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Sullivan first had to dismantle establishment orthodoxies within himself — the same orthodoxies he now sought to undo at Brookings: That globalization and free trade were an unalloyed good, growing economies and improving people’s lives in the process. What was good for the stock market, in effect, was great for everybody. Given enough time, swelling wallets would produce a steady middle class, one that demands its political and human rights from its government. Even the most repressive regimes, the thinking went, would eventually crumble under the weight of inflowing capital. Consistent pressure via greenbacks did the most good for the most people.

“Those were the heady days when the mainstream foreign policy consensus was that globalization was a force for good,” Sullivan recalled in a 2017 interview. There was, of course, reason to think this. Capitalism helped keep the Soviet Union at bay, China still wasn’t a major power and building the economies of enemies turned them into friends. Globalization, per its champions, had the benefit of making many people rich while making the world safer in general and U.S. foreign policy less costly.

“After the Second World War, the United States led a fragmented world to build a new international economic order. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. It sustained thrilling technological revolutions. And it helped the United States and many other nations around the world achieve new levels of prosperity. But the last few decades revealed cracks in those foundations,”

Ramsey, the well-known and intensely followed 63-year-old conservative Christian radio host, has 4.4 million Instagram followers, 1.9 million TikTok followers and legions more who listen to his radio shows and podcasts.

His message is brutal and direct: Avoid debt at all costs. Pay for everything in cash. Embrace frugality.

Plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds are pushing back, largely on TikTok. The hashtag #daveramseywouldntapprove, for instance, has 66.8 million views. Many say they don’t want to eat rice and beans every night—a popular Ramsey trope—or hold down multiple jobs to pay off loans. They also say Ramsey is out of touch with their reality.

Of all the countries in Central and Eastern Europe that shook off communist rule in 1989, Slovakia has the highest proportion of citizens who view liberal democracy as a threat to their identity and values — 43 percent compared with 15 percent in the neighboring Czech Republic

Support for Russia has declined sharply since the start of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, but 27 percent of Slovaks see it as key strategic partner, the highest level in the region.

many of its people — particularly those living outside big cities — feel left behind and resentful, Mr. Meseznikov said, and are “more vulnerable than elsewhere to conspiracy theories and narratives that liberal democracy is a menace.”

The circle of Republican donors in the nation’s tech capital has long been limited to a few tech executives such as Scott McNealy, a founder of Sun Microsystems; Meg Whitman, a former chief executive of eBay; Carly Fiorina, a former chief executive of Hewlett-Packard; Larry Ellison, the executive chairman of Oracle; and Doug Leone, a former managing partner of Sequoia Capital.

But mostly, the tech industry cultivated close ties with Democrats. Al Gore, the former Democratic vice president, joined the venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins in 2007. Over the next decade, tech companies including Airbnb, Google, Uber and Apple eagerly hired former members of the Obama administration.

During that time, Democrats moved further to the left and demonized successful people who made a lot of money, further alienating some tech leaders, said Bradley Tusk, a venture capital investor and political strategist who supports Mr. Biden.

The collapse of the five-year-old Observatory is the latest and largest of a series of setbacks to the community of researchers who try to detect propaganda and explain how false narratives are manufactured, gather momentum and become accepted by various groups

It follows Harvard’s dismissal of misinformation expert Joan Donovan, who in a December whistleblower complaint alleged he university’s close and lucrative ties with Facebook parent Meta led the university to clamp down on her work, which was highly critical of the social media giant’s practices.

Starbird said that while most academic studies of online manipulation look backward from much later, the Observatory’s “rapid analysis” helped people around the world understand what they were seeing on platforms as it happened.

Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.

That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers. 

Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishized specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.   

We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.

It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties

Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.

Last year the Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 20 percent of people in the G7 countries thought that they and their families would be better off in five years.

Another Edelman survey, from 2020, uncovered a broad distrust of capitalism in countries across the world, “driven by a growing sense of inequity and unfairness in the system.”

Why the broad dissatisfaction with an economic system that is supposed to offer unsurpassed prosperity?

A rift between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s military leadership is spilling increasingly into the open after the armed forces’ top spokesman said Netanyahu’s aim of destroying Hamas in Gaza is unachievable.“The idea that we can destroy Hamas or make Hamas disappear is misleading to the public,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari told Israeli television on Wednesday.

The exchange was an illustration of months of tensions between Netanyahu and the country’s military leadership, who argue that Hamas could only be defeated if Israel replaces it with another governing authority in Gaza. During more than eight months of war, the Israeli military has invaded swaths of the Gaza Strip, only to see Hamas reconstitute itself in areas when Israeli forces withdraw.“What we can do is grow something different, something to replace it,” Hagari said Wednesday. “The politicians will decide” who should replace Hamas, he said.

The friction between Netanyahu and the military establishment had burst into public view earlier in the war. In May, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant delivered a speech calling on the government to decide who should replace Hamas in Gaza. The lack of a decision, he said, left Israel with only two choices: Hamas rule or a complete Israeli military takeover of the strip.

Elon Musk is racing to a sci-fi future while the AI chief at Meta Platforms is arguing for one rooted in the traditional scientific approach.

Meta’s top AI scientist, Yann LeCun, criticized the rival company and Musk himself. 

