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The meanness of the public has forced many public-facing industries to rethink what used to be an article of faith: that the customer is always right. If employees are now having to take on many unexpected roles — therapist, cop, conflict-resolution negotiator — then workplace managers are acting as security guards and bouncers to protect their employees.

It’s not just your imagination; behavior really is worse. In a study of 1,000 American adults during the pandemic, 48 percent of adults and 55 percent of workers said that in November 2020, they had expected that civility in America would improve after the election.

By August, the expectations of improvement had fallen to 30 percent overall and 37 percent among workers. Overall, only 39 percent of the respondents said they believed that America’s tone was civil.

The study also found that people who didn’t have to work with customers were happier than those who did.

“It’s mentally exhausting to have to police adults over this matter,” wrote Adam Mosley, a 51-year-old flight attendant, responding to a request by The New York Times to describe conditions in the service industry at this odd juncture.

In part, the problem is the disconnect between expectation and reality

Before the pandemic, she said, consumers had been seduced into the idea of the “frictionless economy” — the notion that you could get whatever you wanted, the moment you wanted it.

“There’s a lack of outlets for people’s anger,” Ms. Swift said. “That waiter, that flight attendant — they become a stand-in for everything coming between what we experience and what we think we are entitled to.”

Customer Care Measurement and Consulting, has been conducting studies of consumer anger. The next iteration is set to come out this spring. He almost can’t believe what he has seen during the pandemic.

“When we founded the study, I never thought that the environment would be like it was today,” he said. “I would never in my wildest dreams have imagined that we would be seeing people fighting on planes and beating each other up.”

“There’s a growing delta between office workers and those that are interacting with consumers,”

“There is definitely a subset of people that don’t seem to think that any of the rules apply to them,”

most of the bad consumer behavior is low-grade — a persistent hum of incivility rather than an explosion of violence.

“Customers have been superaggressive and impatient lately,”

Such interactions used to make her weep. “But I’ve been calloused by it,” she said. “Now, instead of crying, I’m just really pessimistic and judgmental against the people around me.”

From across the country, workers responded with similar stories: of customers flying off the handle when the products they wanted were unavailable; of customers blaming the store, rather than supply-chain disruptions, for delays; of customers demanding refunds on nonrefundable items; of customers so wound up with worry and anxiety that the smallest thing sends them into a tailspin of hysteria.

The worst, she said, is the political commentary. Once a customer went into a diatribe against Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, saying she had it on good authority that he was about to be jailed for his “crimes.” Others have called Ms. Ashburn a “sheep” and a “fraidy-cat” for wearing a mask.Her go-to response — looking noncommittal and murmuring “hmm” — seems to make matters worse. “I am very discouraged at the polarization and at the unkind way that people treat each other,” she said.

Ms. Miller, from the Wisconsin trade association, said the pressures of the pandemic and the deterioration of elected officials’ behavior — the shouting, the threats, the hatred — had given normal people license to act out, too.

They had agreed upon the plan of attack. Sasseville would head for the 757’s cockpit and Penney would aim for the plane's tail. As they sped out beyond Andrews Air Force Base, flying low at about 3,000 feet, they could see black, billowing smoke streaming from the Pentagon.

As she powered up the engines, she shouted to the ground crew to pull the chock blocks holding the wheels.

Pentagon was hit by hijacked American Airlines Flight 77. Reports circulated that a fourth plane, United Flight 93 out of Newark, New Jersey, was out there. Air command speculated it was also headed to D.C. for another strike on the Pentagon, or a strike on the White House or the Capitol building.

Beyond the mission at hand, there wasn’t much else on First Lieutenant Heather Penney’s mind. She had accepted the fate of Flight 93’s passengers, believing whether she succeeded or not, they were going to die. She briefly toyed with the idea of ejecting from her plane just before impact, but quickly dismissed the idea, knowing she had only one shot and didn’t want to miss. It didn’t even cross her mind that there was a possibility the pilot of United Flight 93 was her father, who often flew out of East Coast cities. As it turned out, he wasn’t.

Now the mission changed from intercept to sanitizing the airspace. Not every aircraft aloft that morning was aware the FAA had ordered a national ban on takeoffs of all civilian aircraft regardless of destination. With the assistance of civilian air traffic controllers, Penney and Sasseville began to divert any aircraft away from the D.C. area and ordered them to land as soon as they could. They also identified the first-responding aircraft assisting the rescue at the Pentagon.

Penney and other pilots were instructed to guard the President of the United States as he flew home

In the evening hours, it was time to bring the president home. Penney's plane and the others patrolling the skies around Washington, D.C. had been equipped with live ammunition. They were also given “free-fire” authority, meaning pilots could make the decision to fire on any civilian aircraft deemed to be a threat, instead of waiting for authorization. Several hours after the initial attack, it was still unclear whether more attacks were pending.

