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That willingness is not reassuring. For example, it is not far-fetched to imagine insurers wanting to get their hands on this type of medical information in order to hike premiums. Data brokers of all kinds will be similarly keen to obtain people’s real-time health-chat records. Altman made a point to say that this theoretical product would not trick people into sharing information.

. Neither Altman nor Huffington had an answer to my most basic question—What would the product actually look like? Would it be a smartwatch app, a chatbot? A Siri-like audio assistant?—but Huffington suggested that Thrive’s AI platform would be “available through every possible mode,” that “it could be through your workplace, like Microsoft Teams or Slack.

This led me to propose a hypothetical scenario in which a company collects this information and stores it inappropriately or uses it against employees. What safeguards might the company apply then? Altman’s rebuttal was philosophical. “Maybe society will decide there’s some version of AI privilege,” he said. “When you talk to a doctor or a lawyer, there’s medical privileges, legal privileges. There’s no current concept of that when you talk to an AI, but maybe there should be.”

So much seems to come down to: How much do you want to believe in a future mediated by intelligent machines that act like humans? And: Do you trust these people?

A fundamental question has loomed over the world of AI since the concept cohered in the 1950s: How do you talk about a technology whose most consequential effects are always just on the horizon, never in the present? Whatever is built today is judged partially on its own merits, but also—perhaps even more important—on what it might presage about what is coming next.

the models “just want to learn”—a quote attributed to the OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever that means, essentially, that if you throw enough money, computing power, and raw data into these networks, the models will become capable of making ever more impressive inferences. True believers argue that this is a path toward creating actual intelligence (many others strongly disagree). In this framework, the AI people become something like evangelists for a technology rooted in faith: Judge us not by what you see, but by what we imagine.

I found it outlandish to invoke America’s expensive, inequitable, and inarguably broken health-care infrastructure when hyping a for-profit product that is so nonexistent that its founders could not tell me whether it would be an app or not.

Thrive AI Health is profoundly emblematic of this AI moment precisely because it is nothing, yet it demands that we entertain it as something profound.

you don’t have to get apocalyptic to see the way that AI’s potential is always muddying people’s ability to evaluate its present. For the past two years, shortcomings in generative-AI products—hallucinations; slow, wonky interfaces; stilted prose; images that showed too many teeth or couldn’t render fingers; chatbots going rogue—have been dismissed by AI companies as kinks that will eventually be worked out

Faith is not a bad thing. We need faith as a powerful motivating force for progress and a way to expand our vision of what is possible. But faith, in the wrong context, is dangerous, especially when it is blind. An industry powered by blind faith seems particularly troubling.

The greatest trick of a faith-based industry is that it effortlessly and constantly moves the goal posts, resisting evaluation and sidestepping criticism. The promise of something glorious, just out of reach, continues to string unwitting people along. All while half-baked visions promise salvation that may never come.

this latest effort provoked a response that was swift and scathing and revealed something new: the existence of a tightknit group of scholars who are clamoring for more empathetic political analyses of rural Americans.

“We contribute to the further denigration of expertise when we say, ‘This is what the experts say about these rubes and bumpkins,’” said Mr. Jacobs, a co-author of “The Rural Voter.” “Who’s going to trust the experts when that’s what the experts have to say about you?”

There is an obvious reason for academics’ neglect of the political urban-rural divide until recently: It barely existed.

It’s only since the late 1990s that there has been a marked gap between rural and urban voting patterns in presidential elections, and it has widened ever since. In 2016, Mr. Trump won 59 percent of rural voters. Four years later, that climbed to 65 percent, according to Pew. And in the 2022 midterms, Republicans won 69 percent of the rural vote.

Even if that shift does hint that “rural” may now be its own kind of identity, it’s a cohort that’s hard to define.

The Census Bureau classifies any community as rural if it isn’t within an urban area, meaning it is not part of a densely settled area with 5,000 or more people or 2,000 or more housing units. (In the 2020 census, 20 percent of Americans were classified as rural.)

Beyond these basic definitional problems, rural communities can be wildly different socially. “When you aggregate to the national level, you lose so much,”

“I get frustrated especially when people talk about rural America as white America. In some states, it’s Latino America. In the Deep South, it’s Black America.”

Traditionally, political scientists argued that measuring the effects of place was just a proxy for looking at other parts of identity, like race or education. And because many did not come from rural areas, growing up rural didn’t tend to strike academics as a salient part of political identity.

Maybe because so few people fashioned themselves as “rural political experts” until recently, the few high-profile explanations for the rise of rural Republicanism were widely embraced by the chattering classes.

