicious mass on his pancreas, which a biopsy confirmed was cancerous. Mr. Royse had three months of chemotherapy, surgery and another three months of chemotherapy, which ended last February. Because pancreatic cancer often recurs, he gets CT and MRI scans every three months. In addition, he has signed up for startup Natera’s Signatera customized blood test, which checks DNA specific to the patient’s cancer and can signal its return before signs are visible on the scans

Grail’s test likewise looks for DNA shed by cancer cells, which is tagged by molecules called methyl groups that are specific to a cancer’s origin. Grail uses genetic sequencing and machine learning to recognize links between DNA methyl groups and particular cancers

The test “is based on how much DNA is being shed by tumor,” Grail’s president, Josh Ofman, says. “Some tumors shed a lot of DNA. Some shed almost none.

ut slow-growing tumors typically aren’t shedding a lot of DNA.” That reduces the probability that Grail’s test will identify indolent cancers that pose no immediate danger.

Grail’s test has a roughly 0.5% false-positive rate, meaning 1 in 200 patients who don’t have cancer will get a positive signal

Its positive predictive value is 43%, so that of every 100 patients with a positive signal, 43 actually have cancer

the legislation’s price tag could reduce political support. According to one private company’s estimate, the test could cost the government $39 billion to $145 billion over a decade. Mr. Goldman counters that analysts usually overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits of medical interventions.

Because Grail uses machine learning to detect DNA-methylation cancer linkages, the Grail test’s accuracy should improve as more tests and patient data are collected

regulators may balk at approving the test, and insurers at covering it, until it becomes cheaper and more reliable.

How would the FDA weigh the risk that a false positive on a test like Grail’s could require invasive follow-up testing against the dire but hard-to-quantify risk that a deadly cancer wouldn’t be caught until it’s much harder to treat? It’s unclear.

some experts urge the FDA to require large randomized controlled trials before approving blood cancer tests. “Multicancer screening would entail tremendous costs and potentially substantial harms,” H. Gilbert Welch and Tanujit Dey of Brigham and Women’s Hospital wrote

Dr. Welch and Mr. Dey also suggested that companies should be required to prove their tests reduce overall mortality, even though the FDA doesn’t require drugmakers to prove their products reduce deaths or extend life. Clinical trials for the mRNA Covid vaccines didn’t show they reduced deaths.

One alternative is to rely on real-world studies, which Grail is already doing. One study of patients 50 and older without signs of cancer showed that the test doubled the number of cancers detected.

One recurring problem he has seen: “Epidemiologists are always getting cancer wrong,” he says. “Epidemiologists a decade ago said U.S. overtreats cancers. Well, no, the EU undertreats cancer.”

A 2012 study that he co-authored found that the higher U.S. spending on cancer care relative to Europe between 1983 and 1999 resulted in significantly higher survival rates for American patients than for those in Europe

By his study’s calculation, U.S. spending on cancer treatments during that period resulted in $556 billion in net benefits owing to reduced mortality.

He expects Galleri and other multicancer early-detection tests to reduce deaths and produce public-health and economic benefits that exceed their monetary costs

Expanding access to multicancer early-detection tests could also help solve the chicken-and-egg problem of drug development. Because few patients are diagnosed at early stages of some cancers, it’s hard to develop treatments for them

the positive predictive value for some recommended cancer screenings is far lower. Fewer than 1 in 10 women with an abnormal finding on a mammogram are diagnosed with breast cancer.

Mr. Royse makes the same point with personal force. “I would be dead right now if not for multicancer early-detection testing,” Mr. Royse told an FDA advisory committee last fall. “The longer the FDA waits, the more people are going to die. It’s that simple.”

Research published in the weekly Der Spiegel shows that the AfD, a party started by nationally minded economists who advocated a return to the Deutsche mark as the national currency, now uses language nearly identical to that of the defunct National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD), a small, virulently xenophobic, and openly neo-Nazi party that ran in German elections for decades but never managed to win seats in the Bundestag.

“They have major ideological overlaps. The AfD measures up to the NPD [of 2012] in almost all areas, even if the AfD appears more moderate in its party program.”

