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The result is a relentless pull to the extremes.

A tiny fringe adopts this mind-set as a conscious ethos, but for a much larger group, it is simply their cultural reality. In their minds, the left is so evil — and represents such an existential threat — that any accommodation of it (or any criticism of the right) undermines the forces of light in their great battle against the forces of darkness.

To understand the cultural dynamic, I want to introduce you to an obscure online concept, no enemies to the right.

one of their prime reproofs of what they might call the zombie right, the Reagan right of their parents’ generation, is that it was simply too accommodating

As they see it, classical liberal politics, which preserve free speech and robust debate as a priority, emboldened and empowered the left. Compromise, in their view, ran only one way

here’s where masculine insecurity enters the equation. To the new right, their opposition to the left is so obviously correct that only moral cowardice or financial opportunism (“grifting”) can explain any compromise

To fight on the right — mainly by trolling on social media or embracing authoritarianism as the based alternative to weak-kneed classical liberalism — is seen as strong, courageous and cool. It’s a sign of a fierce and independent mind.

Thus, the troll isn’t just a troll; he’s a man. He’s a warrior.

What happens if you ask: Wait, are we going too far? Well, then, you’re weak and small. You become the grifter

even when one initially embraces bigotry “only” as a form of social transgression, marinating in that environment soon turns trolling into conviction

“What starts off as joking can very quickly become unironically internalized as an actual belief.”

It’s difficult to break the hold of bigotry and fury on the online right, but as is so often the case, the solution to online evil can be found in offline relationships, the family and friends who keep us grounded to the real.

encountering people in full, rather than as mere online avatars for hated ideas, can indeed soften hearts and change minds.

The lost boys of the American right corrupt our culture. Full of fury against their opponents and afraid of running afoul of their “friends,” they poison our politics and damage their own souls.

With so many needs met, economists estimate China now has to invest about $9 to produce each dollar of GDP growth, up from less than $5 a decade ago, and a little over $3 in the 1990s.

Returns on assets by private firms have declined to 3.9% from 9.3% five years ago, according to Bert Hofman, head of the National University of Singapore’s East Asian Institute. State companies’ returns have retreated to 2.8% from 4.3%.

China’s labor force, meanwhile, is shrinking, and productivity growth is slowing. From the 1980s to the early 2000s, productivity gains contributed about a third of China’s GDP growth, Hofman’s analysis shows. That ratio has declined to less than one sixth in the past decade.

Changing that would require China’s government to undertake measures aimed at encouraging people to spend more and save less. That could include expanding China’s relatively meager social safety net with greater health and unemployment benefits.

Much of the debt was incurred by cities. Limited by Beijing in their ability to borrow directly to fund projects, they turned to off-balance sheet financing vehicles whose debts are expected to reach more than $9 trillion this year,

only about 20% of financing firms used by local governments to fund projects have enough cash reserves to meet their short-term debt obligations, including bonds owned by domestic and foreign investors.

The solution for many parts of the country has been to keep borrowing and building. Total debt, including that held by various levels of government and state-owned companies, climbed to nearly 300% of China’s GDP as of 2022, surpassing U.S. levels and up from less than 200% in 201

Household consumption makes up only about 38% of GDP in China, relatively unchanged in recent years, compared with around 68% in the U.S.,

The most obvious solution, economists say, would be for China to shift toward promoting consumer spending and service industries, which would help create a more balanced economy

i and some of his lieutenants remain suspicious of U.S.-style consumption, which they see as wasteful at a time when China’s focus should be on bolstering its industrial capabilities and girding for potential conflict with the West, people with knowledge of Beijing’

The leadership also worries that empowering individuals to make more decisions over how they spend their money could undermine state authority, without generating the kind of growth Beijing desires.

A plan announced in late July to promote consumption was criticized by economists both in and outside China for lacking details. It suggested promoting sports and cultural events, and pushed for building more convenience stores in rural areas.

Instead, guided by a desire to strengthen political control, Xi’s leadership has doubled down on state intervention to make China an even bigger industrial power, strong in government-favored industries such as semiconductors, EVs and AI.

While foreign experts don’t doubt China can make headway in these areas, they alone aren’t enough to lift up the entire economy or create enough jobs for the millions of college graduate

a speech made by Xi six months earlier to senior officials, in which the leader emphasized the importance of focusing on long-term goals instead of pursuing Western-style material wealth. “We must maintain historic patience and insist on making steady, step-by-step progress,” Xi said in the speech. 

In Mexico, the growing interest in all things Korean has made her a social-media sensation with more than 24 million followers on TikTok and over eight million subscribers to her YouTube channel, allowing her to gain popularity, financial stability and a romantic partner — all on her own terms.

“She had all this training in Korea, in this new Korea that allows her to land in a place like Mexico and be successful.”

A sort of a teacher of comparative pop culture, Ms. Kim offers lessons on popular Korean soap operas, lyrics, fashion standards, traditions and social norms. She once worked as a waitress in Mexico for a day and posted about her confusion with tips. (South Korea is a no-tip country.) She showed followers how Korean students crammed for exams. She started traveling across Mexico tasting regional delicacies.

Ms. Kim’s success tracks the growth of Korean influence in Mexico and the region.More than 2,000 Korean companies have a presence in Mexico, part of a so-called near-shoring strategy that has driven larger corporations — Kia, LG, Samsung, Hyundai, among others — to take advantage of a free-trade agreement with Canada and the United States.

K-pop, K-beauty and K-dramas have shown Latin Americans a new, different way to be cool.

K-pop bands have been performing to increasingly bigger and sold-out venues since 2012. This year, a summer festival will bring 16 Korean groups to Mexico City, with ticket prices starting at around $170.

