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the results were consistent with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which describes how matter and energy warp space-time to create what we call gravity. As more data is gathered, this cosmic hum could help researchers understand how the universe achieved its current structure and perhaps reveal exotic types of matter that may have existed shortly after the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago.

“The gravitational-wave background was always going to be the loudest, most obvious thing to find,” said Chiara Mingarelli, an astrophysicist at Yale University and a member of NANOGrav, which is funded by the National Science Foundation. “This is really just the beginning of a whole new way to observe the universe.”

Gravitational waves are created by any object that spins, such as the rotating remnants of stellar corpses, orbiting black holes or even two people “doing a do-si-do,” Dr. Mingarelli said. But unlike other types of waves, these ripples stretch and squeeze the very fabric of space-time, warping the distances between any celestial objects they pass by.

Gravitational waves were first detected in 2016 as audible chirps by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, collaboration; the breakthrough solidified Einstein’s theory of general relativity as an accurate model of the universe and earned the project’s founders the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2017. But LIGO’s signals were mostly in the frequency range of a few hundred hertz, and were created by individual pairs of black holes or neutron stars that were 10 to 100 times as massive as our sun.

Each pair of supermassive black holes is generating a different note, Dr. Siemens said, “and what we’re receiving is the sum of all those signals at once.”

If the signal does arise from orbiting pairs of supermassive black holes, studying the gravitational-wave background will shed light on the evolutionary history of these systems and the galaxies surrounding them. But the gravitational-wave background could also be coming from something else, like hypothetical cracks in space-time known as cosmic strings.

Or it could be a relic of the Big Bang, akin to the cosmic microwave background, which led to fundamental discoveries about the structure of the universe to within 400,000 years of its beginning. The gravitational-wave background would be an even better primordial probe, Dr. Mingarelli said, because it would have been emitted almost instantaneously.

To detect the gravitational-wave background, researchers analyzed the lighthouse-like nature of pulsars. These objects act like cosmic clocks, emitting beams of radio waves that can be periodically measured on Earth.

Einstein’s theory of general relativity predicts that as gravitational waves sweep past pulsars, they should expand and shrink the distance between these objects and Earth, changing the time it takes for the radio signals to arrive at observers. And if the gravitational-wave background is indeed everywhere, pulsars across the universe should be affected in a correlated way.

The findings carry a confidence level in the range of 3.5- to 4-sigma, just shy of the 5-sigma standard generally expected by physicists to claim a smoking-gun discovery. That means the odds of seeing a result like this randomly are about 1 in 1,000 years, Dr. Mingarelli said. “That’s good enough for me, but other people want once in a million years,” she said. “We’ll get there eventually.”

f the ripples originated with the Big Bang, they might instead provide insight into the expansion of the cosmos or the nature of dark matter — the invisible glue scientists think holds the universe together — and perhaps even reveal new particles or forces that once existed.

a few more years may be needed to confirm the source of the gravitational-wave background. Researchers have already begun using their data to piece together maps of the universe and to look for intense, nearby regions of gravitational-wave signals indicative of an individual supermassive black hole binary.

If you believe that climate change is a boutique issue prioritized only by out-of-touch liberal elites, as one poll found, then this bill, should it pass, represents a political achievement of astonishing magnitude: the triumph of a moral crusade against long odds.

if you believe there is quite a lot of public support for climate action, as other polls suggest — then this bill marks the success of outsider activists in holding establishment forces to account, both to their own rhetoric and to the demands of their voters.

whatever your read of public sentiment, what is most striking about the news this week is not just that there is now some climate action on the table but also how fast the landscape for climate policy has changed, shifting all of our standards for success and failure along with it

The bill may well prove inadequate, even if it passes. It also represents a generational achievement — achieved, from the point of view of activists, in a lot less time than a full generation.

None of this is exclusively the work of the climate left

To trust the math of its architects, this deal between Manchin and the Senate majority leader, Chuck Schumer, splits the difference — the United States won’t be leading the pack on decarbonization, but it probably won’t be seen by the rest of the world as a laughingstock or climate criminal, either.

Technological progress has driven the cost of renewable energy down so quickly, it should now seem irresistible to anyone making long-term policy plans or public investments. There has been rapid policy innovation among centrists and policy wonks, too, dramatically expanding the climate tool kit beyond carbon taxes and cap-and-trade systems to what has been called a whole-of-government approach to decarbonizing.

They got their wish. And as a result, we got a bill. That’s not naïveté but the opposite.

as the political scientist Matto Mildenberger has pointed out, the legislation hadn’t failed at the ballot box; it had stalled on Manchin’s desk

He also pointed to research showing climate is driving the voting behavior of Democrats much more than it is driving Republicans into opposition and that most polling shows high levels of baseline concern about warming and climate policy all across the country. (It is perhaps notable that as the Democrats were hashing out a series of possible compromises, there wasn’t much noise about any of them from Republicans, who appeared to prefer to make hay about inflation, pandemic policy and critical race theory.)

It is hard not to talk about warming without evoking any fear, but the president was famous, on the campaign trail and in office, for saying, “When I think ‘climate change,’ I think ‘jobs.’”

He focused on green growth and the opportunities and benefits of a rapid transition.

In the primaries, Sunrise gave Biden an F for his climate plan, but after he sewed up the nomination, its co-founder Varshini Prakash joined his policy task force to help write his climate plan. As the plan evolved and shrank over time, there were squeaks and complaints here and there but nothing like a concerted, oppositional movement to punish the White House for its accommodating approach to political realities.

over the past 18 months, since the inauguration, whenever activists chose to protest, they were almost always protesting not the inadequacy of proposed legislation but the worrying possibility of no legislation at all

When they showed up at Manchin’s yacht, they were there to tell him not that they didn’t want his support but that they needed him to act. They didn’t urge Biden to throw the baby out with the bathwater; they were urging him not to.

