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The biggest factor making this kind of climate initiative possible, after so many years of inaction, is the spectacular technological progress in renewable energy that has taken place since 2009 or so. This means that we can greatly reduce emissions using carrots instead of sticks: giving people incentives to use low-emission technologies rather than trying to regulate or tax them into giving up high-emission activities.

the politics of carrots are obviously a lot easier than the politics of sticks.

Above all, real G.D.P. says nothing about how stuff is produced. A kilowatt-hour of electricity counts the same whether it was generated by burning coal or wind power, but the environmental impact is completely different.

So let’s talk about why such claims are all wrong.

many people don’t understand what economic growth means, imagining that it necessarily involves producing the same things you were producing before, in the same ways, but just at a larger scale.

But that’s not at all what growth means. Currently, America’s real gross domestic product is about a third larger than it was in 2007. But the economy of 2023 isn’t just the economy of 2007 scaled up by a third. Production of some goods has gone way down — coal production has been cut roughly in half.

at this precise moment — the most hopeful moment for the environment, as far as I can tell, in decades — my inbox has been filling up with woeful claims that environmental protection is incompatible with economic growth. These claims are oddly bipartisan. Some of them come from people on the left who insist that the planet can’t be saved unless we give up on the notion of perpetual economic growth. Others come from people on the right who insist that we must give up on all this environmentalism if we want to preserve prosperity.

In fact, environmental quality is often better in rich countries, with high G.D.P. per capita, than in middle-income countries

As a result, there’s no reason a growing economy must place an increasing burden on the environment.

the environmental Kuznets curve.

, a comparison between the New York metropolitan area and Delhi, India. Delhi has a larger population but a much smaller G.D.P. So does New York’s big economy mean a highly stressed environment?

how does air quality in the two cities compare? As anyone who’s visited both places knows, New York air is, well, relatively OK, while Delhi air … isn’t.

at higher levels of development, delinking growth from environmental impact isn’t just possible in principle but something that happens a lot in practice.

Here’s a favorite chart of mine from the invaluable Our World in Data website. It shows carbon dioxide emissions per capita in Britain, where the Industrial Revolution began. The early phases of industrialization were indeed associated with a huge rise in emissions. But more recently emissions have fallen back to the levels of the ’50s — the 1850s:

How did Britain do that? Part of the answer is that over time the British economy switched from relying on coal to relying on hydrocarbons, which when burned generate less carbon dioxide. Britain also learned to use energy more efficiently over time. But more recently a big factor has been the rise of renewable energy, especially, in Britain’s case, wind power

So when you hear an environmentalist say something like, “We live on a finite planet, so we can’t have unlimited economic growth,” what they’re actually revealing is that they don’t understand what economic growth means

in practice, they’re lending aid and comfort to anti-environmentalists, who want us to believe that protecting the environment is incompatible with rising living standards.

That said, while it’s possible to decouple growth from environmental harm, that’s not automatic. To combine rising living standards with an improving environment, we need policies that encourage the use of technologies that cause less environmental damage.

The good news is that the United States is finally implementing such policies. Still, we need a lot more action along those lines — not just in America but in the rest of the world. So we can do this — but we need to try, and not give in to counsels of despair.

The U.S. logs fewer than 1,000 annual deaths out of millions of documented cases

this is more a nauseating nuisance than a public-health crisis. In most people, norovirus triggers, at most, a few miserable days of GI distress that can include vomiting, diarrhea, and fevers, then resolves on its own; the keys are to stay hydrated and avoid spreading it to anyone vulnerabl

norovirus is the most common cause of foodborne illness in the United States.)

direct contact with those substances, or the food or water they contaminate, may not even be necessary: Sometimes people vomit with such force that the virus gets aerosolized; toilets, especially lidless ones, can send out plumes of infection

Still, fighting norovirus isn’t easy, as plenty of parents can attest. The pathogen, which prompts the body to expel infectious material from both ends of the digestive tract, is seriously gross and frustratingly hardy. Even the old COVID standby, a spritz of hand sanitizer, doesn’t work against it—the virus is encased in a tough protein shell that makes it insensitive to alcohol.