Some newsstands specialize in magazines, posters and merchandise about South Korean celebrities. Netflix offers dubbing in “Latin Spanish” for Korean shows. Movie theaters stream live K-pop concerts performed abroad.

After finishing college in South Korea, Ms. Kim said she experienced severe stress. “I wanted to die and I wished to rest,” she said in one of her most popular videos. She has spoken openly about being hospitalized to take care of her mental health.

She attributes her exhaustion to Korea’s culture of sacrifice and grind that helped the country become an economic powerhouse after the Korean War.

“Everything is quick, quick, now, right this second,” Dr. Balderrama said. “This created a culture where there’s no place for mediocrity, there’s no place for those unwilling to compete.”

In Mexico, Ms. Kim hoped to find a more joyous life: “I saw how Latin culture is, how Latin people live and they’re living happily,” she said. “I don’t want to waste a single moment I’m in Latin America because it’s so precious to me.”

But if Ms. Kim has found a passion and a business, she has not completely found the peace of mind she was seeking. She’s in therapy to deal with what she described as some depression and anxiety.

Her large following and popularity has bred fear: “I feel people will forget me, that nobody will like me,” she said, worried about the toll of having to come up with creative content to remain relevant.

She does get criticized online by users who say she should go back to Korea, who ask whether she pays taxes in Mexico (she says she does) and who consider her another foreigner lured by life on the cheap and who contributes to the gentrification of parts of the country at the expense of Mexican residents.

compared with the citizens of these nations, American infants are less likely to turn 5, American teenagers are less likely to turn 30, and American 30-somethings are less likely to survive to retirement.

I called the U.S. the rich death trap of the modern world. The “rich” part is important to observe and hard to overstate. The typical American spends almost 50 percent more each year than the typical Brit, and a trucker in Oklahoma earns more than a doctor in Portugal.

A series about big problems and big solutions

the typical American is 100 percent more likely to die than the typical Western European at almost every age from birth until retirement.

magine I offered you a pill and told you that taking this mystery medication would have two effects. First, it would increase your disposable income by almost half. Second, it would double your odds of dying in the next 365 days. To be an average American is to fill a lifetime prescription of that medication and take the pill nightly.

A series about big problems and big solutions

1.8 figure as “the U.S. death ratio”—the annual mortality rate in the U.S., as a multiple of similarly rich countries.

By the time an American turns 18, the U.S. death ratio surges to 2.8. By 29, the U.S. death ratio rockets to its peak of 4.22, meaning that the typical American is more than four times more likely to die than the average resident in our basket of high-income nations.

The average American my age, in his mid-to-late 30s, is roughly six times more likely to die in the next year than his counterpart in Switzerland.

The average U.S. death ratio stays higher than three for practically the entire period between ages 30 and 50, meaning that the typical middle-aged American is roughly three times more likely to die within the year than his counterpart in Western Europe or Australia.

One could tell a similar story about drug

America suffers not from a monopoly on despair and aggression, but from an oversupply of instruments of death. We have more drug-overdose deaths than any other high-income country because we have so much more fentanyl, even per capita

Americans drive more than other countries, leading to our higher-than-average death rate from road accidents

I expected that these three culprits—guns, drugs, and cars—would explain most of our death ratio

he argued that Americans’ health (and access to health care) seems to be the most important factor. America’s prevalence of cardiovascular and metabolic disease is so high that it accounts for more of our early mortality than guns, drugs, and cars combined.

Disentangling America’s health issues is complicated, but I can offer three data points

First, American obesity is unusually high, which likely leads to a larger number of early and middle-aged death

Second, Americans are unusually sedentary. We take at least 30 percent fewer steps a day than people do in Australia, Switzerland, and Japan

Finally, U.S. access to care is unusually unequal—and our health-care outcomes are unusually tied to income.

voters and politicians in the U.S. care so much about freedom in that old-fashioned ’Merica-lovin’ kind of way that we’re unwilling to promote public safety if those rules constrict individual choice. That’s how you get a country with infamously laissez-faire firearms laws, more guns than people, lax and poorly enforced driving laws, and a conservative movement that has repeatedly tried to block, overturn, or limit the expansion of universal health insurance on the grounds that it impedes consumer choice.

Among the rich, this hyper-individualistic mindset can manifest as a smash-and-grab attitude toward life, with surprising consequences for the less fortunate. For example, childhood obesity is on the rise at the same time that youth-sports participation is in decline among low-income kids

What seems to be happening at the national level is that rich families, seeking to burnish their child’s résumé for college, are pulling their kids out of local leagues so that they can participate in prestigious pay-to-play travel teams. At scale, these decisions devastate the local youth-sports leagues for the benefit of increasing by half a percentage point the odds of a wealthy kid getting into an Ivy League school.

The problem with the Freedom and Individualism Theory of Everything is that, in many cases, America’s problem isn’t freedom-worship, but actually something quite like its opposite: overregulation

In medicine, excessive regulation and risk aversion on the part of the FDA and Institutional Review Boards have very likely slowed the development and adoption of new lifesaving treatments.

Are Americans unusually sedentary because they love freedom so very much? It’s possible, I guess. But the more likely explanation is that restrictive housing policies have made it too hard for middle- and low-income families to live near downtown business districts, which forces many of them to drive more than they would like, thus reducing everyday walking and exercise.

America is caught in a lurch between oversight and overkill, sometimes promoting individual freedom, with luridly fatal consequences, and sometimes blocking policies and products, with subtly fatal consequences.