When, last week, they thought they’d lost, Democratic congressional staff members staged an unprecedented sit-in at Schumer’s office, hoping to pressure the Senate majority leader back into negotiations with Manchin. And what did they say? They didn’t say, “We have eight years to save the earth.” They didn’t say, “The blood of the future is on your hands.” What their protest sign said was “Keep negotiating, Chuck.” As far as I can tell, this was code for “Give Joe more.”

The present-day climate left was effectively born, in the United States, with the November 2018 Sunrise Movement sit-in. At the time, hardly anyone on the planet had heard of Greta Thunberg, who had just begun striking outside Swedish Parliament — a lonely, socially awkward 15-year-old holding up a single sign. Not four years later, her existential rhetoric is routinely echoed by presidents and prime ministers and C.E.O.s and secretaries general, and more than 80 percent of the world’s economic activity and emissions are now, theoretically, governed by net-zero pledges pointing the way to a carbon-neutral future in just decades.

The deal, if it holds, is very big, several times as large as anything on climate the United States passed into law before. The architects and supporters of the $369 billion in climate and clean-energy provisions in Joe Manchin’s Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, announced Wednesday, are already calculating that it could reduce American carbon emissions by 40 percent, compared with 2005 levels, by 2030. That’s close enough to President Biden’s pledge of 50 percent that exhausted advocates seem prepared to count it as a victory

these catastrophising billionaires are the presumptive winners of the digital economy – the supposed champions of the survival-of-the-fittest business landscape that’s fuelling most of this speculation to begin with.

What I came to realise was that these men are actually the losers. The billionaires who called me out to the desert to evaluate their bunker strategies are not the victors of the economic game so much as the victims of its perversely limited rules. More than anything, they have succumbed to a mindset where “winning” means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.

Never before have our society’s most powerful players assumed that the primary impact of their own conquests would be to render the world itself unliveable for everyone else

Nor have they ever before had the technologies through which to programme their sensibilities into the very fabric of our society. The landscape is alive with algorithms and intelligences actively encouraging these selfish and isolationist outlooks. Those sociopathic enough to embrace them are rewarded with cash and control over the rest of us. It’s a self-reinforcing feedback loop. This is new.

So far, JC Cole has been unable to convince anyone to invest in American Heritage Farms. That doesn’t mean no one is investing in such schemes. It’s just that the ones that attract more attention and cash don’t generally have these cooperative components. They’re more for people who want to go it alone

C is no hippy environmentalist but his business model is based in the same communitarian spirit I tried to convey to the billionaires: the way to keep the hungry hordes from storming the gates is by getting them food security now. So for $3m, investors not only get a maximum security compound in which to ride out the coming plague, solar storm, or electric grid collapse. They also get a stake in a potentially profitable network of local farm franchises that could reduce the probability of a catastrophic event in the first place. His business would do its best to ensure there are as few hungry children at the gate as possible when the time comes to lock down.

Most billionaire preppers don’t want to have to learn to get along with a community of farmers or, worse, spend their winnings funding a national food resilience programme. The mindset that requires safe havens is less concerned with preventing moral dilemmas than simply keeping them out of sight.

Rising S Company in Texas builds and installs bunkers and tornado shelters for as little as $40,000 for an 8ft by 12ft emergency hideout all the way up to the $8.3m luxury series “Aristocrat”, complete with pool and bowling lane. The enterprise originally catered to families seeking temporary storm shelters, before it went into the long-term apocalypse business. The company logo, complete with three crucifixes, suggests their services are geared more toward Christian evangelist preppers in red-state America than billionaire tech bros playing out sci-fi scenarios.

Ultra-elite shelters such as the Oppidum in the Czech Republic claim to cater to the billionaire class, and pay more attention to the long-term psychological health of residents. They provide imitation of natural light, such as a pool with a simulated sunlit garden area, a wine vault, and other amenities to make the wealthy feel at home.

On closer analysis, however, the probability of a fortified bunker actually protecting its occupants from the reality of, well, reality, is very slim. For one, the closed ecosystems of underground facilities are preposterously brittle. For example, an indoor, sealed hydroponic garden is vulnerable to contamination. Vertical farms with moisture sensors and computer-controlled irrigation systems look great in business plans and on the rooftops of Bay Area startups; when a palette of topsoil or a row of crops goes wrong, it can simply be pulled and replaced. The hermetically sealed apocalypse “grow room” doesn’t allow for such do-overs.

while a private island may be a good place to wait out a temporary plague, turning it into a self-sufficient, defensible ocean fortress is harder than it sounds. Small islands are utterly dependent on air and sea deliveries for basic staples. Solar panels and water filtration equipment need to be replaced and serviced at regular intervals. The billionaires who reside in such locales are more, not less, dependent on complex supply chains than those of us embedded in industrial civilisation.

If they wanted to test their bunker plans, they’d have hired a security expert from Blackwater or the Pentagon. They seemed to want something more. Their language went far beyond questions of disaster preparedness and verged on politics and philosophy: words such as individuality, sovereignty, governance and autonomy.

it wasn’t their actual bunker strategies I had been brought out to evaluate so much as the philosophy and mathematics they were using to justify their commitment to escape. They were working out what I’ve come to call the insulation equation: could they earn enough money to insulate themselves from the reality they were creating by earning money in this way? Was there any valid justification for striving to be so successful that they could simply leave the rest of us behind –apocalypse or not?