At an extreme, a single gram of feces—roughly the heft of a jelly bean—could contain as many as 5.5 billion infectious doses, enough to send the entire population of Eurasia sprinting for the toilet.

norovirus mainly targets the gut, and spreads especially well when people swallow viral particles that have been released in someone else’s vomit or stool.

the virus is far more deadly in parts of the world with limited access to sanitation and potable water.

If the spittle finding holds for humans, then talking, singing, and laughing in close proximity could be risky too.

Once emitted into the environment, norovirus particles can persist on surfaces for days—making frequent hand-washing and surface disinfection key measures to prevent spread

Handshakes and shared meals tend to get dicey during outbreaks, along with frequently touched items such as utensils, door handles, and phones.

One 2012 study pointed to a woven plastic grocery bag as the source of a small outbreak among a group of teenage soccer players; the bag had just been sitting in a bathroom used by one of the girls when she fell sick the night before.

Once a norovirus transmission chain begins, it can be very difficult to break. The virus can spread before symptoms start, and then for more than a week after they resolve

Once the virus arrives, the entire family is almost sure to be infected. Baldridge, who has two young children, told me that her household has weathered at least four bouts of norovirus in the past several years.

Roughly 20 percent of European populations, for instance, are genetically resistant to common norovirus strains. “So you can hope,” Frenck told me. For the rest of us, it comes down to hygiene

Altan-Bonnet recommends diligent hand-washing, plus masking to ward off droplet-borne virus. Sick people should isolate themselves if they can. “And keep your saliva to yourself,” she told me.

The family fastidiously scrubbed their hands with hot water and soap, donned disposable gloves when touching shared surfaces, and took advantage of the virus’s susceptibility to harsh chemicals and heat. When her son threw up on the floor, Cameron sprayed it down with bleach; when he vomited on his quilt, she blasted it twice in the washing machine on the sanitizing setting, then put it through the dryer at a super high temp

After three years of COVID, the world has gotten used to thinking about infections in terms of airways. “We need to recalibrate,” Bhumbra told me, “and remember that other things exist.”

It’s not that we haven’t been here before. It’s that we arrived and never left. We are caught in a recurring cycle of acute identity crisis (Are we a divine creation or a cosmic accident?) with our sense of our own dignity locked in a war against scientific and technological progress.

The erosion of traditional authority, namely religion, and the transition away from small, intimate communities in favor of large, impersonal urban settings has been rattling us emotionally and psychologically since before Charles Darwin posited evolution over special creation.

it’s also true that the mental habits of conspiracy are probably as old as the human species, and may be rooted in certain evolutionary advantages (e.g., pattern-seeking, symbolic language, cooperative skills) that have betrayed us.

We laugh at flat earthism or the stipulation of lizard people just as many nineteenth-century Germans mocked spiritualism, theosophy, and World Ice Theory. But it bears remembering that these esoteric views formed a good part of the intellectual scaffolding on which an overarching antisemitic “Volk theory” grew and which helped lead the world into catastrophe.

The long-term lesson of conspiracy is that the convergence of social forces under extraordinary economic and social pressures can split the atom of esoteric theories and lead to critical chain reactions

It doesn’t take a lot of imagination to envision an unscrupulous politician in this country welding a majority out of conspiracists and a beleaguered suburban middle class by focusing public anger on an imaginary “other.”

Teachers, university professors, drag queens, and “pedophiles” come to mind as such a figure’s potential targets. It has happened before, and it can happen again.

Today, there are many more people like Claudia who regret transitioning, and who feel their mental health problems were ignored when their condition was put in a neat box marked ‘gender dysphoria’.

some mental health professionals were deeply concerned with the medicalisation of children. They believed these children required talking therapies, not irreversible hormonal and surgical interventions. But these staff were in a difficult position: they were under pressure from ‘powerful lobbies’ to opt for medication

the service was coming under pressure to recommend the prescription of drugs more often and more quickly, and that the independence of professional judgement was also coming under increasing pressure. Young patients may threaten suicide if their anxieties are not immediately addressed. Parents and others may threaten to complain and there are powerful lobbies from older patients pressing for the use of medication, which even more worryingly, is now available without regulation via the internet.