Musk turned to a favorite rebuttal—a veiled suggestion that the executive, who is also a high-profile professor, wasn’t accomplishing much: “What ‘science’ have you done in the past 5 years?”

You and I, sitting on the side that would like to preserve liberal democracy, are exhausted. The people lined up across the way, the ones who want to transition to illiberalism? They are energized.

Damon is right that we are on the cusp of something new. But where he sees it as the dawning of a new epoch, I believe we are on the cusp of a revolution.2

views on policy are merely the ornaments on a wholesale reimagining of government as a tool for minority rule and a rejection of the rule of law.3

By the time he left Discord a year or so later, he’d had about 200 calls with different people, both men and women, who spoke of contemplating suicide.

But it was the boys who seemed the most desperately lonely and isolated. On the site, he said, he found “a lot more unhealthy men than unhealthy women.” He added: “With men, there is a huge thing about mental health and shame because you’re not supposed to be weak. You’re not supposed to be broken.” A male mental-health crisis was flying under the radar.

I have come to believe the conditions of modern boyhood amount to a perfect storm for loneliness

A group of OpenAI insiders is blowing the whistle on what they say is a culture of recklessness and secrecy at the San Francisco artificial intelligence company, which is racing to build the most powerful A.I. systems ever created.

The group, which includes nine current and former OpenAI employees, has rallied in recent days around shared concerns that the company has not done enough to prevent its A.I. systems from becoming dangerous.

The members say OpenAI, which started as a nonprofit research lab and burst into public view with the 2022 release of ChatGPT, is putting a priority on profits and growth as it tries to build artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I., the industry term for a computer program capable of doing anything a human can.

The lesson was clear: Centrists, liberals, and leftists took the credible threat of right-wing authoritarian rule seriously enough to act quickly and strategically. Behaving as though their country’s future was at stake, they reacted to new information in order to maximize success.

No one spoke about personal loyalty to individual candidates. No one spoke about it being a given politician’s turn to be in office. No one said that it was too late to change the plan.

The extreme deadline instead became a motivational boon, not unlike the way a capable basketball team may go on a scoring rampage as the clock runs out.

what’s most Faustian about Mr. Vance — and by proxy Mr. Trump. Their belief that a movement built on aggrievement and rage can be easily controlled, that there is some way in which you can trick the Devil while holding onto what he’s given you.

In my book on Faust, I argue that the politics of authoritarianism is often embraced as a tool by those who believe that they can contain such forces and use them for political gain.

There is a lesson for Mr. Vance from the Faust story, however, assuming he can hear it. Beyond mere self-interest, what the legend warns against is the embrace of irrational forces and powers, especially when there is the delusion that the person trading their soul can wrangle the Devil

it seemed pretty clear that what really bothered conservatives was the very suggestion that American consumers should take into account the adverse effects their choices might have on other people. That sort of consideration, after all, is what the right mainly seems to mean when it condemns policies as “woke.”

Indeed, the vehicle’s fortresslike appearance and hefty price tag (it starts at around $80,000) seem to tap into contemporary anxieties around social disorder, according to Michael Rock, the founding partner of the brand consultancy 2x4.“It’s the embodiment of the culture of fear right now,” Mr. Rock said. “Why do you need a bulletproof car in the Hamptons? There’s a mentality to it. You’ve built this huge thing around you, and it’s all about this invading horde out there, and you’re in this bulletproof container.”

Mr. Rock compared the Cybertruck to the Hummer H2, another imposing automobile whose success critics linked to a frightened national mood. A New York Times review of the Hummer published in 2003, shortly after the United States invaded Iraq, called it “a unilateral personal statement in sync with a unilateral foreign policy.”

“This is a weapon,” he said. “Metal, angles, sharp: It’s like a blade. And so it’s definitely macho. It’s not round, there are no curves. I wonder if I’ll ever see a nice lady driving this kind of car.”

Sequoia Capital, calculated that investments in A.I. were running short of projected profits by a margin of at least several hundred billion dollars annually. (He called this “A.I.’s $600 billion question” and warned of “investment incineration.”)

In a similarly bearish Goldman Sachs report, the firm’s head of global equity research estimated that the cost of A.I. infrastructure build-out over the next several years would reach $1 trillion. “Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed,” he noted. “The crucial question is: What $1 trillion problem will A.I. solve?”

that trillion-dollar A.I. expenditure, more than the United States spends annually on its military, and think: What exactly is that money going toward?

This puts those Republican politicians saddled with inconvenient Ivy League degrees in an awkward position, like the guy who shows up in a tux for a rodeo wedding. In order to stay in office and on message, they must reject the very thing that propelled their own careers.

Remember, Ron DeSantis once eagerly joined one of Yale’s secret societies and told classmates he’d dreamed of attending Harvard Law. He founded a tutoring firm offering “the only LSAT prep courses designed exclusively by Harvard Law School graduates.

But once in office, he made a show of distancing himself from his academic credentials.

Researchers have always had an inkling that seismic activity contributed to the city’s destruction. The ancient writer Pliny the Younger reported from his vantage point in a nearby town that the eruption of Vesuvius had been accompanied by violent tremors.

A team of researchers led by Domenico Sparice from Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology decided to investigate this gap in the record.

Dr. Sparice said that excavations of Pompeii to date had not included experts in the field of archaeoseismology, which deals with the effects of earthquakes on ancient buildings. Contributions from specialists in this area were key to the discovery, he said.