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at least as far as these gentlemen were concerned, this was a talk about the future of technology.

Taking their cue from Tesla founder Elon Musk colonising Mars, Palantir’s Peter Thiel reversing the ageing process, or artificial intelligence developers Sam Altman and Ray Kurzweil uploading their minds into supercomputers, they were preparing for a digital future that had less to do with making the world a better place than it did with transcending the human condition altogether. Their extreme wealth and privilege served only to make them obsessed with insulating themselves from the very real and present danger of climate change, rising sea levels, mass migrations, global pandemics, nativist panic and resource depletion. For them, the future of technology is about only one thing: escape from the rest of us.

These people once showered the world with madly optimistic business plans for how technology might benefit human society. Now they’ve reduced technological progress to a video game that one of them wins by finding the escape hatch.

in recent years, personalized disaster prep has grown into a multimillion-dollar business, fueled by a seemingly endless stream of new and revamped threats, from climate change to terrorism, cyberattacks and civil unrest.

John W. Hoopes, a professor of anthropology at the University of Kansas who spent years studying the myth that the world would end in 2012. He accused doomsday investors of hawking “survival porn,” which he described as a “hypermasculine fantasy” that danger is near and a select few will be able to save themselves and their families — if they are prepared.

“Fear sells even better than sex,” Professor Hoopes said. “If you can make people afraid, you can sell them all kinds of stuff,”

Secret Service agents rushed President Donald Trump to a White House bunker on Friday night as hundreds of protesters gathered outside the executive mansion, some of them throwing rocks and tugging at police barricades.

Trump spent nearly an hour in the bunker, which was designed for use in emergencies like terrorist attacks

The abrupt decision by the agents underscored the rattled mood inside the White House, where the chants from protesters in Lafayette Park could be heard all weekend and Secret Service agents and law enforcement officers struggled to contain the crowds.

In a new study, French scientists analyzed fragments of Adolf Hitler’s teeth to prove that he died in 1945, after taking cyanide and shooting himself in the head.

Though it’s widely established that Hitler died in his bunker in Berlin, rumors of his escape abound. Their research proves that “he did not flee to Argentina in a submarine, he is not in a hidden base in Antarctica or on the dark side of the moon,” said Charlier.

Late on April 30, the bodies of Hitler and his new wife, Eva Braun, were found in the bunker, with a bullet hole in Hitler’s temple.

President Donald Trump continues to howl on Twitter -- between rounds of golf -- spreading the lie that he won the election he lost, and promising he will be in the White House come January.

the first family has canceled plans for Thanksgiving in Florida to instead stay in the White House he'll leave in just more than two months.

Trump also signed a temporary delay on payroll taxes this year.

as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

In private Facebook groups, wealthy survivalists swap tips on gas masks, bunkers, and locations safe from the effects of climate change. One member, the head of an investment firm, told me, “I keep a helicopter gassed up all the time, and I have an underground bunker with an air-filtration system.” He said that his preparations probably put him at the “extreme” end among his peers. But he added, “A lot of my friends do the guns and the motorcycles and the gold coins. That’s not too rare anymore.”

Tim Chang, a forty-four-year-old managing director at Mayfield Fund, a venture-capital firm, told me, “There’s a bunch of us in the Valley. We meet up and have these financial-hacking dinners and talk about backup plans people are doing. It runs the gamut from a lot of people stocking up on Bitcoin and cryptocurrency, to figuring out how to get second passports if they need it, to having vacation homes in other countries that could be escape havens.” He said, “I’ll be candid: I’m stockpiling now on real estate to generate passive income but also to have havens to go to.” He and his wife, who is in technology, keep a set of bags packed for themselves and their four-year-old daughter. He told me, “I kind of have this terror scenario: ‘Oh, my God, if there is a civil war or a giant earthquake that cleaves off part of California, we want to be ready.’ ”

Innovative technologies create new ways for us to express ourselves, and, I hope, will allow humanity to learn more about itself and better understand one another’s ideas, failures and achievements

I can only imagine the creative and constructive possibilities that technological innovation might offer us in solving some of our most intractable problems.

I do not lose faith in our country or its future. I remind myself how far we have come. I think of the brilliantly creative people I have had the pleasure to work with

The brilliance of the Bubble idea, as designed by the New York-based architecture firm of Diller Scofidio + Renfro, is that it would cost less than one-tenth of the projected cost of the Gehry wing at the Corcoran, yet would have an outsized impact on architectural thinking in Washington. Koshalek and his architects have finessed one of this city’s hardest design challenges: How to make something new, in the center of the city, but in such a way that no permanent violence is done to the historic character of the Mall and its environs.

The Bubble would also bring innovative temporary architecture — one of the most intellectually exciting currents in contemporary architectural thinking — to the District. It would enliven the generally moribund civic space of the Mall, and demonstrate something that is now seriously in question: that Washington has developed progressive instincts when it comes to architecture, design and culture.

Since he arrived in 2009, Koshalek has rigorously addressed the most obvious and fundamental question of any art museum today: How to break out of the institutional bunker, and into a larger dialogue with the city and the country at large?

We are different, of course. Our household gods are not Plato and Aristotle — philosophers of a fixed cosmos — but Darwin and Freud.

We know the past better than Adams did, but it speaks to us from a far greater remove. And our implicit notion of what lies at the bottom of history is not a moral but a psychological one

after five years of reading, writing, and thinking about Adams, I’ve concluded that he really wasn’t like us at all. Of course his consciousness was different, but I imagine he was different even in the workings of his subconscious. Living in a moral rather than a psychological world, a world that does not acknowledge a subconscious realm, makes you radically different, especially if, like Adams, you have fashioned your entire life around principle

New research shows that the German Nazi leader was on a constant supply of crystal methamphetamines to stay awake and energized, according to the UK Independent.