Clinicians feared the consequences if they refused to comply with what patients, and their parents, wanted. Sonia Appleby, a former safeguarding lead, told Barnes that those who spoke out against the transition of children were ‘demonised’.

What Friedman believed in was capitalism, or what he called “economic freedom.” Political freedom might come — but capitalism, he said, could do just fine without it.

the corporate funders of “Free to Choose” set out to make their case.

it was still a time when capitalism’s most enthusiastic supporters evidently felt the need to win the public over to a vision of free markets and minimal government

The documentary series “Free to Choose,” which aired on public television in 1980

He and other observers are trying to make sense of what might happen next — and, befitting our current bewilderment, they offer a range of perspectives. Some, like Wolf, hope the relationship can be repaired; others argue that the pairing has always been fraught, if not impossible.

he has also read his Marx and Engels, looking askance at their solutions while commending them for how “brilliantly” they described capitalism’s relentlessness and omnivorousness. Left to its own devices, capitalism expands wherever it can, plowing its way through national boundaries and local traditions — making it marvelously dynamic or utterly ruinous, and not infrequently both.

In Wolf’s case, his anguished tone reflects the scale of his own disillusionment. Born in 1946 in postwar England, he recalls in his preface how “the world seemed solid as I grew up.” He describes the feelings of “confidence” in democracy and capitalism that flourished with the collapse of the Soviet Union

Yet the “democratic capitalism” that Wolf wants to preserve was, even by his own lights, short-lived. Democracy itself — or “liberal democracy” with universal suffrage, which Wolf says is the kind of democracy he means — is a “political mayfly.” Democratic capitalism ended, in his account, with the financial crisis of 2008

Robert Reich has offered another measure, arguing that democratic capitalism, at least in the United States, began with Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal and ended with Reagan, when “corporate capitalism” took over.

The left-wing German sociologist Wolfgang Streeck stakes out a decidedly different position, suggesting that the tendency to equate “democratic capitalism” with a few decades of postwar plenty is to misinterpret a “historical compromise between a then uniquely powerful working class and an equally uniquely weakened capitalist class

In “How Will Capitalism End?” (2016), Streeck argues that it’s not compromise but the cascade of crises following the postwar boom — inflation, unemployment, market crashes — “that represents the normal condition of democratic capitalism.” Where Wolf wistfully invokes a “delicate flower,” Streeck writes contemptuously of a “shotgun marriage.”

the historian Gary Gerstle explores in his fascinating and incisive “The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order” (2022). Before the New Deal order started to falter in the late 1960s and ’70s, Gerstle writes, a majority of Americans believed that capitalism should be managed by a strong state; in the neoliberal order that followed, a majority of Americans believed that the state should be constrained by free markets. Each order began to break down when its traditional ways of solving problems didn’t seem to work

capitalism, according to Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, has obtained the status of civic religion. In “The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market,” the authors argue that industry groups and wealthy donors have engaged in a concerted campaign to promote “market fundamentalism” — “a vision of growth and innovation by unfettered markets where government just gets out of the way.”

The main implication of “The Big Myth” seems to be that “market fundamentalism” is so horrifically egregious — enriching the few and despoiling the planet — that Americans had to be plied with propaganda to believe in it.

as Gerstle’s book shows, neoliberal ideas proved so seductive because they also happened to dovetail with the stories that Americans wanted to tell about themselves, emphasizing individuality and freedom.

A new generation of swashbuckling billionaires entertain the prospect of secession, using their money to realize fantasies of escape, whether through seasteading or spaceships. The book quotes one seasteading enthusiast declaring, “Democracy is not the answer,” but merely “the current industry standard.”