Thomas Frank in his best-selling 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” Mr. Frank, a historian, argued that the Republican focus on social issues, like abortion and guns, persuaded rural voters to put aside their economic interests and vote on cultural values rather than for candidates who supported unions and corporate regulation.

a handful of academics were so frustrated with the book that it inspired them to pursue their own research.

Ms. Cramer came to a different understanding from Mr. Frank’s of why people voted the way they did: Rural Americans resented city dwellers. They believed that national and state governments had enriched urban areas at the expense of rural ones, taking note of all the road-building in Madison, for example, when they drove to sports games.

Their reaction was hostility toward the very idea of government, so they supported politicians who promised to keep it out of their lives; Ms. Cramer called this “the politics of resentment.”

Ms. Cramer’s 2016 book, “The Politics of Resentment,” quickly became an anchor in the growing field of rural political studies. At least half a dozen academics credit her with foundational thinking for their research.

“A lot of the focus has been on ‘What’s wrong with those people?’” she said. “But most people studying what’s going on with rural political behavior are people with empathy for people who live in rural places. They aren’t discounting them as ignorant or uninformed. There’s more of an attempt to understand the way they’re seeing the world.”

When Mr. Jacobs decided this year to convene a group of 15 scholars for a conference called Rethinking Rural, he was struck by the flurry of excitement that greeted the invitations. “It was like the first time they’d been asked to the dance,”

What rankled the experts who had read “White Rural Rage” was what they considered slapdash analysis. The authors build some arguments on polls with sample sizes as small as 167 rural people. The book is filled with critiques of rural Americans — their resistance to pluralism, their willingness to embrace conspiracies — that apply to many groups and that some scholars reject because they are not based on the long-term observation they say is needed to truly understand the political motives of any community.

Mr. Jacobs, with the political scientist Dan Shea, conducted surveys of 10,000 rural voters, from Gambell, Alaska, to Lubec, Maine. The pair were struck by a commonality: Rural residents tend to focus less on their own economic circumstances and more on their community’s prosperity.

Even individuals who are thriving are attuned to whether their community as a whole is being left behind by economic changes like automation or the decline of coal.

That sense of “shared fate,” as the scholars put it, arises in part because rich and poor tend to cross paths often,

“If you go down my street in Vassalboro, the nicest house on the street is right across from the least nice house on the street,” Mr. Jacobs said. “Their kids go to the same school because there’s only one school.”

Such interconnectedness means that pollsters sometimes miss how rural voters are really feeling, he added. “It’s not enough to simply ask: Are you doing better than you were last year?

As millions left rural areas seeking economic opportunity, an appreciation formed for the businesspeople who stayed and tried to create jobs. That led to an outsize influence by local business leaders in the political realm, driving support for anti-union laws and tax policies generous to businesses.

Broadly, rural Americans see free trade and the rise of new technologies as hurting their communities while helping cities prosper

So the resentment they felt toward urbanites didn’t come out of nowhere.

“Rage and resentment are not interchangeable terms,” he wrote in Politico. “Rage implies irrationality, anger that is unjustified and out of proportion. You can’t talk to someone who is enraged. Resentment is rational, a reaction based on some sort of negative experience.”

And while resentment, like rage, doesn’t easily dissolve, he suggests that trying to understand where it comes from could start to build a bridge over that ever-widening urban-rural divide.

Mr. Vance “extracted what he needed from Appalachia.” Before anything else, the senator’s first betrayal was of his own region, the first portion of his soul to be sold.

Shortly after “Hillbilly Elegy” was released, writers throughout Appalachia denounced the classism and elitism of the book, as well as the self-serving ambitions of its author.

Without too much hyperbole, it could be said that J.D. Vance — a possible heir to the MAGA movement who has embraced some of the most noxious elements of the alt-right and the national conservative movement — is an infernal creation of the powerful liberals who championed his writing and elevated his platform. It’s hard to imagine that without “Hillbilly Elegy,” which was adapted into a film by the Democratic Party donor Ron Howard in 2020, Mr. Vance would have become the junior senator of Ohio, much less a nominee for vice president

Since being elected to the Senate, in large part due to the financial support of the tech billionaire and right-wing activist Peter Thiel, Mr. Vance has become a zealous convert to the MAGA cause. That’s a stunning reversal for a figure who eight years ago was celebrated as an astute voice of Never Trumper Republicanism, a man of learning who could formulate a centrist conservatism to supplant the dark turn that had taken hold of the G.O.P.

