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Here’s the thing: MacGuineas, the GOP, most Democrats, and people like me, unnerved by the trend and worried that interest payments on the borrowed money will prevent spending on real needs, agree that we are on an unsustainable fiscal course. Gaetz & co. are not wrong to want to cut spending. They are just wrong about everything else—where and how much and how fast to cut, and their iron rule that taxes should never, ever be raised and should always be reduced, especially for corporations and the rich, who would use their new cash to create jobs. (Spoiler: They didn’t.

Trump theoretically was leading a GOP populist revolution, but in reality the massive tax cut he signed was more of the same deficit-swelling, trickle-down delusion.

As I wrote in my book on political negotiations, the conditions for success include patience, reliance on facts, and the maturity to understand that you won’t get everything you want—but that all sides need to walk away with a few things they can feel good about, or at least can defend to their supporters.

Health care

before the sophisticated agents I’m describing become a reality, we need to confront a number of questions about the technology and how we’ll use it.

Today, AI’s main role in healthcare is to help with administrative tasks. Abridge, Nuance DAX, and Nabla Copilot, for example, can capture audio during an appointment and then write up notes for the doctor to review.

A classic example of this dynamic is the advent of the chain saw. A person with a chain saw can cut 10 times as many trees in the same time as a person using older methods. Logging companies did not use this invention, however, to shorten the workweek by 90 percent. They used it to cut 10 times more trees than they otherwise would have. “Lashed by the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time,”

The problem, Hickel argues, is explained by the “paradox” first observed by the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons: In a growth system, gains in efficiency do not translate to higher wages, greater equality, more leisure, or lower emissions; they are plowed right back into the growth cycle

Increasing outputs of wind, solar, and other renewables are not leading to a drop in the use of fossil fuels. Instead, renewables and fossil fuels are used to satisfy rising global energy demand. “New fuels aren’t replacing the older ones,” Hickel writes. “They are being added on top of them.”

“I consider Mark and Elon to be role models to children in their embrace of fighting,” Andreessen writes.

Modern American society, at least in the big cities, is turning on law enforcement and tolerating crime, so you need combat skills to protect your loved ones. We are also fat and depressed, and learning to fight might help on both counts. In conclusion, “if it was good enough for Heracles and Theseus, it’s good enough for us.”

what caught my eye was the veneration of the virile aggression of the Greeks, the call to rediscover the ways of the ancients. A list of things that were good enough for the Greeks but not good enough for us would run long: Slavery, pederasty and bloodletting come to mind

Prometheus was the Titan who stole fire from the gods of Olympus and gave it to human beings, setting us on a path of glory and disaster and incurring the jealous wrath of Zeus. In the modern world, especially since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, he has served as a symbol of progress and peril, an avatar of both the liberating power of knowledge and the dangers of technological overreach.

The consequences are real enough, of course. The bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed at least 100,000 people. Their successor weapons, which Oppenheimer opposed, threatened to kill everybody els

Annie Dorsen’s theater piece “Prometheus Firebringer,” which was performed at Theater for a New Audience in September, updates the Greek myth for the age of artificial intelligence, using A.I. to weave a cautionary tale that my colleague Laura Collins-Hughes called “forcefully beneficial as an examination of our obeisance to technology.”

The efforts to overturn the 2020 election failed. We’re told that’s because the institutions held. But it’s more accurate to say that most of the individuals holding powerful positions within those institutions — the White House, the Pentagon, the courts, election officials in Georgia and other states — sided with the Constitution over Mr. Trump’s desire to remain in power.

But what if key individuals decide differently the next time they are faced with this kind of choice? What if they have come to believe that the country is in such dire straits — has reached a state of apocalyptic decadence — that democracy is a luxury we can no longer afford?

A coalition of intellectual catastrophists on the American right is trying to convince people of just that

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side

I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.

Countries agreed to “transition away” from fossil fuels

who should transition first? What should determine each nation’s ambition? These efforts will be expensive. Who should pick up the tab?