Slobodian’s excellent if discomfiting new book, “Crack-Up Capitalism” (forthcoming in April), explores other neoliberal evasions of the nation-state: tax havens, special economic zones, gated communities — enclaves that are “freed from ordinary forms of regulation.

in “Globalists” (2018) the historian Quinn Slobodian argues that neoliberals have found ways not just to liberate markets but to “encase” them in international institutions, thereby shielding capitalist activities from democratic accountability. He observes that neoliberals were especially alarmed after World War II by decolonization, adopting a condescending “racialized language” that pitted “the rational West,” with its trade rules and property laws, against a postcolonial South, “with its ‘emotional’ commitment to sovereignty.”

first, what this is not.

It is not an argument against protest

I am not writing this thinking of right-wing America as my audience.

This is not merely a complaint.

Our current conversations waste massive amounts of energy in missing the futility of “dialogue” with them. Of a hundred fundamentalist Christians, how many do you suppose could be convinced via argument to become atheists? There is no reason that the number of people who can be talked out of the Third Wave Antiracism religion is any higher.

our concern must be how to continue with genuine progress in spite of this ideology. How do we work around it?

My interest is not “How do we get through to these people?” We cannot, at least not enough of them to matte

We seek change in the world, but for the duration will have to do so while encountering bearers of a gospel, itching to smoke out heretics, and ready on a moment’s notice to tar us as moral perverts.

We will term these people The Elect. They do think of themselves as bearers of a wisdom, granted them for any number of reasons—a gift for empathy, life experience, maybe even intelligence.

they see themselves as having been chosen, as it were, by one or some of these factors, as understanding something most do not.

“The Elect” is also good in implying a certain smugness, which is sadly accurate as a depiction.

But most importantly, terming these people The Elect implies a certain air of the past, à la Da Vinci Code. This is apt, in that the view they think of as sacrosanct is directly equivalent to views people centuries before us were as fervently devoted to as today’s Elect are

Following the religion means to pillory people for what, as recently as 10 years ago, would have been thought of as petty torts or even as nothing at all; to espouse policies that hurt black people as long as supporting them makes you seem aware that racism exists;

o pretend that America never makes any real progress on racism; and to almost hope that it doesn’t because this would deprive you of a sense of purpose.

“Choosing not to do stories is a form of bias,”

Four outlets mentioned the lawsuit in some way, but did not mention the comments from Fox News hosts. One of those, The Gateway Pundit, published three articles that included additional unfounded allegations about Dominion, including a suggestion that security vulnerabilities at one election site using Dominion machines could have led to some fraud, despite no evidence that votes were mismanaged.

The majority — 18 in all, including Fox News itself — did not cover the lawsuit at all with their own staff.

The lone on-air mention of the case on Fox News has been by Howard Kurtz, who hosts the weekly Fox News show “MediaBuzz.” He addressed the Dominion case on the air this week, telling viewers: “I believe I should be covering it.”“But,” he continued, “the company has decided as part of the organization being sued, I can’t talk about it or write about it, at least for now. I strongly disagree with that decision, but as an employee I have to abide by it.”

Mainstream news organizations often report on themselves when they are at the center of a scandal, Mr. Rosenstiel said, because they get “much more credit when they expose the lens on themselves as aggressively as they would anyone else.”

“The things you ignore and the things you choose to highlight are an important part of how you show whether you are a serious news organization.”

There are no legal orders barring media organizations from covering lawsuits they are involved in. And Mr. Rosenstiel pointed to a long history of past suits and scandals covered by the news organizations involved. The Washington Post, for example, ran a deeply reported article on how and why a reporter had made up a character in an article that won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981. The prize had been withdrawn a few days earlier after the fraud was uncovered

Fox’s lawyers might fear that anything said on the air could be used against the company at the trial

“From an ethical perspective, I’d say it’s a real disservice to their viewers on Fox not to be covering this,” she said.

Newsmax and The Washington Examiner — two of the four outlets reviewed by The Times that mentioned Dominion’s lawsuit but not the specific comments by Fox News’s hosts — have focused on Rupert Murdoch’s private messages, including that he saw Newsmax as a potential threat to Fox News

The hosts’ comments have also not been a focus of users on right-wing social media. Instead, many users on sites like Gab and Truth Social accused Mr. Murdoch of disloyalty to former President Donald J. Trump

One of the articles by The Gateway Pundit that advanced voter fraud narratives about Dominion was the most-shared story about the case on right-wing social media, according to data from Pyrra Technologies, a company that monitors the right-wing internet.