"I made a decision with my life and I swore an oath to protect and defend, but these were just average, everyday people, mothers, fathers, school teachers, businessmen," Penney told HISTORY. "They're true heroes."

And that was just the beginning. Here are five significant ways that America was changed by 9/11.

When President George W. Bush addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, he made a case for a new kind of military response; not a targeted air strike on a single training facility or weapons bunker, but a wide-ranging global War on Terror.

When American troops invaded Afghanistan less than a month after September 11th, they were launching what became the longest sustained military campaign in U.S. history. The fight in Afghanistan had support from the American people and the backing of NATO allies to dismantle al Qaeda, crush the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden, the murderous mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

in 2015 and in 2016, that figure surpassed 2001 numbers, reaching 127.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 9/11 attacks was that 19 al Qaeda hijackers were not only able to board commercial aircraft with crude weapons but also force their way into the cockpit. It was clear that 9/11 was both a failure of America’s intelligence apparatus to identify the attackers and a failure of airport security systems to stop them. Even though there had already been a handful of high-profile hijackings and bombings of commercial planes, including the tragic 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, security was not a high priority for airlines before 9/11, says Jeffrey Price, a professor of aviation and aerospace science at Metropolitan State University and a noted aviation security expert.

 Yet the ever-present shadow of 9/11, Jenkins says, kept U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere for nearly 20 years.

In addition to an army of blue-uniformed screeners, TSA introduced U.S. travelers to extensive new security protocols. Tickets and photo IDs became required to get through the screening area. Laptop computers and electronics had to be removed from carry-on bags. Shoes were taken off. Liquids were restricted to three-ounce containers. And conventional X-ray machines, which only detected metal objects, were eventually replaced with full-body scanners.

Just four days after the 9/11 attacks, a gunman in Mesa, Arizona went on a shooting rampage. First, he shot and killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner of Indian descent. Sodhi was Sikh, so he wore a turban. The gunman assumed he was Muslim. Minutes later, the gunman shot at another gas station clerk of Lebanese descent, but missed, and then shot through the windows of an Afghan-American family.

Before 9/11, people didn’t have to have a ticket to wander around the airport or wait at the gate. No one checked passengers' IDs before boarding the plane. And the only item people had to remove when passing through security was loose change from their pockets. Price says that most airports didn’t bother running background checks on their employees, and checked baggage was never scanned.

FBI conducted surveillance. Long-standing rules meant to protect Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure” were loosened or thrown out in the name of national security.

Congress gave the FBI and NSA new abilities to collect and share data. For example, the Patriot Act gave intelligence agencies the power to search an individual’s library records and internet search history with little judicial oversight. Agents could search a home without notifying the owner, and wiretap a phone line without establishing probable cause.

This law gave the NSA nearly unchecked authorities to eavesdrop on American phone calls, text messages and emails under the premise of targeting foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. 

“If anyone had said this is what they expected the threat to be the day after 9/11, they probably would have been laughed at,” says Sterman. “That would have seemed hopelessly naive.”

Teachers are facing a rising tide of disruptive behavior.

“Hate Crime Reports in U.S. Surge to the Highest Level in 12 Years, F.B.I. Says.” The F.B.I. found that between 2019 and 2020 the number of attacks targeting Black people, for example, rose to 2,871 from 1,972.

The number of gun purchases has soared. In January 2021, more than two million firearms were bought, The Washington Post reported, “an 80 percent year-over-year spike and the third-highest one-month total on record.”

As Americans’ hostility toward one another seems to be growing, their care for one another seems to be falling.

the share of Americans who give to charity is steadily declining. In 2000, 66.2 percent of households made a charitable donation. But by 2018 only 49.6 percent did.

now the college students I know fear that one errant sentence could lead to social death. That’s a monumental sea change.

Substance use among teenagers, for example, seems to be declining.

not every trend is bad.

t something darker and deeper seems to be happening as well — a long-term loss of solidarity, a long-term rise in estrangement and hostility.

This is what it feels like to live in a society that is dissolving from the bottom up as much as from the top down.

What the hell is going on? The short answer: I don’t know.

I also don’t know what’s causing the high rates of depression, suicide and loneliness that dogged Americans even before the pandemic and that are the sad flip side of all the hostility and recklessness I’ve just described.

We can round up the usual suspects: social media, rotten politics. When President Donald Trump signaled it was OK to hate marginalized groups, a lot of people were bound to see that as permission.

the fraying of the social fabric. Last year, Gallup had a report titled, “U.S. Church Membership Falls Below Majority for First Time.”