Many of these scholars, he correctly notes, adopted the German model of the research university—but, he claims, only for evil purposes. “As racist ideas jumped off their scholarly pages,” he writes, “American scholars were especially enamored with the German ideal of the disinterested, unbiased pursuit of truth through original scholarly studies, and academic freedom to propagandize African inferiority and European superiority [sic].”

just as Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning that the racism of some of the founding fathers irrevocably and permanently brands the United States as a racist nation, he claims that these disciplines cannot be taken seriously because of the racism of some of their founders

Kendi complains in the autobiographical sections of How to Be an Antiracist that his parents often talked the same way to him. Nor does it matter to him that the abolitionists bemoaning the condition of black people under slavery were obviously blaming slavery for it. Any negative picture of any group of black people, to him, simply fuels racism.

Two critical ideas emerge from this article. The first is the rejection of the entire western intellectual tradition on the grounds that it is fatally tainted by racism, and the need for a new academic discipline to replace that tradition.

the second—developed at far greater length in Kendi’s other works—is that anyone who finds European and white North American culture to be in any way superior to the culture of black Americans, either slave or free, is a racist, and specifically a cultural racist or an “assimilationist” who believes that black people must become more like white people if they are to progress.

Kendi, in Stamped from the Beginning, designated Phyllis Wheatley, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, W. E. B. DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, and other black and white champions of abolition and equal rights as purveyors of racist views. At one time or another, each of them pointed to the backward state of many black people in the United States, either under slavery or in inner-city ghettos, and suggested that they needed literacy and, in some cases, better behavior to advance.

because racism is the only issue that matters to him, he assumes—wrongly—that it was the only issue that mattered to them, and that their disciplines were nothing more than exercises in racist propaganda.

This problem started, he says, “back in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.” Elsewhere he calls the word “enlightenment” racist because it contrasts the light of Europe with the darkness of Africa and other regions.

In fact, the western intellectual tradition of the eighteenth century—the Enlightenment—developed not as an attempt to establish the superiority of the white race, but rather to replace a whole different set of European ideas based on religious faith, the privilege of certain social orders, and the divine right of kings

many thinkers recognized the contradictions between racism and the principles of the Enlightenment—as well as its contradiction to the principles of the Christian religion—from the late eighteenth century onward. That is how abolitionist movements began and eventually succeeded.

Like the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—which has become practically the alternate national anthem of Japan—those principles are not based upon white supremacy, but rather on a universal idea of common humanity which is our only hope for living together on earth.

The western intellectual tradition is not his only target within modern life; he feels the same way about capitalism, which in his scheme has been inextricably bound together with racism since the early modern period.

“To love capitalism,” he says, “is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism.” He has not explained exactly what kind of economic system he would prefer, and his advocacy for reparations suggests that he would be satisfied simply to redistribute the wealth that capitalism has created.

Last but hardly least, Kendi rejects the political system of the United States and enlightenment ideas of democracy as well.

I am constantly amazed at how few people ever mention his response to a 2019 Politico poll about inequality. Here it is in full.

To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official”

The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

In other words, to undo the impact of racism as Kendi understands it, the United States needs a totalitarian government run by unaccountable “formally trained experts in racism”—that is, people like Ibram X. Kendi—who would exercise total power over all levels of government and private enterprise

Kendi evidently realizes that the American people acting through their elected representatives will never accept his antiracist program and equalize all rewards within our society, but he is so committed to that program that he wants to throw the American political system out and create a dictatorial body to implement it.

How did a man pushing all these ideas become so popular? The answer, I am sorry to say, is disarmingly simple. He is not an outlier in the intellectual history of the last half-century—quite the contrary.

The Enlightenment, in retrospect, made a bold claim that was bound to get itself into trouble sooner or later: that the application of reason and the scientific method to human problems could improve human life. That idea was initially so exciting and the results of its application for about two centuries were so spectacular that it attained a kind of intellectual hegemony, not only in Europe, but nearly all over the world.

As the last third of the twentieth century dawned, however, the political and intellectual regime it had created was running into new problems of its own. Science had allowed mankind to increase its population enormously, cure many diseases, and live a far more abundant life on a mass scale.

But it had also led to war on an undreamed-of scale, including the actual and potential use of nuclear weapons

As higher education expanded, the original ideas of the Enlightenment—the ones that had shaped the humanities—had lost their novelty and some of their ability to excite.

last but hardly least, the claimed superiority of reason over emotion had been pushed much too far. The world was bursting with emotions of many kinds that could no longer be kept in check by the claims of scientific rationality.

A huge new generation had grown up in abundance and security.

The Vietnam War, a great symbol of enlightenment gone tragically wrong, led not only to a rebellion against American military overreach but against the whole intellectual and political structure behind it.

The black studies movement on campuses that produced Molefi Kete Asante, who in turn gave us Ibram X. Kendi, was only one aspect of a vast intellectual rebellion

Some began to argue that the Enlightenment was simply a new means of maintaining male supremacy, and that women shared a reality that men could not understand. Just five years ago in her book Sex and Secularism, the distinguished historian Joan Wallach Scott wrote, “In fact, gender inequality was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. . . .Euro-Atlantic modernity entailed a new order of women’s subordination” (emphasis in original). Gay and gender activists increasingly denied that any patterns of sexual behavior could be defined as normal or natural, or even that biology had any direct connection to gender. The average graduate of elite institutions, I believe, has come to regard all those changes as progress, which is why the major media and many large corporations endorse them.

Fundamentalist religion, apparently nearly extinct in the mid-twentieth century, has staged an impressive comeback in recent decades, not only in the Islamic world but in the United States and in Israe

Science has become bureaucratized, corrupted by capitalism, and often self-interested, and has therefore lost a good deal of the citizenry’s confidence.

One aspect of the Enlightenment—Adam Smith’s idea of free markets—has taken over too much of our lives.

in the academy, postmodernism promoted the idea that truth itself is an illusion and that every person has the right to her own morality.

The American academy lost its commitment to Enlightenment values decades ago, and journalism has now followed in its wake. Ju

Another aspect of the controversy hasn’t gotten enough attention either. Kendi is a prodigious fundraiser, and that made him a real catch for Boston University.