Documents attributed to both parties employ reactionary terminology, some of it straight from Nazi Germany, such as Umvolkung (population replacement) and Volkstod (death of the German nation), as well as Stimmvieh (voting cattle) for voters of opposing parties and Passdeutschen (foreign nationals holding German passports). And like the NPD, Spiegel reported in another study, the AfD maintains close links with violent militants.

this radicalism, which in the past had turned Germans off, has now lifted the AfD to new heights: It is polling at 22 percent support nationwide, second only to the Christian Democrats, and well over 30 percent in several states, making it the number one political force there in advance of autumn elections.

The current outburst of popular indignation at the AfD, echoed by all of the other major political parties, comes on the heels of an investigative exposé that found that at a clandestine meeting in November, ranking AfD personalities met with known neo-Nazis and wealthy financiers to hammer out plans for the forced deportation of foreign nationals and even foreign-born German citizens.

The extremists congregated at a hotel near Potsdam to design what they called a “remigration master plan” to forcibly repatriate millions of people. Shocked observers drew parallels to the 1942 Wannsee Conference, held not far from Potsdam, at which the Nazis coordinated their plan to deport and murder the entire Jewish population of Europe.

While some AfD politicos have tried to distance the party from the Potsdam meeting, others endorsed its purpose. “Remigration is not a secret plan, but a promise. … and there’s no better way to put it,” announced Hans-Christoph Berndt, the AfD point person in the Brandenburg state parliament, on Jan. 17.

they confirm the diagnosis of many experts that the AfD, under the leadership of its most extreme figures—particularly Björn Höcke, a member of the Thuringia legislature—has outpaced other European far-right parties in its radicalism. “The current AfD wouldn’t find a place in the ranks of the Sweden Democrats and most of the other more moderate far-right parties among the European Conservatives and Reformists faction in the European Parliament,”

She explained that like the AfD, the Sweden Democrats, the Finns Party (formerly the True Finns), and the Danish People’s Party are opposed to immigration and favor law-and-order states. But the Nordic rightists’ experiences in office pushed them to adapt to mainstream norms and policy options. (The Sweden Democrats are currently an informal supporter of the Swedish ruling coalition; the Finns are a coalition member in Finland; and the DPP acted as a support party to a conservative Danish government between 2001 and 2011, as well as from 2015 to 2019.)

The radicalized AfD, Jungar said, in contrast to these parties, actively courts militants, trades in antisemitic tropes, and toys with the proposition of Germany exiting NATO and the European Union

Moreover, AfD politicians have stood against adoption rights for same-sex couples, the inclusion of disabled kids in schools, and the legality of abortion. “These positions simply wouldn’t stand a chance in Sweden,”

“The FPO under Kickl has moved further to the right. It is now indistinguishable from the right-wingers in the AfD,” he argued. “They want people who they think don’t belong here out of Austria. They don’t want to gas them yet, but they want to strip people of their citizenship. They want to cut people’s social benefits to such an extent that their livelihoods are destroyed. That is essentially the program of parties like the AfD and the FPO. They harbor fantasies ranging from populist to fascist.

“By stacking the courts and clamping down on opposition forces, these parties gradually undermined the democratic order,” Opratko said. “This is the AfD’s model. It’s what they want to do.”

Bonobos became famous for showing that nature didn’t always have to be red in tooth and claw. “Bonobos are an icon for peace and love, the world’s ‘hippie chimps,’” Sally Coxe, a conservationist, said in 2006.

Because bonobos live in remote, swampy rainforests, it has been much more difficult to observe them in the wild than chimpanzees. More recent research has shown that bonobos live a more aggressive life than their reputation would suggest.

In a study based on thousands of hours of observations in the wild published on Friday, for example, researchers found that male bonobos commit acts of aggression nearly three times as often as male chimpanzees do.

“There is no ‘hippie ape,’”

The researchers called their idea the self-domestication hypothesis. In later years, they speculated that humans may have undergone a self-domestication of their own.

In 2012, a trio of Harvard researchers proposed that bonobos evolved much like dogs did. Less aggressive wolves were not as likely to be killed by humans, which over time led to the emergence of dogs. In a similar fashion, the researchers argued, female bonobos preferred to mate with less aggressive males, giving birth to less aggressive offspring.

As our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees can offer us clues about the roots of human behavior. We and the two species share a common ancestor that lived about 7 million years ago. About 5 million years later, bonobos split off from chimpanzees.