Trump, by contrast, correctly perceived that the party was not — or was no longer — primarily an ideological party. It was more clearly defined by what it was against than what it was for.

the ideological definition of Trumpism became something else entirely: a full-spectrum political and cultural opposition to the left, however it might be defined.

This transformation was also tied to a change in the way that Republicans perceive government. Fusionists such as me read the Declaration of Independence and reaffirm that governments are instituted for the purpose of securing our “unalienable rights.” Thus, the protection of liberty is an indispensable aspect of American government.

whom DeSantis attacks is ultimately less important than how he does it. Republicans, after all, have long fought the left, but DeSantis does it differently, in part by abandoning fusionist commitments to free speech and limited government.

the obvious alarm. Any government strong enough to reward friends and punish enemies is also strong enough to do the reverse,

the nationalist conservative movement that Trump has helped bring center stage has different priorities. In its view, the right should — to cite the words of David Azerrad, a professor at Hillsdale College — use the power of government to “reward friends and punish enemies (within the confines of the rule of law).”

There’s at least one key difference. Trump fights for himself above all else. His political impulses are selfish, sub-ideological and subject to revision at a moment’s notice

DeSantis is likewise ambitious, but his political commitments have an underlying consistency that extends beyond that ambition: He fights the left. When you understand that distinction between the two men, you understand the course of the race so far and its likely shape going forward.

DeSantis, a keynote speaker at the 2022 National Conservatism Conference and the ultimate example of fight club conservatism. His primary victory would signal that the transformation of conservatism since 2016 wasn’t a mere interruption of Republican ideology — one in which Republicans would return to fusionism once Trump leaves the scene — but rather the harbinger of more permanent change.

Why the flip-flops? Because support for vaccines and for Ukraine are now seen in populist right circles as “coding left” or — equally unacceptable — as positions of the “regime” or the “uniparty” or the “establishment.”

, I disagree with DeSantis on many things, but I see Trump as an entirely different order of threat — one who is demonstrably willing to help precipitate mob violence to sustain his hold on power. So should someone like me quiet his critique of DeSantis in the interest of defeating Trump?

I say no. I believe we can walk and chew gum at the same time, opposing Trump while upholding a vision of state power that limits its ability to “reward friends and punish enemies” so that all Americans enjoy the same rights to speak, regardless of their view of the government.

Moreover, suspicion of state power should extend beyond the protection of civil liberties. Conservatives have long raised proper concerns about the ability of the government to achieve the economic or cultural outcomes it desires when it institutes sweeping, large-scale government programs. And this concern is not exclusive to conservatives.

Liberals aren’t watching “Yellowstone” for cultural reasons, and conservatives love it for ideological ones, he said.

I watched all four seasons of “Yellowstone” through the lens of these asymmetries. The show is compelling but not groundbreaking. It is too easy to call it a conservative show. Like its audience counterpart, “Yellowstone” thinks it is at war with progress when it is really at war with itself.

when it comes to identity and tastes, Childress said it is a “mark of social status for liberals to be culturally omnivorous.”

In contrast, conservative audiences do not consider reading, watching or listening around a mark of status or identity. And they are more likely to dislike what liberals like than liberals are to dislike what conservatives like.

“People on the left like more pop culture than people on the right,’’ Childress said. “And people on the left don’t dislike what people on the right dislike.

The rejection of cosmopolitanism as a desirable attribute is more subtle, but present

The West of “Yellowstone” is multiethnic, multiracial and multi-class. There are Black cowboys and complex Native American characters. A pair of lesbians even makes an appearance in Season 2 (although there are no gay cowboys,

Regardless of whether you agree with the classification, you have an idea of what other people mean by “elite”: urban, sophisticated and educated. In short, the things that “Yellowstone” skewers at every opportunity. The characters despise California and San Francisco in particular

It accommodates feminism by making women the most vicious capitalist actors.

The slow dialogue of “Yellowstone” also rejects sophistication. The narrative plods even as the show’s many horses run. And the mood is dour; there aren’t many jokes

Those aesthetic choices implicitly argue for simplicity as a moral virtue, something John Dutton telegraphs when he tells a field hand that sometimes the world really is simple.

“Yellowstone” sidesteps Westerns’ romanticization of the white imaginary. At dinner last week with my family, my 30-something Black lesbian cousins gushed about the show, although they prefer its Native American characters to the Duttons.

There are few strivers in the world of “Yellowstone.” The show’s royalty grudgingly accept higher education as a strategic tool to beat the liberal do-gooders. The poor and disenfranchised don’t dream of going to college at all.

the show’s revenge is how well it exposes the material conditions of elitism. Its worldview resembles fantasy but it is brutally realistic about how power operates.

Whatever brings its audience to the show, once they arrive, they are playacting within the vision of America that “Yellowstone” holds. The show suggests that elitism and power can be reconciled with our need to be both moral and self-interested. It is a seductive fantasy because it does not ask the audience to give up anything.

The nominal diversity of the show’s cast implies that conservatives don’t hate anyone, as long as everyone is willing to conform to their way of life

It acknowledges white land theft and Native American grievance, but it does not make a case for reparations.

It accepts that Christopher Columbus was a colonizer but implies that the Duttons’ good-enough ends justify the means.

If the show rejects sophistication, it takes a hammer to education

And it depicts the police as feckless, but it does not want to abolish cops. It wants to choose the cops. That means a lot of guns.

“Yellowstone” does not just have gunfights. It has all-out wars. There are military-grade weapons, aerial assaults, night-vision goggles and automatic rifles. When John Dutton cannot win, he starts shooting.

“Yellowstone” isn’t ideologically driven, even if ideology is what makes it so comforting for conservative audiences.

in the end, the show shares a problem with Republican Party electoral politics: Neither offers a compelling vision of the future.