No matter what happens to Ibram X. Kendi now, he is not an anomaly in today’s intellectual world. His ideas are quite typical, and others will make brilliant careers out of them as well

We desperately need thinkers of all ages to keep the ideas of the Enlightenment alive, and we need some alternative institutions of higher learning to cultivate them once again. But they will not become mainstream any time soon. The last time that such ideas fell off the radar—at the end of the Roman Empire—it took about one thousand years for their renaissance to begin

We do not as individuals have to give into these new ideas, but it does no good to deny their impact. For the time being, they are here to stay.

"[Young people] aren't even thinking about change, it's a feeling of how am I going to get out of this country - I'm stuck here, there's no future for me," said Emilie Pradichit, a Lao-French international human rights lawyer and the founder of human rights group Manushya Foundation.

Confronted with a barren job market, the Vientiane resident holds no hope of finding work at home, and instead aims to become a cleaner or a fruit picker in Australia. His aspirations are low, but they reflect a hushed disenchantment spreading among his peers; the result of a severe and sustained economic downturn that has ravaged Laos for the past two years.

I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.

The parts of listening to Bannon that were most destabilizing were when I heard him saying things that sounded like the left, and when I heard him saying things that I agreed with in part – not in whole, but where I saw that kernel of truth and I realized how effective it was going to be in the mix and match with what I see as a fascist project that he’s engaged in.

I expect Steve Bannon to be monstrous on immigration, on gender. I expect that from him. It’s when he’s talking about corporate control of the media and saying things that are true about big tech that I start to get queasy and ask, wait a minute, why is he saying more about this than a lot of people on the liberal side of the spectrum? Have we ceded this territory?

This point seems central. The mirror world isn’t devoid of truth. Instead, it’s destabilizing because elements of truth are there, but warped.

Absolutely. And the destabilizing piece is not simply that they’re saying something true. It’s when you realize people [on the left] have stopped saying that true thing. That’s when you realize that it has power.

If we were building multiracial, intergenerational social movements that were really rooted in confronting corporate power, then they could say whatever they want and it wouldn’t really bother me. But we’re talking about it less, and the more [conspiracists] talk about it, the more reticent we become. So it’s a dialectic that makes me queasy.

Ehrenreich has a completely different theory, which I think is much more plausible, which is this is the 1980s: people are in the wreckage of the failures of these huge social movements in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There had been this glimpse of collective power that a lot of people really thought was going to change the world, and suddenly they’re living through Thatcherism and Reaganism. And there is this turn towards the self, towards the body as the site of control.

Kneeling before the temple of the body also has fascist roots. Historically, certain ideals of human fitness were a way to communicate the value of citizens.Whenever you are working within a system of a hierarchy of humans and bodies, then you’re in fascism territory. I think that it made perfect sense that Nazis were body obsessives who fetishized the natural and the hyperfit form and genes.

There is a connection between certain kinds of new age ideas and health fads and the fascist project

After the second world war, a lot of people in the world of wellness ran in the opposite direction. But there are some ways in which they are natural affinities and they’re finding each other again

there is a way the quest for wellness and hyper fitness becomes obsessive.

But the spread of misinformation across wellness culture was likely attributable to more complex factors, including the limits of conventional medicine and the areas of health that are understudied or dismissed.

Ehrenreich is trying to understand why this exploded in the 1980s. The whole aerobics craze, the whole jogging craze. You know, how does somebody like Jerry Rubin, a member of the Yippies, turn into a health evangelist in the 1980s?

in lots of ways this is what Naomi Wolf was trying to understand in the Beauty Myth. Why was there so much more of a focus in the 1980s on personal appearance? She makes the case that beauty became a third shift for women: there was the work shift, there was the home shift, and on top of that, women were now also expected to look like professional beauties.

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this really beautifully in her book about wellness culture, where she talks about the silence of the gyms. This is a collective space, right? Why aren’t people chitchatting? But often gyms are very silent and she speculates that maybe it’s because people are talking to someone, it’s just not the other people in the gym, it’s somebody in their head. They’re trying to tame their body into being another kind of body, a perfected body.

Then you have all of these entrepreneurial wellness figures who come in and say, individuals must take charge of their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control and competitive edge.

the flip side of the idea that your competitive edge is your body is that the people who don’t have bodies as fit or strong as yours somehow did something wrong or are less deserving of access, less deserving even of life.

And that is unfortunately all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority and disposable people.

We should be compassionate with ourselves in terms of why we look away. There are lots of ways of distracting oneself from unbearable realities. Conspiracy theories are a kind of distraction. So is hyper fitness, this turn towards the self.

The compassion comes in where we acknowledge that there’s a reason why it is so hard to look at the reality of what has been unveiled by these overlapping crises – you could call it a polycrisis: of the pandemic, climate change, massive racial and economic inequality, realizing that your country was founded on a lie, that the national narratives that you grew up on left out huge parts in the story.

All of this is hard to bear.

Because we live in a hyper-individualist culture, we try to bear it on our own and we should not be surprised that we’re cracking under the weight of that, because we can’t bear it alone.

the weight of our historical moment. We really are alive on the knife’s edge of whether or not this earth is going to be habitable for our species. That is not something that we can handle just on our own.

So we need to reach towards each other. That’s really tricky work. It’s a lot easier to come together and agree on things that are not working and things that are bad than it is to come together and develop a horizon of how things could be better.

Things could be beautiful, things could be livable. There could be a world where everyone belongs. But I don’t think we can bear the reality of our moment unless we can imagine something else.

Professors warn that these guides are no substitutes for reading great works of literature, but concede, grudgingly, that as an adjunct, they can stimulate thought and deepen insight.

CliffsNotes guides cover not only literature, but also foreign languages, math, science, history and other topics, and many of the guides are free online.