Dr. Mouginot soon became perplexed, as she saw that male bonobos acted aggressively on a regular basis. Unlike male chimpanzees, who started their days in a mellow mood, the male bonobos seemed to wake up ready for a fight.

She and her colleagues trained field assistants, who made more observations throughout the pandemic. The new analysis, based on 9,300 hours of observations on 12 male bonobos and 14 male chimpanzees, found that bonobos committed aggressive acts 2.8 times as frequently as than the chimpanzees did.

Dr. Mouginot found that the frequent bonobo aggressions almost always involved a single male attacking another male. Chimpanzees, in contrast, often ganged up to attack a victim.

the study set a new standard for comparing aggression in bonobos and chimpanzees.

Dr. Mouginot speculated that male chimpanzees engage in one-on-one aggression less often because it poses bigger dangers: A victim of aggression may not want to go on a border patrol with the perpetrator, for example. Or he may bring back some of his own allies to wreak vengeance.

It may be easier for male bonobos to get away with aggression, Dr. Mouginot said, because in their female-dominated society they don’t face the risks that come with male alliances. “I think that’s why we see more aggression in bonobos — because it’s less risky to act aggressively against other males,”

the apes that carried out the most aggressive acts were also the ones who mated most often.

parts of the self-domestication hypothesis “clearly need refinement.” It may be important to consider the effect that different kinds of aggression have on a species, rather than lumping them altogether, he said.

Still, he argued that the differences between the two species remained significant. “Chimpanzees murder, and bonobos don’t,

For the first time since the first World Happiness Report was published in 2012, the United States fell out of the Top 20 and dropped to 23rd, pushed down by cratering attitudes of Americans under 30.

Americans have long been an unhappy bunch. They have never ranked in the Top 10 of the World Happiness Report, which is based on how respondents in different countries rate their own happiness.

cited the disruptions to life brought about by the coronavirus pandemic as a chief cause of mental health challenges among younger Americans.

The happiest young people are in Lithuania, while the unhappiest are in Afghanistan.

“I have never seen such an extreme change,” John Helliwell, an economist and a co-author of the report, said in an interview, referring to the drop in happiness among younger people. “This has all happened in the last 10 years, and it’s mainly in the English-language countries. There isn’t this drop in the world as a whole.”

Respondents were asked — among other prompts — to think of their life as a ladder and to rate it on a scale of one to 10, with 10 being the best possible life.

this was the first time that the consortium separated results by age, finding disparities in the views of younger and older Americans. Among the 143 countries surveyed, the United States ranked 10th for people 60 and older, but 62nd for people under 30.

Jade Song, a 27-year-old novelist, counted herself among those who had become increasingly unhappy in recent years.

“Many of the things that would have normally taken place for people, particularly high school young adults, did not take place,” he added. “And that is still occurring.”

“It’s mostly because as an adult you suddenly become aware of all the world news and you pay attention more to what you can control, and you realize that there is so little you can control,” Ms. Song, who was not part of the study, said in an interview. “Even if you’re going to protests or paying your rent and bills all on time, it’s so difficult, especially now, to break free from how you’re living your life when you realize how little impact your actions actually have on a broader level.”

There is a silver lining, though

In 2022, a Harvard University study showed that well-being among young adults in the United States had declined in the previous 20 years. Young people — those between the ages of 18 and 25 — reported the lowest levels of happiness compared with other age groups, as well as the poorest mental and physical health, sense of purpose, character, virtue, close social relationships and financial stability

Similar findings have emerged in Britain and Canada.

“One factor, which we’re all thinking about, is social media,” said Dr. Robert Waldinger, the director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development

“Because there’s been some research that shows that depending on how we use social media, it lowers well-being, it increases rates of depression and anxiety, particularly among young girls and women, teenage girls.”

In addition, Dr. Waldinger said, the negative feedback loop from news consumption has become a contributing factor.

“There’s also a lot of anxiety about the state of the world,” he said. “About climate change. About all of the polarization that we’re seeing.”

in some other countries, such as Croatia, Switzerland and Austria, the World Happiness Report shows that young people are becoming happier.

“Part of the problem is that we have this huge expectation of happiness in America,” said Eric Weiner, the author of “The Geography of Bliss,” and so we suffer partly from the unhappiness of not being happy and the expectation that we should be happy. And not every country in the world has that.”