When users on right-wing social networks discussed the Fox News hosts, many criticized Mr. Carlson, Mr. Hannity and others for not fully believing the election fraud lies they appeared to endorse, Pyrra found.

From the start of the American experiment the language of freedom applied only to a privileged few.

At the time of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, only 2 percent of the city’s population were qualified to vote.

Slave codes allowed white property owners to possess Black humans — creating what the historian Tyler Stovall called “white freedom,” the “belief (and practice) that freedom is central to white racial identity, and that only white people can or should be free.” This freedom for the white master extended to torture, rape and lifelong control over the humans he (or she) owned.

In the 20th century, racial segregation was justified as the freedom of white people to control public space and make their own business choices.

It is true the language of freedom was central to emancipation, suffrage and democratic movements of all kinds, but it has also justified violence and discrimination.

more and more laws, caucuses, rallies and hard-right movements use the language of freedom as a cudgel to erode democratic governance and civil rights; these laws expand the creep of authoritarianism.

overtake freedom’s meaning entirely, harnessing freedom solely to projects of exclusion, privilege and harm.

The ugly freedoms in American politics today increasingly justify minority rule, prejudice and anti-democratic governance. If we don’t push back against their growing popularity, we will have ceded what freedom means to those who support monopolistic rule and furthered the country’s downward slide toward authoritarianism.

It does not take into account the differing protection offered by various covid vaccines, natural immunity, the impact of population density on transmission or covid treatment options for immunocompromised people. Estimating the number of immunocompromised people is itself hard: the model the data was based on includes only a few conditions. Others, like severe type-1 diabetes or rheumatoid arthritis, were absent. Nor is everyone with such conditions immunocompromised. But the study still offers insight into where to look for future variants—and where to focus efforts on increasing the supply and take-up of vaccines.

Spotify doesn’t have those things to turn to. So it’s been turning to podcasts. Besides enticing new subscribers with Spotify-branded podcasts—Rogan and Gimlet Media at the forefront of these—Spotify gets a new place to run ads. The podcast-advertising ecosystem is still lush enough to support additional harvesting. Spotify is betting that what used to be known as the music industry is in fact dead but that maybe the company can make money in the “audio industry.” But that shift involves decisions that disappoint even people jaded by years of experience with the recording business.

In the context of the devaluation of so many artists’ work, the backing of Rogan feels like a particularly nihilistic move. Spotify didn’t sign him for his talent or care at all about his impact—good or ill—on the world; with a heartless, almost video-game sensibility, they signed him to take market share from Apple and Google

Complaints against bloodless businessmen are hardly new. But what’s happening in music today feels less like individual acts of exploitation and more like the razing of an ecosystem.

When Rogan announced his signing, he emphasized that Spotify would have no creative control over his podcast. He was agreeing to a licensing deal, but he wouldn’t be an employee. “It will be the exact same show,” Rogan claimed

His comments fell somewhere between the gentle vibe of “Look, man, they’re offering me $100 million, so, uh, what am I supposed to do?” and a more aggressive “Spotify doesn’t own me, man. They are renting me for a certain period of time for $100 million—that’s different.” It’s infuriating that Rogan’s podcast has the trappings of counterculture while finding itself in such particular proximity to money and tech power. But I don’t know that, if I were Rogan, I would do much different.

Others in the “audio industry” face more discouraging trends. I suspect that the big record companies would dissolve if they weren’t still making so much money off the music of the 20th century.

I knew a lot of bands in the early 2000s whose members could quit their day job for a few years and make a living on relatively small amounts of record sales coupled with touring

Today, fewer artists are crossing the bar of being able to live purely off making and performing music. A lot of artists are failing to find a place in an “audio industry” that ever more efficiently mines smaller veins for what little cash can be extracted, or in a broader entertainment industry that has more in common with Marvel-movie spectacle than any particular sort of artistry.