As Mr. Vance noted in a Time magazine interview in 2016, Mr. Trump’s greatest failure as a political leader is that “he sees the worst in people, and he encourages the worst in people.” That’s turning out to be true of Mr. Vance, too.

Eight years ago, during the heated days of the 2016 Republican primary, Mr. Vance wrote that Mr. Trump’s policy proposals “range from immoral to absurd.” A few months later, he referred to Mr. Trump as “cultural heroin,” and called him “unfit for our nation’s highest office.” And memorably, in a text conversation with a former roommate, the future senator worried that Mr. Trump might be “America’s Hitler.”

Mr. Trump’s White House tenure, he said, had changed his mind, but it’s hard to take the senator entirely at his word.

At the outset of Christopher Marlowe’s late 16th-century play “The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus,” the scholar at the center of the tale abandons all the learning he has mastered. Law, philosophy, medicine — none of these have fulfilled his boundless ambition. Instead, he turns to magic, making the fateful decision to sell his soul to the demon Mephistopheles, for what he “most desires” — “a world of profit and delight, /Of power, of honor.”

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

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

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

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

Stock prices of its five biggest makers of panels and other equipment have halved in the past 12 months. Since late June, at least seven large Chinese manufacturers have warned that they will announce heavy losses for the first half of this year.

The turmoil in the solar energy sector amid enormous factory capacity and booming exports highlights how China’s industrial policymaking works. The government decided 15 years ago to put extensive support behind solar power, and then let the companies claw it out. Beijing has shown a high tolerance for letting firms stumble and even fail in large numbers.

Something similar is happening in the automotive sector. Annual car sales in China are around 25 million a year, more than any other country but barely half the country’s ability to make vehicles. So automakers in China are now following the solar industry’s lead in cutting prices sharply and ramping up exports.

China’s approach can lead to big financial losses for local governments, state investment funds and state-supported banks, all of which bankroll companies in favored industries.

Sunzone’s rivals, including Tongwei and Longi Green Energy Technology, gained formidable economies from large-scale production. They have plowed part of their extra revenue into developing solar panels that are increasingly efficient at converting sunlight into electricity.

The rise and fall of Hunan Sunzone Optoelectronics in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province in south-central China, is a case study of how China’s policies work.

“It’s a very expensive development model, but it produces national champions quite reliably,” said David R. Hoffman, a senior adviser on China for the Conference Board, a global business group.

Despite the financial help, Sunzone’s factory now sits empty. A large “Sunzone” sign on the second floor rusts in the swampy heat of Changsha. The only person still working at the site on a recent afternoon, a security guard, said that manufacturing equipment was removed in January and the factory was set to be demolished and turned into office buildings.

Sunzone epitomizes how lavish lending from state-owned banks and generous local subsidies have produced manufacturing overcapacity. Solar companies cut costs and prices sharply to maintain market share. That led to a few low-cost survivors while many other competitors were driven out of business in China and around the world.

China’s banks, acting at Beijing’s direction, have lent so much money to the sector for factory construction that the country’s solar factory capacity is roughly double the entire world’s demand.

Started in 2008, the solar panel manufacturer benefited early on from practically every possible subsidy. It got 22 acres of prime downtown land in the heart of the city almost for free. One of China’s biggest state-owned banks arranged a loan at a low interest rate. The Hunan provincial government then agreed to pay most of the interest.

Many other factories, like Sunzone’s, quickly become obsolete.

“Enterprises continue to put advanced production capacity into operation to maintain competitiveness” said Zhang Jianhua, director of China’s National Energy Administration, at a news conference last month. “At the same time, the outdated production capacity is still extensive and needs to be gradually phased out.”

Compounding the problems facing China’s solar energy companies is the rapid disappearance of local subsidies. Local governments are running out of money as a housing crisis makes it hard for them to sell long-term leases on state land to real estate developers — previously their biggest source of cash.

Partly because of worries about Chinese subsidies, President Biden last month allowed steep tariffs that had expired to go back into force on solar products imported from Southeast Asia that use lots of Chinese components. And the Department of Commerce has begun trade cases against imported solar panels that could lead to further tariffs.

Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital

in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital

bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.

We want community, and yet there’s something that takes us away from community. Why?

The first answer is we’re busy. And you might think therefore busy people are going to be more online and less face to face.

the fact is busy people are more connected with the rest of the world. If you’re asking, “Why do we have people no longer connecting face to face,” it absolutely is not because we’re too busy.