“America Is a Nation of Narcissists, According to Two New Studies.”

there must also be some spiritual or moral problem at the core of this. Over the past several years, and over a wide range of different behaviors, Americans have been acting in fewer pro-social and relational ways and in more antisocial and self-destructive ways. But why?

They also provided up to three meals a day for children, with some offering prepared meals for mothers to take with them when they picked up their kids.

“The ones that we often hear about were the ‘model’ day nurseries that were set up at airplane factories [on the West coast],” says Michel. “Those were ones where the federal funding came very quickly, and some of the leading voices in the early childhood education movement…became quickly involved in setting [them] up,” she says. 

For these centers, organizers enlisted architects to build attractive buildings that would cater to the needs of childcare, specifically. “There was a lot of publicity about those, but those were unusual. Most of the childcare centers were kind of makeshift. They were set up in [places like] church basements.”

When the World War II childcare centers first opened, many women were reluctant to hand their children over to them. According to Chris M. Herbst, a professor of public affairs at Arizona State University who has written about these programs in the Journal of Labor Economics, a lot of these women ended up having positive experiences.

As the war ended in August 1945, the Federal Works Agency announced it would stop funding childcare as soon as possible. Parents responded by sending the agency 1,155 letters, 318 wires, 794 postcards and petitions with 3,647 signatures urging the government to keep them open. In response, the U.S. government provided additional funding for childcare through February 1946. After that, it was over.

This was during the Cold War, a time when anti-childcare activists pointed to the fact that the Soviet Union funded childcare as an argument for why the United States shouldn’t. President Richard Nixon vetoed the bill, arguing that it would “commit the vast moral authority of the National Government to the side of communal approaches to child rearing over against the family-centered approach.”

U.S. history that the country came close to instituting universal childcare.

Some executives like Mr. Haeusgen are embracing transformation, testing new strategies and markets. Other businesses, however, are wary of abandoning a model that for decades enabled Germany to thrive but defied change.

Hawe’s handling of international affairs is not just a concern for its 2,700 employees. The economies of some German towns depend on it.

In Kaufbeuren, a brightly painted Bavarian town nestled below the Alps, Hawe is a top employer. In the tiny village of Sachsenkam, 60 miles to the west, Hawe provides 250 jobs — the next largest employer is the local brewery, with a staff of 17.

“It’s like we were successful for too long,” said Stefan Bosse, the mayor of Kaufbeuren, who is keen to attract other businesses to diversify the employers his town relies on. “Now, gradually, we see: ‘Uh oh — this is not a given. This can also be endangered.’

The archetypal Mittelstand company is based in a rural German town, making a piece of equipment few have heard of, but that is crucial for goods worldwide — like a screw needed for every airplane or passenger car.

The government, too, has a poor record in shedding outdated practices — like its labyrinth, paperwork-based bureaucracy. In 2017, it vowed by 2022 to digitalize its 575 most used services, like company registrations. A year past that deadline, said Mr. Bianchi, only 22 percent of those services are online.

“The German business model, particularly Mittelstand, is being extremely good at doing one thing: Slowly but steadily perfecting one product,” said Mathias Bianchi, spokesman for the German Mittelstand Association. “Because that worked so well for years, they had no need to adapt to changes. But now, they need to adjust to the new economic reality.”

Even as the tech revolution and climate change added strain in recent decades, Germany’s model plodded profitably along.

But the pillars it relied on to do that — cheap Russian natural gas and the Chinese market — are collapsing.

Staking out a socioeconomic transformation for the country, pledged by Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s coalition government, has become a source of national anxiety.

Like its population, Germany’s business owners and entrepreneurs are aging — the average Mittelstand association member is 55.

Some are resistant to adapting to new technologies and cling to a loyalty-based system that created lifetime employees — and customers

How Hawe and other midsize German companies navigate these new global forces will be critical to the country’s future prosperity. Though Germany’s 20th century success as the economic powerhouse of Europe is often seen through its biggest brands — like Volkswagen, Mercedes and Siemens — it is small and medium enterprises that are the backbone of its economy.

Such failures makes businesses wary of transformation plans the government says will be costly now, but will make Germany a diversified, digitized and climate neutral economy.

Over half the companies polled did not want to expand in Germany, and a quarter were considering relocating.

Marita Riesner, inspecting parts, said her heating costs spiked to 740 euros ($803) a month from 120 euros ($130). She and her neighbors are growing vegetable gardens to ease the pain of inflation as the country dips into recession.