My deep dread, though, is that this ability to tune out and focus on art becomes an aristocratic luxury; that a lack of money for music means a lack of money for musicians; that new ways of doing business are destroying the possibility of a creative middle class.

Solidarity is a tempting response to technological change, but my tired brain just can’t see the mechanism for it in this era. I honestly feel like a master sock weaver at the start of the industrial revolution. People will still get their socks, maybe worse than the ones before. And in the end, technology will plow us over.

North America fared only slightly better. Despite riots in the Capitol and attempts by the departing president Donald Trump to overturn the election results, the inauguration of Joe Biden proceeded smoothly and America’s democracy score only fell by 0.07 points.

Pedro Castillo’s narrow victory in Peru in June was contested for weeks by his opponent, Keiko Fujimori, and the Nicaraguan poll in November was a sham. Chile was downgraded to a “flawed democracy” partly because of low voter turnout in its deeply polarised elections, and Haiti is still in political crisis after the assassination of the president, Jovenel Moïse.

Through lockdowns and travel restrictions, civil liberties were again suspended in both developed democracies and authoritarian regimes.

Canada suffered a far bigger setback, of 0.37 points. Again, pandemic restrictions were the main cause of frustration and disaffection. According to the World Value Survey, which is used in some of the quantitative sections of the EIU’s survey, just 10.4% of Canadians felt that they had “a great deal” of freedom of choice and control. More alarming, 13.5% expressed a preference for military rule.

The fall in Canada’s index score reflected popular disaffection with the status quo and a turn to non-democratic alternatives.

The trucker blockade in Ottawa may presage more political upheaval. But the biggest challenge to the Western model of democracy over the coming years will come from China

After four decades of rapid growth it is the world’s second-biggest economy; within a decade the EIU forecasts that it will overtake America. If China’s absence from Mr Biden’s recent Summit for Democracy is anything to go by, the West is not looking to engage it. China’s response to being snubbed was to declare the state of American democracy “disastrous”.

The Ambassador Bridge is the busiest U.S.-Canadian border crossing, carrying 25% of all trade between the two countries.

The Freedom Convoy has been promoted and cheered on by many Fox News personalities and attracted support from the likes of former President Donald Trump.

On Friday, amid signs that authorities might be prepared to get tough, police in Windsor and Ottawa awaited reinforcements from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the federal police force.

Ottawa’s mayor has asked for 1,800 additional police officers, nearly doubling the manpower available to the the city’s police force, which has 2,100 officers and civilian members.

The reaction to the protests has also been marked by disagreements over who’s in charge. Canada’s emergency preparedness minister said this week that Ontario has ultimate responsibility, while the province’s transport minister said it is the federal government’s job to secure the border.

Also, the leadership of the opposition Conservative Party on the federal level has openly supported the truckers, apparently happy to make this Trudeau’s problem.

it’s worth acknowledging that adhering to these necessary rules cuts against some core aspects of human nature. I’m of the opinion that people should not bring their “whole self” to work — no one owes an employer that — but it’s also impossible to bring none of your personal self to work.

There are good reasons that both formal and informal boundaries are a necessity in the workplace and academia

In Putin’s plan to dismember Ukraine by embracing self-determination for ethnic Russian separatists, he, like Hitler in 1938, is exploiting careless rhetoric that ignores the fact that ethnicities do not tidily coincide with national boundaries.

Lansing, who called Wilson “a phrase-maker par excellence,” warned that “certain phrases” of Wilson’s “have not been thought out.” The “undigested” phrase “self-determination” is “simply loaded with dynamite.” Nevertheless, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Churchill in their Atlantic Charter of August 1941 affirmed the right of self-determination for all “peoples,” which the United Nations Charter also affirms.

This phrase can be used to sanitize the dismemberment of Ukraine — and some other nations (see above: the Baltics). And perhaps can reduce nations supposedly supporting Ukraine to paralytic dithering about whether sanctions, or which sanctions, are an appropriate response to an aggression wielding a Wilsonian concept.