In booklet form, 159 literature study guides are available, costing about $6 to $10 each. But more than 250 are available online, and all can be viewed free. Downloading them as PDF files costs $5 to $10 each. A comparatively paltry 39 CliffsNotes for literature are available for mobile at $1.99 each for the iPhone.

CliffsNotes, owned by Wiley Publishing, also offers free podcasts called CramCasts, which are three- to five-minute overviews of books with a plot summary.

Dr. Fisher liked the idea behind Shmoop’s “Why Should I care?” section. It explains the satire in “Candide” by comparing it to modern satires like “The Simpsons” and “The Family Guy.” The problem, he said, is that the writing strains to relate to students. “It makes an interesting attempt to be hip,” he said, “but it is just so high school-y.”

Thrall was asked about his depictions of Israelis, and whether he had qualms about “humanizing the occupation.”

I don’t like the fact that the statement Nguyen signed gestured only vaguely at Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians. In calling off his Friday evening appearance, 92NY, a Jewish organization, was playing by rules much of the left established, privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas.

“I was very glad to be asked that question,” Thrall told me. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.

if someone as evenhanded as Thrall now finds his talks being dropped, we’re in an especially repressive period. And in a time of war, particularly a war shrouded in fiercely competing narratives, free speech is more important than ever.

Thrall is not alone; in recent weeks several literary and cultural events by pro-Palestinian speakers or groups have been either scrapped or relocated.

And supporters of Israel are hardly alone in creating a censorious atmosphere; particularly on college campuses, it is Zionists who feel silenced and intimidated

Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness

The report, as Svrluga writes, “paints a picture of a university that discouraged people from reporting crimes, underreported the claims it received and, meanwhile, marketed its Virginia campus as one of the safest in the country.” The details are grim. According to the report, “Liberty failed to warn the campus community about gas leaks, bomb threats and people credibly accused of repeated acts of sexual violence — including a senior administrator and an athlete.”

A campus safety consultant told Svrluga, “This is the single most blistering Clery report I have ever read. Ever.”

I’ve been following (and covering) Liberty’s moral collapse for years, and the list of scandals and lawsuits plaguing the school is extraordinarily long. The best known of these is the saga of Jerry Falwell Jr. Falwell, the former president and son of the school’s founder, resigned amid allegations of sexual misconduct involving himself, his wife and a pool boy turned business associate named Giancarlo Granda.

Falwell is nationally prominent in part because he was one of Donald Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic evangelical supporters. Falwell sued the school, the school sued Falwell, and in September Falwell filed a scorching amended complaint, claiming that other high-ranking Liberty officers and board members had committed acts of sexual and financial misconduct yet were permitted to retain their positions

Paul demonstrates ferocious anger at the church’s internal sin, but says this about those outside the congregation: “What business is it of mine to judge those outside the church? Are you not to judge those inside? God will judge those outside. ‘Expel the wicked person from among you.’”

Yet as we witness systemic misconduct unfold at institution after institution after institution, often without any real accountability, we can understand that many members of the church have gotten Paul’s equation exactly backward. They are remarkably tolerant of even the most wayward, dishonest and cruel individuals and institutions in American Christianity. At the same time, they approach those outside with a degree of anger and ferocity that’s profoundly contributing to American polarization.

Under this moral construct, internal critique is perceived as a threat, a way of weakening American evangelicalism. It’s seen as contributing to external hostility and possibly even the rapid secularization of American life that’s now underway. But Paul would scoff at such a notion. One of the church’s greatest apostles didn’t hold back from critiquing a church that faced far greater cultural or political headwinds — including brutal and deadly persecution at the hands of the Roman state — than the average evangelical can possibly imagine.

Why? Because he realized the health of the church wasn’t up to the state, nor was it dependent on the church’s nonbelieving neighbors.

Liberty University is consequential not just because it’s an academic superpower in Christian America, but also because it’s a symbol of a key reality of evangelical life — we have met the enemy of American Christianity, and it is us.

Before the rise of Google, internet companies stuffed their data centers with increasingly powerful and expensive computer servers, as they struggled to reach more and more people. Each server delivered the website to a relatively small group of people. And if the server died, those people were out of luck.

Dr. Barroso realized that the best way to distribute a wildly popular website like Google was to break it into tiny pieces and spread them evenly across an array of servers. Rather than each server delivering the site to a small group of people, the entire data center delivered the site to its entire audience.

“In other words, we must treat the data center itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer.”

Widespread outages became a rarity, especially as Dr. Barroso and his team expanded these ideas across multiple data centers. Eventually, Google’s entire global network of data centers behaved as a single machine.

By the mid-1990s, he was working as a researcher in a San Francisco Bay Area lab operated by the Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the computer giants of the day.

There, he helped create multi-core computer chips — microprocessors made of many chips working in tandem. A more efficient way of running computer software, such chips are now a vital part of almost any new computer.

At first, Dr. Barroso worked on software. But as Dr. Hölzle realized that Google would also need to build its own hardware, he tapped Dr. Barroso to lead the effort. Over the next decade, as it pursued his warehouse-size computer, Google built its own servers, data storage equipment and networking hardware.

For years, this work was among Google’s most closely guarded secrets. The company saw it as a competitive advantage. But by the 2010s, companies like Amazon and Facebook were following the example set by Dr. Barroso and his team. Soon, the world’s leading computer makers were building and selling the same kind of low-cost hardware, allowing any internet company to build an online empire the way Google had.

Things that were long big fun now overwhelm, exhaust and annoy. The holiday season is an extended exercise in excess and loud, often sleazy sweaters.

Which means it is nothing of the sort. This is the drag equivalent of fun and suggests that fun is done.

Adults assiduously record themselves appearing to have something masquerading as “fun,” a fusillade of Coachellic micro social aggressions unleashed on multiple social media platforms. Look at me having so much FUN!