“There’s an assumption that if you’re American, you’re wealthy and you’re high tech and you’re successful; you should be happy,” he said. “There’s a lot of data that shows that the greater your expectations, the less you’re happy.”

The expectations for young people like Ms. Song, the novelist, said have shifted.

“We have less to look forward to,” she said. “Because in the future, there’s going to be climate change that will affect the way we live. I think there’s less of a clear-cut trajectory for our life paths, because for so long, it was so easy just to know that you could go get married and have your 2.5 kids, and then pay for your house. But now that path is a lot more closed.”

“The literature is clear in practice — the effect that this had on socialization, pro-social behavior, if you will, and the ability for people to feel connected and have a community,”

“A, this angst is very local and, B, it’s very recent, which means, C, it’s not fundamental and going to last forever,” he said. “If it has been created that quickly, it could be removed that quickly.”

Special effects software can give your music all sorts of subtle vibes. For $299, for instance, you can make your song sound as though it was recorded in Sound City Studios in Los Angeles, on the $20,000 vintage microphones with the $100,000 mixing console that recorded Fleetwood Mac and Nirvana. For $259 you can simulate the Beatles’ Abbey Road Studios

In the past, when you assembled all the tracks for a song, it would have to be mixed and mastered in a studio by a sound engineer adjusting the levels. Now an app will do it for you.

Now, all you need to do is get the files uploaded to streaming services. If you are signed with a label, they will do that for you, but you don’t need a record deal to do that. There are companies such as DistroKid that act as postmen: for £17.99 a year, you can ensure that the song you created in your bedroom is available on multiple streaming platforms.

Some artists thrive on social media. It suits lively, quirky performers like Ryder, and artists who want to experiment with different genres. Mxmtoon, a 23-year-old American YouTuber, singer-songwriter and ukulele player, is also a streamer on Twitch, a platform on which people watch others playing online games, has published graphic novels and made a podcast. Maia — the artist’s name — describes mxmtoon as “a multi-hyphenated project”.

More traditional musicians struggle with some aspects of tech. “We get together,” says Sital-Singh of his contemporaries in the business, “and have a little moan about how everyone’s telling us to do TikTok and we can’t bring ourselves to dance and we feel old and decrepit.”

Even digital natives struggle sometimes: “I already have nostalgia for a simpler past, even though I’m 23,” says Maia. “It’s exciting but it does put so much pressure on a normal individual to be an entrepreneur to advertise their own personal brand.”

Journalists, regrettably, no longer have the power they once did. What matters these days is social media. The A&R (artists and repertoire) people at record companies who would once have hung out in basement clubs scouting for new talent now sit in meetings examining the data on artists’ social media performance.

Now that the whole world’s music is available all over the world at the click of a play button, there’s a greater diversity among top-selling artists.

People making videos of themselves performing or dancing to the song on TikTok helped propel it to the stratosphere. It has been streamed a billion times. Sethi now plays to packed venues in America and Europe; last year, he performed at Coachella, America’s Glastonbury. “Without digital technology I would be a south Asian indy musician, working on the fringes of Bollywood,” he says from his home in New York.

For musicians, it’s more ambiguous. Because the costs of making music are lower, anybody with ambition can have a go. Many more people, as a result, are getting into the music business. According to PPL, the organisation which distributes money to music performers and rights-holders, the number of registered artists has risen from 61,310, when the industry was at its nadir, to 165,039 last year.

That makes the business fiercely competitive. As Will Page, former chief economist at Spotify and author of Tarzan Economics, points out, around 100,000 tracks are being uploaded on to Spotify every day: that’s more than were released in an entire calendar year in the 1980s

That has cemented the power of the record companies. When the digital revolution started, it was widely expected that record labels would cease to exist, and be replaced by a model in which everybody promoted and distributed their own music. That’s not what has happened: because it’s so difficult to get noticed, embryonic stars need record labels to promote them.

A label invests in the production of the music, the styling of the band, video content, interviews, touring and the crucial business of getting a song on a streaming service’s playlist that suggests the song to listeners to suit their tastes. Artists that are signed with major labels get paid more, per stream, than those that aren’t.