Much of Putin’s geopolitics consists of doing whatever opposes U.S. policy. Call this the Nelson Rule. Before the Battle of Trafalgar, Lord Nelson, meeting with some of his officers, reportedly picked up a fire poker and said, “It matters not at all in what way I lay this poker on the floor. But if Bonaparte should say it must be placed in this direction, we must instantly insist upon its being laid in some other one.” Regarding the United States, Putin is Nelsonian.

raw power lubricated by audacious lying is Bismarckian. In July 1870, the French ambassador to Prussia asked King William of Prussia for certain assurances, which the king declined to give. Bismarck edited a telegram describing this conversation to make the episode resemble an exchange of insults. Passions boiled in both countries, and France declared war, which Bismarck wanted because he correctly thought war would complete the welding of the German states into a muscular nation.

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one

Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting

Even in absolute numbers, America’s unvaccinated and current-smoker populations seem to match up rather well: Right now, the CDC pegs them at 13 percent and 14 percent of all U.S. adults, respectively, and both groups are likely to be poorer and less educated.

Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

data suggest that most of the unvaccinated hold that status voluntarily at this point

The same arguments apply to tobacco: Smokers are 15 to 30 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Quitting the habit is akin to receiving a staggeringly powerful medicine, one that wipes out most of this excess risk.

If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again.

With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use.

We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort

Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated

And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.

nother aspect of where we’re headed with COVID. Tobacco is lethal enough that we are willing to restrict smokers’ personal freedoms—but only to a degree. As deadly as COVID is, some people won’t get vaccinated, no matter what, and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated will spread disease to others.

anti-COVID actions, much like anti-smoking policies, will be limited not by their effectiveness but by the degree to which they are politically palatable.

Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu.

this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person.

Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.

We still care for smokers when they get sick, of course, and we reduce harm whenever possible. The health-care system makes $225 billion every year for doing so—paid out of all of our tax dollars and insurance premiums

Hospitals have a well-honed talent for transforming any terrible situation into a marketable “center of excellence.”

But we shouldn’t forget the most important reason that the coronavirus isn’t like the flu: We’ve never had vaccines this effective in the midst of prior influenza outbreaks, which means we didn’t have a simple, clear approach to saving quite so many lives. Compassionate conversations, community outreach, insurance surcharges, even mandates—I’ll take them all. Now is not the time to quit.

for the next three years Democrats need to wake up with one overriding political thought: What are we doing to appeal to all working-class voters in those five states? Are we doing anything today that might alienate these voters?

The authoritarians tell a simple story about how to restore order — it comes from cultural homogeneity and the iron fist of the strongman

Democrats have a harder challenge — to show how order can be woven amid diversity, openness and the full flowering of individuals. But Democrats need to name the moral values and practices that will restore social order.

Beyond that, Mr. Putin is a Soviet nostalgist. He is the product of a system in which power produced truth and truth reinforced power.

Mr. Putin is an immensely skilled ruler, the most formidable Russian figure since Stalin, but he has his problems, too. Russian power remains limited by material and demographic constraints

In the same way, accusing Mr. Putin, even accurately, of planning or committing atrocities may weaken him among human-rights activists in the West, but it may strengthen him at home and in Ukraine.

Letting the world know that Mr. Putin has a kill list for Ukraine is more likely, Mr. Putin may believe, to reduce resistance to his rule in Ukraine than to boost it.

Exposing Mr. Putin as, by our standards, a liar does not weaken him at home or, in his view, in Ukraine.

If Western leaders can overcome their posthistorical parochialism and develop coherent strategies for the actual world as opposed to the world of their dreams, effectively countering Vladimir Putin is an eminently achievable goal, though in no way a simple or a trivial one.

It produces economic distortions as high IQ types get jobs as “money butlers.” (Chuck Collins, the author of “The Wealth Hoarders,” estimates that at least 90,000 people are employed in what he calls the “wealth defense industry.”)

Today the educated are losing their faith in upward mobility.