“I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having,” says Alyssa Alvarez, a social media marketing manager and DJ in Detroit, expressing a sentiment that many share. “There are expectations of what I want people to believe that my life is like rather than what my life is actually like.”

Weddings have morphed into multistage stress extravaganzas while doubling as express paths to insolvency: destination proposals for the whole family, destination bachelorette and bachelor blowouts, destination weddings in remote barns with limited lodging, something called a “buddymoon” (bring the gang!) and planners to help facilitate the same custom cocktailsness of it all.

What could be a greater cause for joy or more natural than having a baby? Apparently, not much these days. Impending parenthood is overthought and over-apped, incorporating more savings-draining events that didn’t exist a few decades ago: babymoons and lethal, fire-inducing, gender-reveal gatherings and baby showers so over-the-top as to shame weddings.

Retirements must be purposeful. Also, occasions for an acute identity crisis. You need to have a plan, a mission, a coach, a packed color-coded grid of daily activities in a culture where our jobs are our identities, our worth tied to employment.

Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue, so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one.

“The world is so much less about human connection,” says Amanda Richards, 34, who works in casting in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Cudworth’s course. “We do more things virtually. People are more isolated. And there’s all this toxic positivity to convince people of how happy you are.”

For eons, early adulthood was considered an age of peak fun. Now, according to several studies, it’s a protracted state of anxiety and depression.

Because there is now a coach for everything, Alvarez hired the “party coach” Evan Cudworth, taking his $497 course this fall on how to pursue “intentional fun.” (It now costs $555.)

Instead of this being the most wonderful time of the year, we battle holiday fatigue, relentless beseeching for our money and, if Fox News is to be believed, a war on Christmas that is nearing its third decade.

Blame it on technological advances that tether us to work without cessation

Blame it on the pandemic, which exacerbated so much while delivering Zoomageddon.

Blame it on 2004, with the advent of Facebook, which led to Twitter (okay, X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok and who-knows-what lurking in the ether.

Blame it again on 2004 and the introduction of FOMO, our dread of missing out, broadcast through multiple social media spigots

“So many people are retreating into their phones, into anxiety,” says Cudworth, 37, from Chicago. “I’m helping people rediscover what fun means to them.”

His mandate is redefining fun: cutting back on bingeing screen time, eradicating envy scrolling, getting outside, moving, dancing. “With technology, we don’t allow ourselves to be present. You’re always thinking ‘something is better around the corner,’” Cudworth says, the now squandered in pursuit of the future.

Blame it on an American culture that values work, productivity, power, wealth, status and more work over leisure

ow do Americans spend their leisure hours when they might be having fun with others, making those vital in-person connections? Watching television, our favorite free time and “sports activity” (yes, that’s how it’s classified), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of 2.8 hours daily.

“That’s way more television than you really need. We put play on the back burner,” says Pat Rumbaugh, 65, of Takoma Park, Md. She’s “The Play Lady,” who organizes unorganized play for adults

Catherine Price, the author of “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again,” believes “we’re totally misdoing leisure” and “not leaving any room for spontaneity.”

To Price, True Fun is the confluence of connection (other people, nature), playfulness (lightheartedness, freedom) and flow (being fully engaged, present), which is not as challenging as it sounds. “You can have fun in any context. Playfulness is about an attitude,”

Back in the day, co-workers were friends. (Sometimes, more.) After hours, they gathered for drinks, played softball. Today, because of email, Slack and remote work, offices are half empty and far quieter than libraries.

“We go to work and there’s no sense of connection and camaraderie,” says Davis, who was long employed by his city’s department of parks and recreation. “People feel emotionally disconnected. Healthy conversations are the precursor of fun. We’ve lost the art of communication. Our spirit comes home with us. If you don’t communicate at work, what are you coming home with?”

Argeo Aquino, who has lived in the town his whole life, said he could recall only two other occasions when he saw such flooding. 'œThe houses are totally flooded, so they are getting everything out,' Aquino said Monday as he watched his neighbors. "There are stores, houses. More than anything else, we have to try to save all the good material, because everything else is going to be washed away.'

Agatha formed on Sunday and quickly gained power. It was the strongest hurricane on record to make landfall in May in the eastern Pacific, said Jeff Masters, meteorologist with Yale Climate Connections and the founder of Weather Underground.

As it turns out, technology demand only increased and the Nasdaq had its best year since 2009, spurred on by low interest rates and a surge in spending on products for remote work.

“Companies that recently raised at very high prices at the height of valuation inflation may be grappling with high burn rates and near-term challenges growing into those valuations,” Shakir told CNBC in an email. “Others that were more dilution-sensitive and chose to raise less may now need to consider avenues for extending runway that would have seemed unpalatable to them just months ago.”

“Our companies heeded that advice and most companies are now prepared for winter,” Lux wrote.

“This time, many of those tools have been exhausted,” Sequoia wrote. “We do not believe that this is going to be another steep correction followed by an equally swift V-shaped recovery like we saw at the outset of the pandemic.”Sequoia told its companies to look at projects, research and development, marketing and elsewhere for opportunities to cut costs. Companies don’t have to immediately pull the trigger, the firm added, but they should be ready to do it in the next 30 days if needed.

And among companies that are still private, staff reductions are underway at Klarna and Cameo, while Instacart is reportedly slowing hiring ahead of an expected initial public offering. Cloud software vendor Lacework announced staffing cuts on Friday, six months after the company was valued at $8.3 billion by venture investors.“We have adjusted our plan to increase our cash runway through to profitability and significantly strengthened our balance sheet so we can be more opportunistic around investment opportunities and weather uncertainty in the macro environment,” Lacework said in a blog post.