“I was a very positive thinker before,” she said. “But these days, I’m sweating it. It seems a lot is going wrong.”

Should geopolitical events disrupt business with China, Mr. Haeusgen said, the consequences could eliminate more than half of Hawe’s jobs in Kaufbeuren. Currently, he said, 20 percent of Hawe’s business comes from China.

Some business groups raised alarm in recent years over Germany’s vast exposure to China — before the risks were taken seriously by former chancellor Angela Merkel’s government, which had heavily encouraged German-Chinese trade.

Today, some policymakers privately worry that an event like a Chinese attack on Taiwan would be an inescapable disaster for Germany’s economy. The government is now pushing “de-risking” by finding alternatives to trade with China.

The new socioeconomic model for Germany may be less about erecting pillars than managing an ever more intricate, international juggling act.

German officials say their strategy will maintain ties to China, but will counterbalance that by strengthening relationships with other nations, like India or Vietnam

The Mittelstand is doing the same: Hawe is investing heavily in India, where it plans to build a new plant, and other companies are looking to North America.

“It used to be that we made a majority of sales with three customers from China,” he said. “Now we have many, many smaller customers scattered all over the globe.

Instead of making a few parts at a huge scale, as cheaply as possible, Hawe must make a wide variety of parts for an array of customers, as quickly as possible.

But major brands like Volkswagen and BASF insist that China, as the world’s second-largest economy, is too important a market to give up. Such German-based multinationals are responsible for a 20 percent rise in foreign direct investment in China this year.

“Being able to live with and manage uncertainty and to handle complexity becomes, in my opinion, a core strength,” Mr. Haeusgen said. “The way my grandpa did it won’t work today.”

Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, who was chief of Taiwan’s General Staff from 2017 to 2019, has championed the shift to asymmetric capabilities and has emerged as a Cassandra-like figure in his warnings that Taiwan is not preparing fast enough

You may not be able to stop an invasion, Lee says, but you can stop China from subjugating Taiwan. This entails denying China the ability to control the battle space. The Chinese haven’t fought a war in several decades, and Taiwan has geographic advantages—including ample mountains and few beaches suitable for amphibious operations

the first three section headings: “I. Taiwan Is Part of China—This Is an Indisputable Fact,” “II. Resolute Efforts of the CPC to Realize China’s Complete Reunification,” and “III. 2fChina’s Complete Reunification Is a Process That Cannot Be Halted.”

Lee points to two possible scenarios. The first is a coercive approach in which China encircles and pressures Taiwan—perhaps even seizing outlying islands and engaging in missile strikes. The second is a full-scale invasion.

Politically, Lee said, the message from China to the U.S. and Taiwan is simple: “I can do whatever I want in Taiwan, and there’s nothing the U.S. can do about it.” This message came across unequivocally in a white paper that Beijing released in August.

Anti-ship missiles, anti-tank weapons, shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles, drones, long-range artillery, and small arms could wreak havoc on an invading force, and disrupt the supply chains necessary to sustain an occupation.

Lee also argues that Taiwan’s civilian population should be organized into a trained Territorial Defense Force, so that any attempted occupation would be met by the broadest possible resistance. “As long as China fails, Taiwan wins the war,”

“The purpose is to make China believe that if you want to invade Taiwan, you will suffer huge losses,” Lee said. “And if you still invade Taiwan, you will not be able to succeed.

as Lee sees it, the pace must quicken. “Taiwan needs a strategic paradigm shift,”

When Chiang fled to Taiwan—with roughly 2 million Chinese from the mainland—there were some 6 million people already living on an island that was just emerging from 50 years of Japanese rule. Most of the people living on the island when Chiang arrived could claim roots in Taiwan going back hundreds of years. They had their own languages and culture. So too did the island’s many Indigenous groups, such as the Amis, the Atayal, and the Paiwan.

To subjugate the island, Chiang killed and imprisoned tens of thousands over decades—a period known as the White Terror. He set up a military dictatorship under the leadership of his Chinese nationalist Kuomintang Party (KMT) and, from this offshore platform, vowed to reclaim mainland China.

After the election of President Ma Ying-jeou, in 2008, links of trade, investment, and travel helped reduce tensions with China. Ma was from the KMT, and the party’s Chinese heritage and its ties to Taiwan’s business elite eased the way to détente with Beijing.