Republicans don’t solve problems like climate change or economic inequality or water rights or housing costs or stagnant wages. With Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell’s leadership, the G.O.P. does not even bother to sell a conservative story for America. Audiences looking for that vision in “Yellowstone” might find that cosmetic diversity needn’t be scary, but they won’t find much else.

Like Republicans, the Dutton dynasty has one defense against demography and time: Buy guns and hoard stolen power.

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.

48,830 people died from gun-related injuries in 2021. (The U.S. population is about 20 times that of the Netherlands; U.S. gun homicides are more than 1,777 times the number in the Netherlands.)

“Since 2014, 23 prisons have been shut, turning into temporary asylum centres, housing and hotels. … The number of prison sentences imposed fell from 42,000 in 2008 to 31,000 in 2018 — along with a two-thirds drop in jail terms for young offenders

Registered crimes plummeted by 40% in the same period, to 785,000 in 2018.”

in the United States, “Drug offenses still account for the incarceration of over 350,000 people

possession arrests each year, many of which lead to prison sentences.”

the United States has 163 times the number of incarcerated people as the Netherlands, more than eight times as many per 100,000 people.

“The United States spends nearly $300 billion annually to police communities and incarcerate 2.2 million people.”

“The societal costs of incarceration — lost earnings, adverse health effects, and the damage to the families of the incarcerated — are estimated at up to three times the direct costs, bringing the total burden of our criminal justice system to $1.2 trillion.”

These two very different systems didn’t just happen. Each country made choices.

In real terms, the U.S. criminal justice system and ubiquitous guns require an industry — ambulances, emergency room personnel, police, courts, judges, prisons, lawyers, private security and more — that the Dutch system does not

As I walked down the streets of Amsterdam, I imagined what we could have bought with the money we spend on the criminal justice system: universal college education, universal medical care, a strong social safety net.

The human cost of crime in America — a family driven into poverty because a breadwinner is murdered, a child permanently disabled from a gunshot, children terrorized in schools — is astronomically higher than in the Netherlands.

there is the opportunity cost in the United States — the murdered child who doesn’t grow up to invent the next cancer cure, the school that is forced to use resources on lockdown drills and grief counselors rather than reading teachers

We are very good at feeding a criminal justice system; we’re not so adept at eliminating crime

Understand, then, that we have our current criminal justice system because we have fetishized guns, criminalized addiction, neglected mental and emotional health, and resisted addressing social factors driving crime.

We could do it differently. We simply don’t want to

A graduate of Stanford and Yale Law, Carter was a proud beneficiary of affirmative action. Yet he acknowledged the personal toll it took (“a decidedly mixed blessing”) as well as affirmative action’s sometimes troubling effects on Black people as the programs evolved.

The diversity argument holds that people of different races benefit from one another’s presence, which sounds desirable on its face

The demise of affirmative action, in Carter’s view, was both necessary and inevitable. “We must reject the common claim that an end to preferences ‘would be a disastrous situation, amounting to a virtual nullification of the 1954 desegregation ruling,’” he wrote, quoting the activist and academic Robert Allen. “The prospect of its end should be a challenge and a chance.”

Like many people today — both proponents and opponents of affirmative action — he expressed reservations about relying on diversity as the constitutional basis for racial preferences.

What immediately struck me on rereading it was how prescient Carter was about these debates 32 years ago. What role affirmative action should take was playing out then in ways that continue to reverberate.

But the implication of recruiting for diversity, Carter explained, had less to do with admitting Black students to redress past discrimination and more to do with supporting and reinforcing essentialist notions about Black people.

An early critic of groupthink, Carter warned against “the idea that Black people who gain positions of authority or influence are vested a special responsibility to articulate the presumed views of other people who are Black — in effect, to think and act and speak in a particular way, the Black way — and that there is something peculiar about Black people who insist on doing anything else.”

Carter took issue with the belief, now practically gospel in academic, cultural and media circles, that heightened race consciousness would be central to overcoming racism

, it’s hard to imagine Carter welcoming the current vogue for white allyship, with its reductive assumption that all Black people have the same interests and values

He disparaged what he called “the peculiar relationship between Black intellectuals and the white ones who seem loath to criticize us for fear of being branded racists — which is itself a mark of racism of a sort.”

Carter bristled at the judgment of many of his Black peers, describing several situations in which he found himself accused of being “inauthentically” Black, as if people of a particular race were a monolith and that those who deviated from it were somehow shirking their duty. He said he didn’t want to be limited in what he was allowed to say by “an old and vicious form of silencing.”

In the past, such ideas might have been seen as “frankly racist,” Carter noted. “Now, however, they are almost a gospel for people who want to show their commitment to equality.”

However well intentioned you may be, when you reduce people to their race-based identity rather than view them as individuals in their full, complex humanity, you risk making sweeping assumptions about who they are. This used to be called stereotyping or racism.

he rejected all efforts to label him, insisting that intellectuals should be “politically unpredictable.

“Critics who attempt to push (or pull) Carter into the ranks of the Black right wing will be making a mistake. He is not a conservative, neo- or otherwise. He is an honest Black scholar — the product of the pre-politically correct era — who abhors the stifling of debate by either wing or by people of any hue.”

This strikes me as the greatest difference between reading the book today and reading it as an undergrad at a liberal Ivy League college: the attitude toward debating controversial views. “Reflections” offers a vigorous and unflinching examination of ideas, something academia, media and the arts still prized in 1991.