Shakir agreed with that assessment. “Like many, we at Lux have been advising our companies to think long term, extend runway to 2+ years if possible, take a very close look at reducing burn and improving gross margins, and start to set expectations that near-term future financings are unlikely to look like what they may have expected six or 12 months ago,” she wrote.

Lux highlighted one of the painful decisions it expects to see. For several companies, the firm said, “sacrificing people will come before sacrificing valuation.”But venture firms are keen to remind founders that great companies emerge from the darkest of times. Those that prove they can survive and even thrive when capital is in short supply, the thinking goes, are positioned to flourish when the economy bounces back.

conditions.”CORRECTION: This story was updated to reflect that cloud software vendor Lacework raised $1.3 billion in growth funding at a valuation of $8.3 billion.

Andrew Adams, a federal prosecutor leading the task force, said in an interview that “targeting people who make their living by providing a means for money laundering is a key priority.”

Along with the Amadea, Imperial Yachts oversaw the construction of the Scheherazade, a $700 million superyacht that U.S. officials say is linked to Mr. Putin, and the Crescent, which the Spanish police believe is owned by Igor Sechin, chairman of the state-owned oil giant Rosneft.

Mr. Timchenko and his partners designed the Scheherazade — seized in early May by the Italian police — as a gift for Mr. Putin’s use, according to the assessment. Together, the three vessels may have cost as much as $1.6 billion, enough to buy six new frigates for the Russian navy.

But U.S. officials are not buying such explanations. Elizabeth Rosenberg, the assistant secretary for terrorist financing and financial crimes at the Treasury Department, said it was the responsibility of people in the yacht services industry to avoid doing business with people under sanctions.“And if you do,” she said, “you yourself will be subject to sanctions.”

Mr. Kochman, 41, got his start in the yacht business in Russia in 2001, the year after Mr. Putin took power, selling Italian-made yachts.

“We grow with our clients like parents with babies,

Locals have never seen Mr. Khudainatov. Mariangela Canale, owner of the town’s 111-year-old bakery, said she was worried that Portofino would become a place where the homes were mere investments, owned by wealthy people who rarely visited, and the community would lose its soul. “Even the richest residents have always come for a chat or to buy my focaccia bread with their children, or have dinner in the piazza,” she said. “They live with us.”

“The client may be fully immersed in the project, he might not be,” he said in a phone interview. “I channel everything through Mr. Kochman.”

“We are not currently working with anyone on the sanctions list and we have shared all requested information with the authorities, with whom we continue to work,” the spokesman said in an email.

But according to U.S. investigators, Imperial Yachts brokered the sale of the Amadea late last year to Suleiman Kerimov, a Russian government official and billionaire investor who has been on the U.S. sanctions list since 2018. He was among a group of seven oligarchs who the American officials said “benefit from the Putin regime and play a key role in advancing Russia’s malign activities.”

Mr. Clark, the lawyer for Imperial Yachts, said the company “would never knowingly create structures to hide or conceal ownership, nor would we knowingly broker deals to sanctioned individuals.”

One thing is clear, according to the U.S. task force: Members of Mr. Kerimov’s family were on board the Amadea earlier this year, based on investigators’ interviews with crew members, reviews of emails between the ship and Imperial, and other documents from the superyacht including copies of passports.

The cast of characters restoring Villa Altachiara to its former glory is familiar. Mr. Kochman’s BLD Management is supervising the project. Mr. Gey is helping to oversee the local and international artisans restoring the interior of the mansion. Yachtline 1618, an Italian high-end carpentry company that has worked on Imperial Yachts projects, is also involved.

We buy your yachts and you buy our gas,”

“Everything is under very strict nondisclosure agreements,” Mr. Gey said. “It’s a standard in the industry.”He added, “It’s not like there is something to hide.”

It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage.

“The people thinking strategically about how to win the 2022 election are the ones doing the most for democracy,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard and one of the authors of “How Democracies Die.”

“I’ve heard people saying bridges don’t save democracy — voting rights do. But for Democrats to be in a position to protect democracy, they need bigger majorities.”

There are people working on a Plan B

He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy t

The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — reminds me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.

“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results.

While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”

Protecting democracy by supporting county supervisors or small-town mayors — particularly ones who fit the politics of more conservative communities — can feel like being diagnosed with heart failure and being told the best thing to do is to double-check your tax returns and those of all your neighbors.

These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”

“One thing I was really struck by when I first started getting involved in politics is how much power there is in just showing up to things,” she said. “If you love libraries, libraries have board meetings. Go to the public meeting. See where they’re spending their money. We’re supposed to be participating. If you want to get involved, there’s always a way.”

The multinational response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown that the demise of the global postwar rules-based order may not be inevitable.

But the reappearance of war in Europe is also an omen. With toddlers sheltering in subway tunnels, and nuclear power plants under threat, it is a global air raid siren — a warning that the American-led system of internationalism needs to get itself back into gear, for the war at hand and for the struggle against authoritarianism to come.

“The global system was built in the 1950s, and if you think of it as a car from those years, it is battered, out of date in some ways, and could use a good tuneup,”

“But it is still on the road, rolling along, and, ironically enough, Vladimir Putin has done more in a week to energize it than anything I can remember.”

Almost universally, from leaders in Europe and Asia to current and former American officials, Ukraine is being viewed as a test for the survival of a 75-year-old idea: that liberal democracy, American military might and free trade can create the conditions for peace and global prosperity.

Because the founder of that concept, the United States, continues to struggle — with partisanship, Covid and failure in distant war zones — many foreign policy leaders already see Ukraine in dire terms, as marking an official end of the American era and the start of a more contested, multipolar moment.

For at least a decade, liberal democracies have been disappearing. Their numbers peaked in 2012 with 42 countries, and now there are just 34, home to only 13 percent of the world population, according to V-Dem, a nonprofit that studies governments

In many of those, including the United States, “toxic polarization” is on the rise.