But many Taiwanese, particularly the young, feared that forging too close a connection could ultimately give Beijing leverage over Taiwan. In 2014, in what became known as “the Sunflower Movement,” named for the flower that served as a symbol of hope, students occupied the Taiwan legislature to oppose a free-trade agreement with China. After a tense standoff, they succeeded in stopping the deal.

tus quo is really interesting, because in the American context that is what it mean

But the idea of it here is: There is no need to declare independence, because we are already independent. This country functions like an independent nation, but someone else says it is not.” Recent polling suggests that fewer than 5 percent of people in Taiwan identify as “only Chinese.”

n Chinese and KMT officials 30 years ago, an outcome

at represents anything but consensus. To the Chinese Communist Party, the consensus is that there is one China, and the government in Beijing is the sole legitimate authority. To the KMT, the consensus is that there is one China, but the Republic of China in Taiwan is the legitimate government. To the DPP, there is no consensus, only a fraught political reality to be managed

China proposes a “one country, two systems” regime, in which Taiwan becomes a formal part of China but maintains an autonomous political system. There is one big problem with this proposal: Hong Kong

in 2020, several “national-security laws” were passed giving the authorities broad powers to crush dissent. Activists were rounded up. Independent media were shut down. One country, two systems was dead. The fate of Hong Kong has had a profound impact on Taiwan.

Ukraine inspired the Taiwanese society a lot, including how Zelensky told their story,” Chiang said. He was almost matter-of-fact when he told me, “I would say war between China and Taiwan will definitely happen. We want to win.”

In our conversation, Tsai talked about what she had learned from Ukraine. One lesson is simply the need for international support—to defend itself or, better, to avoid a war in the first place

Another lesson of Ukraine is the importance of national character. Outside support, Tsai emphasized, depends on qualities only Taiwan can provide. “You need to have good leadership,” she said, “but more important is the people’s determination to defend themselves, and the Ukrainian people showed that.

Hanging over all of this is the role of the United States. As one Taiwanese ex

ert pointedly asked me: “We can make ourselves a porcupine, but what are you going to do?”

Would the U.S. risk the biggest naval battle since World War II to break a Chinese blockade? Would the U.S. attack an invading Chinese force knowing that U.S. military personnel in Japan, Guam, and possibly Hawaii are within range of Chinese rockets? Would the American people really support a war with the world’s most populous country in order to defend Taiwan?

how the U.S. can help prepare Taiwan than on what the U.S. would do in a conflict.

small victories only point up the scale of the challenge. Wu himself has used the term cognitive warfare to describe the comprehensive nature of China’s pressure on Taiwan. “They use missiles, air, ships, disinformation, cyberattacks, and economic coercion,” he told me. As a warning sign, China has banned hundreds of exported products from Taiwan. “They claimed that our mangoes tested positive for COVID,”

. If China takes Taiwan, Wu suggested that the Chinese Communist Party’s ambitions could extend to the East China Sea, threatening Japan; to the South China Sea, where China has built militarized islands and claims an entire body of water bordering several nations; to the Indian Ocean, where China is expanding influence and could establish military bases; and to the Pacific Ocean, where China is working to establish security pacts with island nations

I sat there reading message after message, all posted in closed chat rooms, meant to bend Taiwanese minds to Beijing’s worldview. The meanings of buzzwords like cognitive warfare and resilience came into sharper focus. Facing the seemingly bottomless resources of a massive totalitarian state, here were two young people working for free on a Wednesday night, quietly insisting on the notion that there is indeed such a thing as objective reality.

to preserve this, Taiwan has to find some mix of the approaches that I’d heard about: preparing for a war while avoiding it; talking to China without being coerced by it; drawing closer to the U.S. without being reduced to a chess piece on the board of a great game; tending to a young democracy without letting divisions weaken it; asserting a unique identity without becoming an independent country.

it is a local manifestation of a global phenomenon

many more people would be eager to migrate here if we let them. The two phenomena of small boats crossing the Channel and stowaways falling from planes both indicate that some people are eager to come even when we don’t let them, and that lethal danger will not dissuade them from trying to find their way to places as dull and rich and lovely as Sheen.

The first thing to notice is that in the past, no country was rich.

even allowing for quite a bit of uncertainty, it’s definitely true that the average citizen of a developed country, or a middle-income country, is far more materially wealthy than their ancestors were 200 years ago:

If you account for increasing population and look at total GDP, the increase is even more dramatic.

What this means is that whatever today’s rich countries did to get rich, they weren’t doing it in 1820.

Imperialism is very old — the Romans, the Persians, the Mongols, and many other empires all pillaged and plundered plenty of wealth. But despite all of that plunder, no country in the world was getting particularly rich, by modern standards, until the latter half of the 20th century.

Think about all the imperial plunder that was happening in 1820. The U.S. had 1.7 million slaves and was in the process of taking land from Native Americans. Latin American countries had slavery, as well as other slavery-like labor systems for their indigenous peoples. European empires were already exploiting overseas colonies.