Today, a kind of magical thinking has seized ideologues on both the left and the right, who seem to believe that stifling debate on difficult questions will make them go away

As Mr. Schwartz answered the judge’s questions, the reaction in the courtroom, crammed with close to 70 people who included lawyers, law students, law clerks and professors, rippled across the benches. There were gasps, giggles and sighs. Spectators grimaced, darted their eyes around, chewed on pens.

“I continued to be duped by ChatGPT. It’s embarrassing,” Mr. Schwartz said.

The episode, which arose in an otherwise obscure lawsuit, has riveted the tech world, where there has been a growing debate about the dangers — even an existential threat to humanity — posed by artificial intelligence. It has also transfixed lawyers and judges.

Mr. Schwartz, who has practiced law in New York for 30 years, said in a declaration filed with the judge this week that he had learned about ChatGPT from his college-aged children and from articles, but that he had never used it professionally.He told Judge Castel on Thursday that he had believed ChatGPT had greater reach than standard databases.“I heard about this new site, which I falsely assumed was, like, a super search engine,” Mr. Schwartz said.

Avianca asked Judge Castel to dismiss the lawsuit because the statute of limitations had expired. Mr. Mata’s lawyers responded with a 10-page brief citing more than half a dozen court decisions, with names like Martinez v. Delta Air Lines, Zicherman v. Korean Air Lines and Varghese v. China Southern Airlines, in support of their argument that the suit should be allowed to proceed.After Avianca’s lawyers could not locate the cases, Judge Castel ordered Mr. Mata’s lawyers to provide copies. They submitted a compendium of decisions.It turned out the cases were not real.

“This case has reverberated throughout the entire legal profession,” said David Lat, a legal commentator. “It is a little bit like looking at a car wreck.”

Irina Raicu, who directs the internet ethics program at Santa Clara University, said this week that the Avianca case clearly showed what critics of such models have been saying, “which is that the vast majority of people who are playing with them and using them don’t really understand what they are and how they work, and in particular what their limitations are.”

“This case has changed the urgency of it,” Professor Roiphe said. “There’s a sense that this is not something that we can mull over in an academic way. It’s something that has affected us right now and has to be addressed.”

In the declaration Mr. Schwartz filed this week, he described how he had posed questions to ChatGPT, and each time it seemed to help with genuine case citations. He attached a printout of his colloquy with the bot, which shows it tossing out words like “sure” and “certainly!”After one response, ChatGPT said cheerily, “I hope that helps!”

Many of the seminal works of literature, history, philosophy, science and theology were revolutionary in their respective age

Like revolutionary ideas today, the ideas of yesterday were provocative and, in many cases, much more consequential.

Revolutionary figures of the past give us insight into the present and allow for reflection on the consequences of their choices.

one of the virtues of the classics: They are a means of considering what is true without invoking the blind partisanship that encourages thoughtless action. There is nothing we need more today than the cultivation of reason and understanding.

Education based on values, logic and discipline isn’t Republican—it’s timeless.

“I spent years debating quite strongly with climate sceptics, including people I assume were paid,” he added. “But there can be a real personal cost interacting over a long time with people who are abusing you.”McNeall said it was hard for scientists to work out how to cut through the false information on Twitter. “I just can’t tell if people are seeing disinformation or getting good scientific information about what is happening,” he said. “That’s really worrying.”

Ed Hawkins, professor of climate science at Reading University, who has 94,000 Twitter followers, said he had seen a “huge increase” in tweets from climate-denier accounts, often involving conspiracy theories or long-debunked topics. “A larger fraction of the comments are personal and abusive,” he said. “Any mildly popular tweet from a climate scientist is now targeted for a barrage of replies.”

Hawkins has noticed that many denier accounts have paid subscriptions to Twitter and therefore appear higher up in the replies. “It appears to be a coordinated effort [by climate change deniers] to make it appear as though climate denial is more prevalent than it really is,” he said.

Professor Richard Betts, chair of climate impacts at Exeter University and head of climate impacts at the Hadley Centre, said: “Outright hostility has increased in recent weeks. It’s mostly just people saying you’re talking rubbish. They don’t want a conversation.”

A survey of 468 international climate scientists published by campaign group Global Witness last month found that prominent scientists were the most likely to face abuse, with half of those who had published at least 10 papers reporting they had suffered online harassment as a result of their climate work. One in eight female scientists who reported abuse had been threatened with sexual violence.

Mr. Gutfeld has said he initially connected with network executives through his friendship with Andrew Breitbart, a fellow Californian and an early contributor to The Huffington Post. Mr. Gutfeld had been writing there as he moved beyond magazines, embracing the rollicking venom of the nascent blogosphere and tormenting the in-house liberals.

“He’s like America’s latchkey kid, grown up,” said Nick Gillespie, an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine, and a “Red Eye” regular. “You are constantly searching out new things to pass the day when the adults aren’t around.”

What he did not know was that Fox was looking for someone like him — or at least someone unusual enough to advance an unusual new venture: proving that the right knew how to laugh.

“In every situation there’s that polarity where the Republicans are Dean Wormer in ‘Animal House,’” Mr. Gutfeld said, naming the film’s antagonist. And Democrats, he continued, came off as “the fun, Jon Stewart, ‘let’s have a great time and make fun of Dean Wormer.’ And I said that my goal was to flip that.”

“He was using a lot of all-caps,” Arianna Huffington recalled, mostly warmly.

Like media personalities before and since — including Joe Rogan and a constellation of other podcaster-comedians — Mr. Gutfeld took care to convey a vital quality to his audience: that he was getting away with something, saying what should not be said. He names Norm Macdonald, David Letterman and Tim Dillon as favored comedy minds.

Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor and Mr. Marx’s co-author of “That’s Not Funny,” said Mr. Gutfeld’s emergence was a signal accomplishment for the right: “somehow claiming conservativism or right-wing-ness as being against the squares.”

Around this period, he also often did something that feels disorienting to rewatch, given the host’s present disdain for those who moralize about Mr. Trump: He moralized about Mr. Trump.

“I’ve heard people defend him about making fun of a disability, making fun of John McCain, making fun of women,” he said on “The Five” in December 2015, accusing a Fox colleague of “Trumpsplaining” away his behavior. “No one will ever stop defending the crass stuff he says.”

“He is a salesman,” Mr. Gutfeld said, cradling his French bulldog, Gus, on his lap in the home the host shares with his wife, Elena Moussa. “Once you understand that, the derangement just kind of washes away.”

While Mr. Gutfeld mostly agrees with other Fox personalities in the lineup of Republican-friendly hours — that progressives are nuts, that Mr. Trump is unduly targeted, that President Biden is a doddering mess — “Gutfeld!” does land differently, with a host who seems adamant that his exclamation point is in on the joke.

“He’s today’s Don Rickles,” Candace Caine, a devotee from Birmingham, Ala., said after a recent taping — her third visit to see Mr. Gutfeld — where she leaned over a railing to shout “I love you!” during a commercial break.

In the Court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts held that “eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it”—a new version of his old affront that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

This glib framing, and the school of thinking it represents, established a pernicious, false moral equivalence. Those who preserved and protected Jim Crow — the institution that defended America’s old racial hierarchy — were and are something altogether different from those who fought and who continue fighting for a more just America.

Those uprooting affirmative action seem content to leave intact systems that compound privilege, exacerbating inequality — like legacy admissions policies that disproportionately favor wealthy, white applicants — resulting in lower-income students and families of all races losing out.

I find it regrettable that, over 40 years ago, Justice Lewis Powell introduced the American public to the imperative of diversity in the shallow manner that he did.

I was a freshman in college when his seminal opinion in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978) invited some to equate the benefits of diversity with unfairness

the idea that necessary diversity initiatives are somehow reverse discrimination or that they correlate with lower standards or lesser outcomes.

The data suggests exactly the opposite. Study after study demonstrates that, across organizations, diversity enhances critical thinking, creativity and collaboration, as well as productivity, profitability and performance.

we should tell the truth about why diversity is now controversial: Opponents of diversity are opponents of any racial consciousness. They want to prevent us from understanding the ways that the past informs the present, from wrestling with the fullness and richness and complexity of our history.

As so many IRL organizing meetings are, the meeting was admirably focused on the here and now. There was little to complain about. But when a speaker closed by saying “All power to the people,” I winced. Because it was emblematic of that inescapable feeling that attends radical politics now - the feeling that it’s all kitsch, like a Googie-architecture portrayal of the space age.

The palpable sense that everyone is quietly aware that the whole thing is a type of pantomime, people going through the motions with no real sense of possibility, unwilling to entirely give up on the profound moral necessity of radical change but at this point entirely incapable of lying to themselves about the reality of what’s actually possible

you know what would be a much bigger symbol of radical progress than some killer whales attacking a couple dozen random small watercraft? A diverse working-class movement based on shared economic need, coming together across demographic distance and using their labor power to earn a better, more just world for all people, rallying under a banner of shared sacrifice and the universal brotherhood of all. But nobody, nobody believes that such a thing is possible. Not anymore

We are all of us at a lefty Renaissance festival, our hammer and sickles no more authentic than Ye Olde Meade Hall, feeling like parents trying to keep the myth of Santa Claus alive to a child that’s probably just too old to keep buying it

It’s easier to imagine whales delivering our salvation than it is to imagine us delivering it to ourselves.

Yes, enjoying orcas attacking some random boats is natural and funny, and rolling that into a metaphor of radical politics in a humorous way is fine. But that’s not all that’s been happening with this story, is it? I’m not just talking about a few random tweets, here. I’ve been following this story for days now, in various forums, and growing increasingly sad as people seem to invest more and more in this, emotionally. What’s going on here, exactly?

I was at an organizing meeting not too long ago, one put together by a good local lefty organizatio

In Britain, where gas accounts for roughly 40 percent of electricity generation but has a disproportionate effect on its cost

if the price of beer had risen as much that of natural gas over the last year, a pint in a pub would cost £25, or about $30.

“How can you adapt to a rise like this?” said Tewdos Gebreysus, a 35-year-old Uber driver in London, who said he was now paying four times as much on his energy bills as he was at the beginning of the year.

Johnson has left it for his successor to devise a response to the skyrocketing energy costs.

She and her opponent, Rishi Sunak, reject more sweeping measures, like using state subsidies to freeze the energy price cap for two years.

“We have a sort of worst-of-both-worlds system,” said Jonathan Portes, a professor of a professor of economics and public policy at Kings College London. “Household prices are related to the spot market, and we sort of save up price increases and dump them on households all at once.”

Britain is far less dependent on Russian gas than Germany or other European countries. But the structure of its energy market makes it extremely sensitive to fluctuations in the market price of natural gas.

The Bank of England has predicted that inflation will peak at 13 percent in October as the new energy prices turn up in household bills. Other estimates are higher; analysts at Citibank have said the rate could reach as high as 18 percent early next year.

Britain’s opposition Labour Party recently proposed to freeze energy tariffs where they are now, paying part of the £29 billion cost by increasing the so-called windfall taxes that the Conservative government imposed this year on oil and gas giants operating in the North Sea

The leadership contest has been dominated by Ms. Truss’s promise to cut taxes, which is popular with the rank-and-file Conservative Party members who will vote for the next prime minister. But economists say it would do little to protect the most vulnerable people from the ravages of soaring energy bills.