Mr. Biden, in his State of the Union address on Tuesday, spoke bluntly of the future risk, saying, “When dictators do not pay a price for their aggression, they cause more chaos.” He insisted that the free world was holding Mr. Putin accountable.

One lesson seems to be that alliances matter. But for many, the most important lesson echoes what Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman concluded about World War II: America cannot retreat into isolationism; its own prosperity depends on actively trying to keep the world’s major powers at peace.

Make no mistake what Sasse is up to: He is telling his party that to continue to follow Trump -- and the Trump-inspired members of the GOP -- is to ensure long-term defeat.

Sasse wants to be the leader of an alternative vision of what the Republican Party is and, more importantly, what it can be. He has a lot of competition for that role, however. And it's not at all clear that anything close to a majority of GOP voters are looking for someone other than Trump in 2024.

Since the Taliban took control of Afghanistan last year, the TTP has stepped up its attacks in Pakistan, killing dozens of government soldiers in 2021.

The TTP was founded in 2007 in response to a Pakistani military operation clearing the Lal Masjid mosque in Islamabad where a radical preacher held sway. The group's founder, Baitullah Mehsud, was once considered close to Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI.

The financial cost, while vast, is impossible to calculate. In late December, Russia’s Communications Ministry reported that 10 percent of the country’s IT workers had left in 2022 and not returned.

those remaining in the depleted political opposition also faced a choice this year: prison or exile. Most chose exile. Activists and journalists are now clustered in cities such as Berlin and the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia.

“This exodus is a terrible blow for Russia,” said Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who moved to Portugal after the invasion. “The layer that could have changed something in the country has now been washed away.”

the influx of Russians into countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which have long sent immigrants to Russia, set off political tremors, straining ties between Moscow and the other former Soviet states. Real estate prices in those countries have shot up, causing tensions with local populations.

For many Russians choosing to flee, Armenia was a rare easy option. It is one of five ex-Soviet countries that allow Russians to enter with just a national ID — making it a popular destination for former soldiers, political activists and others needing a quick escape.

Given the shared religion and use of language, Russians typically do not face animosity or social stigma in Armenia. Obtaining residency permits is also straightforward, and living costs are lower than in the European Union.

Yerevan has attracted thousands of IT workers, young creatives and working-class people, including families with children, from across Russia. They have established new schools, bars, cafes and robust support networks.

n the courtyard of the “Free School” for Russian children, established in April, Maxim, a construction company manager, was waiting for his 8-year-old son, Timofey. The school started with 40 students in an apartment. Now, there are nearly 200 in a multistory building in the city center.

“I did not want to be a murderer in this criminal war,” said Andrei, who is being identified by his first name for safety reasons

Like the White Russian emigres of the Bolshevik era and the post-Soviet immigrants of the 1990s, many of those leaving Russia because of the war in Ukraine are probably gone for good.

The family has adapted seamlessly to Yerevan. Everyone around them speaks Russian. Maxim works remotely on projects in Russia. Timofey likes his school and is learning Armenian. Maxim said he is sure the family will not return to Russia.

Tanya Raspopova, 26, arrived in Yerevan last March, with her husband but without a plan, overwhelmed and frightened.Then she heard that another emigre was seeking partners to set up a bar, a space where Russian expats could come together, and she wanted to help. Tuf, named after the pink volcanic rock common throughout Yerevan, opened its doors within a month.

They started with a neon-lit bar and kitchen on the ground floor, which soon expanded into a small courtyard. Then they opened up a second floor, then a third. Upstairs there is now a recording studio, a clothing boutique and a tattoo parlor. On a Wednesday night in January, the place was packed with young Russians and Armenians singing karaoke, drinking cocktails and playing ping-pong. “We have since created such a big community, a big family,” Raspopova said. “Tuf is our new home.”

Thousands have chosen the UAE, which did not join Western sanctions and still has direct flights to Moscow, as their new home. Russians enjoy visa-free travel for 90 days, and it is relatively easy to get a national ID, through business or investment, for a longer stay.

The high cost of living means there are no activists or journalists. Dubai is a haven, and the go-to playground, for Russian tech founders, billionaires under sanctions, unpenalized millionaires, celebrities, and influencers.

Shortly after the invasion, conversations in Moscow’s affluent Patriarch Ponds neighborhood turned to the best Dubai real estate deals, said Natalia Arkhangelskaya, who writes for Antiglyanets, a snarky and influential Telegram blog focused on Russia’s elite. A year later, Russians have ousted Brits and Indians as Dubai’s top real estate buyers, Russian-owned yachts dock at the marina, and private jets zigzag between Dubai and Moscow.

Russians can still buy apartments, open bank accounts and snag designer leather goods they previously shopped for in France.

The UAE’s embrace of foreign business has lured a stream of Russian IT workers seeking to cut ties with Russia and stay linked to global markets. Start-ups seek financing from state-supported accelerators. Larger firms pursue clients to replace those lost to sanctions.

About a dozen people arrived to discuss opportunities in India, which has maintained ties with Russia despite the war. Most expressed bitterness about the Kremlin’s politics and a longing for Moscow when it was an aspiring global hub.

“The most important thing for me is to be able to develop international projects and to integrate my kids into a global community, so they grow up in a free environment,”

Andrei works as a delivery driver and shares a modest room with two other men in a shelter set up by Kovcheg, a support organization for Russian emigrants. “Before the war, I never followed politics, but after the invasion, I started reading about everything,” Andrei said. “I feel so ashamed about what Russia has done.”

“Every extra month leads people to get used to a different country,” she said. “They get a job there, their children go to school, they begin to speak a different language. The longer the war lasts — the longer the dictatorship in the country continues — the fewer people will return.”

the expats could become “a repository of relevant skills for a better, freer, modern Russia.” For now, though, Rojansky said, the outflow sends a clear message.