Three quarters of streamed tracks have one of the major record labels behind them. And even though streaming is booming, it doesn’t contribute much to the incomes of the vast majority of artists.

Most artists stay hungry. A single stream will earn a musician anywhere between 0.1p and 2.4p. Crispin Hunt reckons that on average a million streams for a song — a wild ambition for most musicians — will, if you have to pay a cut to a record company, probably make you £1,000

If you’ve then got to pay your manager 20 per cent, and divide the rest between the four band members, “it barely pays for a Sainsbury’s shop. That’s why music is dominated by middle-class people called Crispin whose parents can afford to buy them an electric guitar and a laptop.”

For Christie Gardner, half of Lilo, a two-woman band, it helps planning gigs. “You can see where your listeners are and you can tell what they’re listening to. We make decisions about shows on that basis.” But for most bands, the economics of live performance are pretty grim.

Deathcrash’s manager Joe Taylor says that the band has been offered the opportunity of a European tour supporting a much bigger act. It would be good for their career but not their bank balance. The fees per show would be €200; once the costs of a sound engineer, a tour van, a driver, fuel, hotels and a carnet for importing musical instruments into the EU had been factored in, they would lose £15,000.

music has always been an uneconomic business, which people subsidise through other activities. The fiddler in the village pub probably worked in the fields in the daytime and played for money and fun in the evenings and at the weekend, rather as Ryder ran a juice bar and sang at weddings. These days, there is also the wafer-thin chance that they might end up being one of the 1,200 artists who make more than $1 million a year on Spotify

There are some signs that in the new musical economy, the balance of power between artists and the big record companies may have tipped slightly in the artists’ favour

the share of streaming revenues going to artists increased from 19.7 per cent to 23.3 per cent between 2012 and 2021 and that going to songwriters has risen from 8 per cent in 2008 to 15 per cent in 2021. “Outcomes for consumers, artists and songwriters,” it concludes, “are getting better.”

Most of the extra revenues generated by streaming are going to the top earners. But the stars are not the only ones benefiting. Between 2017 and 2022, the number of artists earning over $1 million on Spotify more than doubled, but so did the number earning over $10,000

more than two fifths of artists who release their own music aren’t expecting to make a full-time career. They’re in it for fun, for the love of it, or to be able to show their mum that they have released a song on Spotify.

It seems likely that the more music is being created, the greater the chance that wonderful tunes are being written, but it’s not necessarily the case. The best stuff might get buried under a mound of mediocrity.

For the fantasy of transcendence, of escape from connection with other lives, we are torching our life-support systems. We consent to the Earth-eating, soul-sucking mode of exploitation we call capitalism because we believe, quite wrongly, that we are all temporarily embarrassed millionaires. One day we too might live the affectless life of the ultra-rich.

Just as that boat owner scattered the dolphins, the very rich break up communities, deprive people of housing and threaten, ultimately, to drive us all out of the human climate niche – that is, the temperature range that enables us to flourish.

We should seek a wealth of community, of knowledge, of wonder, of life, of love: a wealth that does not impoverish others. We should seek not private luxury, but private sufficiency and public luxury.

Democracy, a fair distribution of resources, peace of mind and a habitable planet all depend on restraining the power of the very rich: their noise, their occupation of our common space, and their intrusion into all we hold dear.

Out of the 7,000 rooms in the Village, 2,500 have been supplied mobile air conditioning units at the teams’ requests, a Paris 2024 spokesman said

Keeping cool at all times is that much more important given the erratic schedules that some of the athletes here are facing, said Carroll, the Australian Olympic committee executive. Since many athletes’ events are at night, they’ll need to sleep during the hottest part of the day. So the decision to pay for air conditioners was a no-brainer.

But not everyone is all-in on A/C. Germany’s Olympic sports federation will have one of the larger contingents in the village with around 350 athletes. That includes 6-foot-7½-inch decathlon medal favorite Leo Neugebauer, who recently won the NCAA title competing for the Texas Longhorns in Austin, where air conditioning isn’t merely a suggestion—it’s a way of life.

When Germany asked its individual sport federations if they wanted to order air conditioning units for the athletes’ village, demand for frigid air was lukewarm, according to Olympic committee spokesman Michael Schirp.

“A total of 11 AC have been ordered. Eleven,” he wrote, adding an emoji of a face wearing sunglasses.