Young men backed Trump over Biden by 14 points in the merged Journal polls this year, a substantial swing from 2020. In that election, they supported Biden by 15 points, according to AP VoteCast, a voter survey. Young women in the Journal surveys backed Biden by 30 points and Democratic control of Congress by 34 points, essentially unchanged from 2020.

Women now make up a record 60% of college students and carry 66% of all student-loan debt, research shows.

The testosterone-fueled lineup, coming on the heels of Trump’s fist-pumping response to bullets flying past him, “positions Trump as an anti-hero that millions of young men—specifically, young, first-time voters—connect with and even aspire to,’’ said John Della Volpe, director of the Harvard Youth Poll. “It’s something they see everywhere they consume information, whether it’s in the gamer community, TikTok, Instagram.’’

“The American flag is in the background, and there’s blood on his face,” Mertz said, “I mean, it just looks pretty badass.”

The gender gap extends to opposing views of abortion, student-loan forgiveness and other issues affecting the lives of young adults.

Polling last week by the Journal found Harris leading Trump among young voters by about 10 percentage points, less support than Biden drew from the group in 2020. The sample size was too small to measure how voter preferences differ by gender among those under 30.

Some men say they have lost economic, cultural and political influence to women amid the focus on equity and diversity. Others expressed resentment over feminist and progressive attitudes on college campuses, in the entertainment industry and at many workplaces. 

In certain U.S. cities, young women are outpacing young men in median annual income and are more likely than young men to live apart from their parents. A larger share of women under 30 are reaching financial independence compared with young women in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center, while fewer young men are reaching that milestone compared with four decades ago.

The Democratic push for diversity is making them more likely to vote for Republicans, some men said. An April survey by the Pew Research Center found that 23% of men—and 33% of men who backed Trump—believed the advancement of women has come at their expense. 

Many young men feel abandoned by Democrats, saying Republican politicians are the ones making direct appeals to them, according to interviews with dozens of men under 30.

Biden successfully pressed for trillions of dollars in federal spending on infrastructure construction, semiconductor manufacturing and other sectors that traditionally employ men. Yet young men maintain an overwhelmingly negative view of him,

The shift toward Trump includes Black and Latino men. Young Black men had backed Biden over Trump by about 70 percentage points in 2020, and Latino men backed Biden by more than 40 points, according to AP VoteCast. 

Journal polls found support for Biden shrank this year before the president withdrew from the race, leaving him with a narrow lead, as small as in the single digits, among nonwhite men.

Some men interviewed said they were fearful of criticism by women and expressed their resentments only in private and with other men. Several said they hide their conservative views because women they know have said they won’t date right-leaning men.

Other men say they are drawn to the so-called manosphere, a loose collection of male influencers who espouse macho, “anti-woke” views. The hyper-masculinity of the right, many of them said, is at the core of its appeal, not policies or party politics.“Young men just want freedom, recklessness, adrenaline,” said Lester, who kickboxes in his spare time. 

Many young people said their political views hardened years before they could vote.“Even back in 2016, when I was a 12-year-old trying to make sense of my place in the world and one of the candidates for president was making crude remarks toward women about their body parts—even at that age I felt it wasn’t right,” Isabelle Ems, a 19-year-old rising junior at Pennsylvania State University, said of Trump.

Harrison Wells, 22, said Trump’s 2016 campaign initiated his shift to the political right. He recalled being confused by the apoplectic reaction from teachers and students to Trump’s victory. His high school canceled classes and held listening sessions with students.“People were crying, upset,” he said. “Everyone was hysterical.”The experience crystallized growing skepticism of his private Catholic high school outside Menlo Park, Calif., which organized lectures about the importance of access to abortion and contraceptives and celebrated transgender visibility. 

“I felt as though there was a narrative and certain school of thought that was being pushed on us aggressively,” said Wells. “That was what made me think and start learning more about politics.”

He led a chapter of a conservative group, Young Americans for Freedom, at the University of Wisconsin and voted for Trump in 2020. He sides with the former president on the economy, taxes and immigration.

Journal polling found that young men are open to Trump policy proposals that young women reject. That includes Trump’s idea to deploy troops to the U.S.-Mexico border and to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

The president’s frustration over the fitful cease-fire talks came as Israel’s Channel 12 reported on Friday that Mr. Netanyahu had clashed with his own security chiefs, who accused him of changing the terms of the proposal to make it harder to reach a deal.

The subsequent phone conversation between Mr. Biden and Mr. Netanyahu on Thursday was a tough one. The president was extremely direct and forthright, according to the U.S. official, telling the prime minister that it was time to get the deal over the finish line.