With another hefty price increase looming in October, the public outcry over energy costs is likely to haunt the next prime minister. Unless the government develops an effective response, some analysts said, the issue could cripple the government and tilt the next election to the Labour Party.

at a campaign gathering with Mr. Sunak on Thursday, she said the solution to the crisis was not to throw more money carelessly at consumers. Mr. Sunak, who has proposed cutting value-added tax on energy bills, warned that without drastic action, “there’s a high risk that millions of people will fall into destitution.

Beyond the mechanics of the system, critics said Britain had lagged Germany and other European countries in urging people to reduce energy consumption and increase the efficiency of their homes and offices.

“This is the poverty of our politics,” said Tom Burke, the chairman of E3G, an environmental think tank, and a former government adviser. “You’ve got to do some financial work to address the costs in the short term, and then you’ve got to really drive forward on demand reduction in the long run.”

A culture that separated intellect from integrity would stop granting undue moral mystique to graduates of elite colleges.

It would stop implicitly deriding occupations that are essential for our collective functioning but don’t require an extensive education.

such a society could better recognize that there are different forms of intelligence beyond book learning and test taking—from sound judgment to emotional awareness to practical handiness—and cultivate those attributes in our children and leaders.

“It is genius for the current consumer culture,” Christine Whelan, a clinical professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “It encourages and then meets the need for the thing, so we then continue on the hedonic treadmill: Buy the latest thing we want and then have it delivered immediately and then buy the next latest thing.”

With traditional retail, “there’s the friction of having to go to the store, there’s the friction of will the store have it, there’s the friction of carrying it,” Whelan said. “There’s the friction of having to admit to another human being that you’re buying it. And when you remove the friction, you also remove a lot of individual self-control. The more you are in the ecosystem and the easier it is to make a purchase, the easier it is to say yes to your desire rather than no.”

“It used to be that being a consumer was all about choice,”

But now, “two-thirds of people start their product searches on Amazon.

Prime discourages comparison shopping—looking around is pointless when everything you need is right here—even as Amazon’s sheer breadth of products makes shoppers feel as if they have agency.

“Consumerism has become a key way that people have misidentified freedom,”

what Amazon represents is a corporate infrastructure that is increasingly directed at getting as many consumers as possible locked into a consumerist process—an Amazon consumer for life.”

Amazon offers steep discounts to college students and new parents, two groups that are highly likely to change their buying behavior. It keeps adding more discounts and goodies to the Prime bundle, making subscribing ever more appealing. And, in an especially sinister move, it makes quitting Prime maddeningly difficult.

As subscription numbers grew through the 2010s, the revenue from them helped Amazon pump more money into building fulfillment centers (to get products to people even faster), acquiring new businesses (to control even more of the global economy), and adding more perks to the bundle (to encourage more people to sign up)

In 2019, Amazon shaved a full day off its delivery time, making one-day shipping the default, and also making Prime an even more tantalizing proposition: Why hop in the car for anything at all when you could get it delivered tomorrow, for free?

the United States now has more Prime memberships than households. In 2020,

Amazon’s revenue from subscriptions alone—mostly Prime—was $25.2 billion, which is a 31 percent increase from the previous year

Thanks in large part to the revenue from Prime subscriptions and from the things subscribers buy, Amazon’s value has multiplied roughly 97 times, to $1.76 trillion, since the service was introduced. Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the United States, after Walmart, and it is responsible for roughly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States.

It controls hundreds of millions of square feet across the country and is opening more fulfillment centers all the time. It has acquired dozens of other companies, most recently the film studio MGM for $8.5 billion. Its cloud-computing operation, Amazon Web Services, is the largest of its kind and provides the plumbing for a vast swath of the internet, to a profit of $13.5 billion last year.

Amazon has entered some 40 million American homes in the form of the Alexa smart speaker, and some 150 million American pockets in the form of the Amazon app

“Amazon is a beast we’ve never seen before,” Alimahomed-Wilson told me. “Amazon powers our Zoom calls. It contracts with ICE. It’s in our neighborhoods. This is a very different thing than just being a large retailer, like Walmart or the Ford Motor Company.”

I find it useful to compare Big Tech to climate change, another force that is altering the destiny of everyone on Earth, forever. Both present themselves to us all the time in small ways—a creepy ad here, an uncommonly warm November there—but are so big, so abstract, so everywhere that they’re impossible for any one person to really understand

Both are the result of a decades-long, very human addiction to consumption and convenience that has been made grotesque and extreme by the incentives and mechanisms of the internet, market consolidation, and economic stratification

Both have primarily been advanced by a small handful of very big companies that are invested in making their machinations unseeable to the naked eye.

Speed and convenience aren’t actually free; they never are. Free shipping isn’t free either. It just obscures the real price.

Next-day shipping comes with tremendous costs: for labor and logistics and transportation and storage; for the people who pack your stuff into those smiling boxes and for the people who deliver them; for the planes and trucks and vans that carry them; for the warehouses that store them; for the software ensuring that everything really does get to your door on time, for air-conditioning and gas and cardboard and steel. Amazon—Prime in particular—has done a superlative job of making all those costs, all those moving parts, all those externalities invisible to the consumer.

The pandemic drove up demand for Amazon, and for labor: Last year, company profits shot up 70 percent, Bezos’s personal wealth grew by $70 billion, and 1,400 people a day joined the company’s workforce.