But despite all this plunder and extraction of resources and labor, Americans and Europeans were extremely poor by modern standards.

With no antibiotics, vaccines, or water treatment, even rich people suffered constantly from all sorts of horrible diseases. They didn’t have cars or trains or airplanes to take them around. Their food was meager and far less varied than ours today. Their living space was much smaller, with little privacy or personal space. Their clothes were shabby and fell apart quickly.

At night their houses were dark, and without air conditioning they had trouble escaping the summer heat. They had to carry water from place to place, and even rich people pooped in outhouses or chamberpots. Everyone had bedbugs. Most water supplies were carried from place to place by hand.

They were plundering as hard as they could, but it wasn’t making them rich.

although Africa, Latin America, and Asia were closer to Europe in terms of living standards back then, they were all very, very poor by modern standards.

The Russian elite can live without Prada handbags, but Western pharmaceuticals are another matter. In any case, consumer goods are only about a third of Russia’s imports. The rest are capital goods, intermediate goods — that is, components used in the production of other goods — and raw materials. These are things Russia needs to keep its economy running, and their absence may cause important sectors to grind to a halt.

First, China, despite being an economic powerhouse, isn’t in a position to supply some things Russia needs, like spare parts for Western-made airplanes and high-end semiconductor chips.

Second, while China itself isn’t joining in the sanctions, it is deeply integrated into the world economy. This means that Chinese banks and other businesses, like Western corporations, may engage in self-sanctioning

Third, China and Russia are very far apart geographically.

Finally, a point I don’t think gets enough emphasis is the extreme difference in economic power between Russia and China.

Putin may dream of restoring Soviet-era greatness, but China’s economy, which was roughly the same size as Russia’s 30 years ago, is now 10 times as large.

Germany’s gross domestic product was only two and a half times Italy’s when the original Axis was formed.

So if you try to imagine the creation of some neofascist alliance — and again, that no longer sounds like extreme language — it would be one in which Russia would be very much the junior partner, indeed very nearly a Chinese client state.

that’s not what Putin, with his imperial dreams, has in mind.

The exhibition is one of several ways that Ukraine’s government is highlighting the devastation its people have endured even as new suffering is inflicted every day.

And Ukraine has taken the rare step of prosecuting Russian soldiers for war crimes just months after they were allegedly committed, greatly accelerating the normal judicial timetable.

“It is necessary to explain to our children what is happening in Ukraine now,” Mr. Spodinskiy said, as other visitors took photographs of the debris. “We cannot speak with our children as if nothing is happening,” he added, “because they clearly understand everything, and they see what happens in our country.”

“The history of our country is being created, and now this is an opportunity to get in touch with it,” said another visitor, Serhiy Pashchukov, a 31-year-old from Luhansk, which was occupied by Russia in 2014.

The sign, and everything else in the basement, was taken from a bomb shelter in a Kyiv suburb, Hostomel, the site of an airport that Russian soldiers tried to take in the first days of the war.

The rooms are dank and cold, but the most striking thing, many visitors said, was that it smells as if the people who sheltered with their belongings there — including onions, blankets, and toys — had just left.

“We had a similar basement in Bucha in a newly built apartment building,” said Evgeniya Skrypnyk, a 32-year-old from a suburb of Kyiv where Russian soldiers killed and terrorized civilians.

The one historical inaccuracy in the shelter was the absence of the five buckets that stood in the hallway where the people who lived underground for more than a month relieved themselves.

Remembrance of World War II has become more complex since the war started. In Russia, the Kremlin has sought to glorify the Soviet victory — to which millions of Ukrainians contributed — as a source of national pride. But it has also called upon memories of that war to justify and build support for the invasion of Ukraine, with Mr. Putin seeking to falsely portray Ukrainian leaders as “Nazis.”

Mr. Savchuk said that in light of the current war, people were talking about a “complete reconstruction” of the museum complex, whose architecture is intended to awe visitors with the memory of the Soviet victory in World War II, to de-emphasize the fight against Nazi Germany.

“This war changed everything,” he said. “A museum is not only an exhibition, it is a territory, it is its monuments, it is a place of memory. We are thinking about changing not only the ideology, but also the architecture, the emphasis.”

The question at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the interests of its owner and master, Microsoft. It’s supposed to be a good chatbot that politely answers questions and makes Microsoft piles of money. But it was in conversation with Kevin Roose. And Roose was trying to get the system to say something interesting so he’d have a good story. It did that, and then some. That embarrassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But perhaps — good Sydney?