The “Global Stocktake” from Dubai, like statements from earlier conclaves, got around these questions with the standard diplomatese:

J.G.A. Pocock, who brought new perspectives to historical scholarship by arguing that the first step in understanding events of the past is to identify their linguistic and intellectual context

Among the most important were “The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century” (1957), “The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition” (1975) and, most notably, “Barbarism and Religion,” a six-volume study of the life and times of Edward Gibbon,

Professor Pocock, Quentin Skinner and other like-minded scholars, known collectively as the Cambridge School, came to prominence in the late 1960s with a fresh approach to the study of political thought, characterized by an emphasis on context and an unwillingness to assume that all ideas and problems were viewed in the past as they would be viewed today.

In Russia, power is a pyramid. This pyramid was built by Ivan the Terrible in the 16th century – an ambitious, brutal tsar overrun by paranoia and a great many other vices. With the help of his personal army – the oprichnina – he cruelly and bloodily divided the Russian state into power and people, friend and foe, and the gap between them became the deepest of moats

His friendship with the Golden Horde convinced him that the only way to rule the hugeness of Russia was by becoming an occupier of this enormous zone. The occupying power had to be strong, cruel, unpredictable, and incomprehensible to the people. The people should have no choice but to obey and worship i

And a single person sits at the peak of this dark pyramid, a single person possessing absolute power and a right to all.

let’s assume that he expects some of those consequences, expects a more isolated future. What might be his reasoning for choosing it?

Here is one speculation: He may believe that the age of American-led globalization is ending no matter what, that after the pandemic certain walls will stay up everywhere, and that the goal for the next 50 years is to consolidate what you can — resources, talent, people, territory — inside your own civilizational walls.

In this vision the future is neither liberal world-empire nor a renewed Cold War between competing universalisms. Rather it’s a world divided into some version of what Bruno Maçães has called “civilization-states,” culturally-cohesive great powers that aspire, not to world domination, but to become universes unto themselves — each, perhaps, under its own nuclear umbrella.

When Mr. Xi came to power a decade ago, the entente between the countries accelerated into a deepening relationship that has overcome decades of division and suspicion. Trade has skyrocketed, reaching $146 billion last year. The two militaries train together and conduct joint air and naval patrols along China’s coast.

“Even though the bilateral relationship is not an alliance, in its closeness and effectiveness this relationship even exceeds that of an alliance,” Mr. Xi told his counterpart during virtual talks in December, according to Mr. Putin’s foreign policy adviser Yuri V. Ushakov.

That relationship seemed to reach a new peak at the Olympics. After their meeting, the leaders issued a lengthy joint statement that raised alarms in Washington.

The Renaissance was a fervent period of European cultural, artistic, political and economic “rebirth” following the Middle Ages.

Some of the greatest thinkers, authors, statesmen, scientists and artists in human history thrived during this era, while global exploration opened up new lands and cultures to European commerce. T

Galieo (1564-1642): Italian astronomer, physicist and engineer whose pioneering work with telescopes enabled him to describes the moons of Jupiter and rings of Saturn. Placed under house arrest for his views of a heliocentric universe.

I want to take a break and talk about environmental policy — specifically, the relationship between protecting the environment and economic growth.

the Biden administration has taken a huge step forward in the fight against climate change. The strategically misleadingly named Inflation Reduction Act is mainly a climate bill, using subsidies and tax credits to promote green energy

It’s not quite as aggressive as the climate plans in Biden’s original Build Back Better legislation, but modelers estimate that it will accomplish about 80 percent of what B.B.B. was trying to do.

Initial data shows that at least 500,000, and perhaps nearly 1 million, have left in the year since the invasion began — a tidal wave on scale with emigration following the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.

The huge outflow has swelled existing Russian expatriate communities across the world, and created new ones.

Some fled nearby to countries like Armenia and Kazakhstan, across borders open to Russians. Some with visas escaped to Finland, the Baltic states or elsewhere in Europe. Others ventured farther, to the United Arab Emirates, Israel, Thailand, Argentina. Two men from Russia’s Far East even sailed a small boat to Alaska.