Amazon is so big that every sector of our economy has bent to respond to the new way of consuming that it invented. Prime isn’t just bad for Amazon’s workers—it’s bad for Target’s, and Walmart’s. It’s bad for the people behind the counter at your neighborhood hardware store and bookstore, if your neighborhood still has a hardware store and a bookstore. Amazon has accustomed shoppers to a pace and manner of buying that depends on a miracle of precision logistics even when it’s managed by one of the biggest companies on Earth. For the smaller guys, it’s downright impossible.

“Every decision we make is based upon the fact that Amazon can get these books cheaper and faster. The prevailing expectation is you can get anything online shipped for”— he scrunched his fingers into air quotes—“‘free,’ in one or two days. And there’s really only one company that can do that. They do that because they’re willing to push and exploit their workers.”

Just as abstaining from flying for moral reasons won’t stop sea-level rise, one person canceling Prime won’t do much of anything to a multinational corporation’s bottom line. “It’s statistically insignificant to Amazon. They’ll never feel it,” Caine told me. But, he said, “the small businesses in your neighborhood will absolutely feel the addition of a new customer. Individual choices do make a big difference to them.”

Whelan teaches a class at UW called Consuming Happiness, and she is fond of giving her students the adage that you can buy happiness—“if you spend your money in keeping with your values: spending prosocially, on experiences. Tons of research shows us this.”

Thanks to social-science research, we now know that children’s life chances are profoundly affected by their context—not only income and family circumstances but also their community—more so than by their genetic profile or the medical care they receive.

With this in mind, we created what we call the Index of Deep Disadvantage, which reflects two traditional measures of income (the poverty rate and the “deep poverty rate,” meaning those with incomes below half the poverty line), two markers of health (birth weight and life expectancy), and the rate of social mobility for children who grow up in low-income families. We used this index to rank the roughly 3,100 counties in the United States along with the 500 most populous cities.

Immediately, the rankings revealed a stark geographical pattern.

the most disadvantaged places on our index were primarily rural

Though some of these were majority white, most were majority Black or Hispanic.

these places resembled, well, colonies—internal colonies within the U.S.

Considerable poverty exists in Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. But in our apples-to-apples comparison, none of those cities ranked among even the 600 most disadvantaged places in the nation

The only cities on that list were a relatively small number of industrial municipalities such as Cleveland, Detroit, and Rochester.

Those living in the 200 most disadvantaged places on our index were just as likely to have major difficulties paying for housing as those in America’s 500 largest cities.

The places that our index identified as the 200 most disadvantaged are concentrated in three regions—Appalachia, South Texas, and the southern Cotton Belt.

hese places share a history of intensive resource extraction and human exploitation not seen to the same degree elsewhere in the United States

In each place, this economic pattern emerged (or, in the case of the Cotton Belt, fully flourished) in the late 19th or early 20th century. In each place, one industry came to dominate the economy, a pattern that held, broadly, until the 1960s, when King Cotton, King Tobacco, King Coal, and South Texas agriculture, would bow to the twin forces of automation and global competition.

many places with large Native American populations ranked among the most disadvantaged in the nation

While visiting many of the nation’s most disadvantaged places, we set out to build on this work through historical research, ethnographic observations, and in-depth interviews.

For generations, the appearance of towns in South Texas followed a pattern of social hierarchy: sturdy wood-frame houses, paved streets, and enclosed sewers in the white neighborhoods; shacks, dirt roads, and privies in the Mexican parts of town. Forced to migrate to find work during the off-season, generations of Mexican American children lost their right to a decent education. Even today, adult-illiteracy rates in these places are among the highest in the nation.

in Leflore County, Mississippi, for example, Black residents told us that violence was the No. 1 problem they face. The rate of death due to interpersonal violence there was nearly four times the national average, and well above that of Cook County, Illinois, home to Chicago

Throughout these regions, we saw the same themes emerge again and again—unequal schooling, the collapse of social infrastructure, violence, entrenched public corruption, and structural racism embedded in government programs.

Overall, poverty rates in these places are very low, babies are born healthy, people live to a ripe old age, and a low-income child usually has a similar chance of making it into the middle class as any other kid.

er they were forcibly relocated onto land mostly inhospitable to human habit

hey have enjoyed the lowest rates of violent crime, income inequality, and public corruption in the nation. These counties are unusually rich in social capital: Residents are connected to one another through volunteerism, membership in civic organizations, and participation in other community activities.

Counties that rank among those of greatest advantage began as agricultural communities with modestly sized farms, many originally secured through the 1862 Homestead Act that made landownership widely available. Many of these places have built on this history of broad-based wealth by making significant investments in schools, which has contributed to high graduation and college enrollment rates over generations.

One cannot fully understand the benefits enjoyed in America’s most advantaged places without considering the historic (and ongoing) exploitation of migrant labor that has gone on in them, mostly drawn from the U.S. border regions.

these communities have been more successful than most in preventing poverty, promoting health, and ensuring a level playing field for their children.

The upper Midwest is also overwhelmingly white. When we examined the relationship between whiteness and rank on the index, we found that a higher percentage of white residents is a significant predictor of a place’s rank, which is not at all surprising when one considers that the good schools and the good jobs have long been bestowed liberally on whites while being denied to Hispanic and Black Americans.

What makes the communities that are most advantaged unique is their histories as places of broad-based wealth. How different would conditions be in other parts of the country had they followed a similar, equitable course?

The lesson is that people seem to thrive—not always in high salaries but in health and life chances—when inequality is low; when landownership is widespread; when social connection is high; and when corruption and violence are rare.

The social leveling that is characteristic of communities in the upper Midwest is more than just a quaint cultural feature. It is the foundation of a community’s well-being. Until these regions’ virtues are shared nationwide, poverty and disadvantage will continue to haunt America.