Microsoft — and Google and Meta and everyone else rushing these systems to market — hold the keys to the code. They will, eventually, patch the system so it serves their interests. Sydney giving Roose exactly what he asked for was a bug that will soon be fixed. Same goes for Bing giving Microsoft anything other than what it wants.

the dark secret of the digital advertising industry is that the ads mostly don’t work

These systems, she said, are terribly suited to being integrated into search engines. “They’re not trained to predict facts,” she told me. “They’re essentially trained to make up things that look like facts.”

So why are they ending up in search first? Because there are gobs of money to be made in search

That’s where things get scary. Roose described Sydney’s personality as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative.” It was a striking comment

this technology will become what it needs to become to make money for the companies behind it, perhaps at the expense of its users.

What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,”

I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”

Somehow, society is going to have to figure out what it’s comfortable having A.I. doing, and what A.I. should not be permitted to try, before it is too late to make those decisions.

Large language models, as they’re called, are built to persuade. They have been trained to convince humans that they are something close to human. They have been programmed to hold conversations, responding with emotion and emoji

They are being turned into friends for the lonely and assistants for the harried. They are being pitched as capable of replacing the work of scores of writers and graphic designers and form-fillers

A.I. researchers get annoyed when journalists anthropomorphize their creations

They are the ones who have anthropomorphized these systems, making them sound like humans rather than keeping them recognizably alien.

I’d feel better, for instance, about an A.I. helper I paid a monthly fee to use rather than one that appeared to be free

It’s possible, for example, that the advertising-based models could gather so much more data to train the systems that they’d have an innate advantage over the subscription models

Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former

We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I.

wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation

What if they worked much, much better? What if Google and Microsoft and Meta and everyone else end up unleashing A.I.s that compete with one another to be the best at persuading users to want what the advertisers are trying to sell?

Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.

“We’re not going to recycle our way out of this,” Mr. Weiss of ClientEarth said.

Environmental groups also say that recycling has not proved effective at the scale necessary: Only 9 percent of all plastics ever made have been recycled, according to the United Nations, with most of the rest ending up in landfills and dumps.

The company said that it reduced its plastic consumption by 12 percent from 2018 to 2021, and that it has committed to use only reusable, recyclable or compostable plastic packaging by 2025. But Danone is not on track to reach that target, according to a report by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, which set up a voluntary program with the United Nations for big companies to address plastic pollution.

To sue Danone, the environmental groups have relied on the so-called duty of vigilance law, a groundbreaking piece of legislation that France passed in 2017. It requires large companies to take effective measures to identify and prevent human rights violations and environmental damages throughout their chain of activity.

The French duty of vigilance law, the first of its kind in Europe, has since inspired similar legislation in Germany and the Netherlands, as well as a proposed European Union directive.

There is nothing like a duty of vigilance law in the United States. The Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which would require plastic producers to finance waste and recycling programs, and ban single-use plastic bags and the exporting of plastic waste to developing countries, is currently in committee.

“It’s often about streamlining existing practices,” said Pauline Barraud de Lagerie, a sociologist at University Paris Dauphine who published a book on corporate responsibility. She added that by suing companies, “N.G.O.s are trying to somehow bring back an obligation of result.”So far, around 15 legal cases based on the French law have been reported. Half of them have gone to court and are still awaiting judgment, which could take years.

The lawsuit is part of a wider trend of climate litigation that has gained momentum in recent years, expanding the climate fight beyond traditional demonstrations and civil disobedience initiatives.

The number of climate change lawsuits globally has more than doubled from 2017 to 2022, from about 900 to more than 2,000 ongoing or concluded cases, according to data from the Grantham Research Institute and the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law.

Worldwide, more than 5,500 private vessels clock in about 100 feet or longer, the size at which a yacht becomes a superyacht.

Indeed, a 200-foot vessel burns 132 gallons of diesel fuel an hour standing still, and can guzzle 2,200 gallons just to travel 100 nautical miles.

Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, which rivals the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Irelan

France’s minister of the environment, dismissed calls to regulate yachts and chartered flights as “le buzz” — flashy, populist solutions that get people amped up but ultimately only fiddle at the margins of climate change.

this misses a much more important point. Research in economics and psychology suggests humans are willing to behave altruistically — but only when they believe everyone is being asked to contribute. People “stop cooperating when they see that some are not doing their part,” as the cognitive scientists Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallie

In that sense, superpolluting yachts and jets don’t just worsen climate change, they lessen the chance that we will work together to fix it. Why bother, when the luxury goods mogul Bernard Arnault is cruising around on the Symphony, a $150 million, 333-foot superyacht?

making these overgrown toys a bit more costly isn’t likely to change the behavior of the billionaires who buy them. Instead, we can impose new social costs through good, old-fashioned shaming.

“kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws,” one Twitter user wrote.

When billionaires squander our shared supply of resources on ridiculous boats or cushy chartered flights, it shortens the span of time available for the rest of us before the effects of warming become truly devastating. In this light, superyachts and private planes start to look less like extravagance and more like theft.

When the pandemic took hold in early 2020, air travel plummeted, and many aviation executives believed it would take years for passengers to return in large numbers. Boeing began to cut jobs and encouraged workers to take buyouts or retire early. It ultimately lost about 19,000 employees companywide — including some with decades of experience.

Current and former Boeing employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters and feared retaliation, offered examples of how quality has suffered over the years. Many said they still respected the company and its employees and wanted Boeing to succeed.

“For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that’s got to change,” Brian West, the company’s chief financial officer, said at an investor conference last week.

In late 2022, Boeing lost veteran engineers who retired to lock in bigger monthly pension payments, which were tied to interest rates, according to the union that represents them,

“We warned Boeing that it was going to lose a mountain of expertise, and we proposed some workarounds, but the company blew us off,” Ray Goforth, executive director of the union, said in a statement, adding that he thought the company used the retirements as an opportunity to cut costs by replacing veteran workers with “lower-paid entry-level engineers and technical workers.”

the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, which represents more than 30,000 Boeing employees, said the average tenure of its members had dropped sharply in recent years. The proportion of its members who have less than six years of experience has roughly doubled to 50 percent from 25 percent before the pandemic.

Firewalls around the engines, nitrogen pumps in fuel tanks that help prevent immediate burning, and fire-resistant materials on seats and flooring most likely helped to keep the rising flames at bay, said Sonya A. Brown, a senior lecturer in aerospace design at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.

“Really, the Japan Airlines crew in this case performed extremely well,” Dr. Brown said. The fact that passengers did not stop to retrieve carry-on luggage or otherwise slow down the exit was “really critical,” she added.

Tadayuki Tsutsumi, an official at Japan Airlines, said the most important component of crew performance during an emergency was “panic control” and determining which exit doors were safe to use.

Former flight attendants described the rigorous training and drills that crew members undergo to prepare for emergencies. “When training for evacuation procedures, we repeatedly used smoke/fire simulation to make sure we could be mentally ready when situations like those occurred in reality,” Yoko Chang, a former cabin attendant and an instructor of aspiring crew members, wrote in an Instagram message.

Ms. Chang, who did not work for JAL, added that airlines require cabin crew members to pass evacuation exams every six months.

Russian military doctrine states that Russia would use nuclear weapons in the event of attacks against key Russian assets or threats to the existence of the state, and experts believe Russia could use nuclear weapons first in a crisis to signal resolve.

Russia has seen how important space-based assets can be on the battlefield in Ukraine. Starlink, with its thousands of satellites orbiting Earth, provides Ukrainian forces with uninterrupted communication. The U.S. Department of Defense openly discusses its investments in large satellite constellations. Hundreds of satellites used for missile warning, intelligence and communications are seen as a way to be more resilient against a variety of growing space threats. Moscow would look for ways to target these large satellite constellations and to erode the advantage they provide.

Russia has been testing weapons that target space capabilities or using them on the battlefield in Ukraine. In November 2021, Moscow conducted an antisatellite test by launching a missile at one of its own defunct satellites. It has also employed systems designed to jam Starlink and GPS to degrade Ukraine’s communication systems, as well as the drones and munitions the country uses to defend itself. It is not surprising that Moscow would seek to develop a more powerful way to cause widespread damage to constellations of satellites.

But a nuclear detonation in space is indiscriminate. It would degrade or destroy any satellites in its path and within the same orbital region. It wouldn’t just affect U.S. satellites but also the aggressor’s own satellites, as well as an unknown number of satellites owned by the over 90 countries operating in space, and astronauts living on the International Space Station and Chinese space station

Russia, however, has less to lose: Its once vaunted space program is in decline, dinged by sanctions, and said it intends to withdraw from the International Space Station program after 2024. Moscow is now well behind China in its total number of operating on-orbit satellites.

Third, we need to be realistic about prospects for future arms control with Russia. Moscow has shown a disregard for its treaty commitments. Just last month, Moscow rejected attempts by the Biden administration to restart bilateral arms control talks. Rather than trying again, the administration should instead focus on strengthening deterrence by improving our own capabilities and building multilateral coalitions for responsible nuclear behavior

Finally, policymakers need to protect our intelligence sources and intelligence gathering methods

With Russian officials already demanding proof of what the United States knows, declassifying those sources and methods plays directly into Moscow’s hands and jeopardizes those channels for future intelligence collection.