The intoxicated Fuhrer, a famous hypochondriac, was on more than 74 different medications while he ordered the systematic murders of Jews across Europe

It also claims he took nine shots of methamphetamine while living out his last days in his bunker to ease his pain and stress

our society reaps enormous benefits from religious engagement, while suffering from few of the potential downsides. Widespread churchgoing seems to make Americans more altruistic and more engaged with their communities, more likely to volunteer and more inclined to give to secular and religious charities. Yet at the same time, thanks to Americans’ ever-increasing tolerance, we’ve been spared the kind of sectarian conflict that often accompanies religious zeal.

In the last 50 years, the Christian churches have undergone what “American Grace” describes as a shock and two aftershocks. The initial earthquake was the cultural revolution of the 1960s, which undercut religious authority as it did all authority, while dealing a particular blow to Christian sexual ethics. The first aftershock was the rise of religious conservatism, and particularly evangelical faith, as a backlash against the cultural revolution’s excesses. But now we’re living through the second aftershock, a backlash to that backlash — a revolt against the association between Christian faith and conservative politics,

Having popularized the term “culture war” two decades ago, Hunter now argues that the “war” footing has led American Christians into a cul-de-sac. It has encouraged both conservative and liberal believers to frame their mission primarily in terms of conflict, and to express themselves almost exclusively in the “language of loss, disappointment, anger, antipathy, resentment and desire for conquest.”

“It happens like that,” says a somber narrator. “The police can’t get there in time. How you defend yourself is up to you. It’s your choice. But Mary Landrieu voted to take away your gun rights. Vote like your safety depends on it. Defend your freedom. Defeat Mary Landrieu.”

Two years after the Sandy Hook tragedy, the top gun-control priority in the United States is still background checks. There is nothing controversial about the idea that people who buy guns should be screened to make sure they don’t have a criminal record or serious mental illness. Americans favor it by huge majorities. Even gun owners support it. Yet we’re still struggling with it.

The N.R.A.’s vision of the world is purposefully dark and utterly irrational. It’s been running a series of what it regards as positive ads, which are so grim they do suggest that it’s time to grab a rifle and head for the bunker. In one, a mournful-looking woman asks whether there’s still anything worth fighting for in “a world that demands we submit, succumb, and believe in nothing.” It is, she continues, a world full of “cowards who pretend they don’t notice the elderly man fall ...”

a 1948 film never before shown to the American public, former Nuremberg trials judge and Pennsylvania Supreme Court justice Michael Musmanno proclaimed: "I have brought a number of eye witnesses on the subject of Hitler's disappearance. In their own words, they will tell you what happened to the Führer of Germany."

For two years following World War II, Musmanno tracked down members of Hitler's staff, including his secretary and the leader of the Nazi Youth, among others, in an effort to prove the Führer’s death.

The interviewees describe Hitler in his last moments as the Soviet Army invaded Germany in 1945, detailing everything from the claustrophobic quarters of the Führer's underground bunker, to his marriage to Eva Braun, to his final meal and eventual suicide.

Sleek combat jets loaded with precision bunker-buster bombs roar into the skies as soldiers in desert-style uniforms march past rows of neat housing at this Russian military base at one of Syria’s largest airports.

A small group of journalists visiting the base this week could see a dozen Su-24 bombers taking off into the night with a deafening roar, piercing the darkness with scarlet flames from their engines.

Putin has pointed at the launch of 26 cruise missiles from Russian navy ships in the Caspian at targets in Syria 1,500 kilometers (930 miles) away as a signal to the U.S. that Russia can pack a similar punch.

Might, militarism and humiliation: These are the memories that make Germans today reluctant to project their clout as, once again, Europe’s economic powerhouse. One hundred years on from World War I, German leadership in Europe is both desired and resented, a historically rooted ambivalence that is keenly felt by the Germans and by their wary neighbors.

Today, with nationalism and populism on the rise in Europe, Ms. Merkel is central in trying to untangle a tussle over European leadership that may hasten a British exit from the European Union, and she faces demands from two other major partners, France and Italy, to relax stringent budgetary demands.

under Otto von Bismarck and then the kaiser. Numbers alone tell a story: In 1870, as Bismarck unified Germany, Kiel had around 30,000 inhabitants.

he Syrian government declared Saturday it is ready to attend peace talks scheduled in Geneva later this month

“terrorist groups” will be participating in the meetings, according to the Syrian news agency SANA.

The Geneva negotiations are the first step in a road map laid out last year by the international community to end the Syrian civil war. The

both conventional polling and conventional wisdom underestimated the potential for white turnout generally and working-class white turnout specifically — and that’s why Trump’s strategy was able to carry him to victory.

The numbers offer a cautionary tale for both emerging-Democratic-majority inevitabilists and for a left whose increasing vehemence about the wickedness of “whiteness” probably encourages the white tribalism that Trump rallied and exploited.

though Trump outperformed pundit expectations, he did not carry a majority, and his Midwestern electoral victory was wide but dangerously shallow.

Since it’s rather difficult to know where to start on what happened on Wednesday, let’s begin in the future. I want to assure you that when the apocalypse has come, and you’re living in the bombed-out remnants of civilisation, clad in rags and distilling drinking water from your own urine, the one crackling radio in your resistance bunker will still be bringing news of Conservative party leadership contests.

Still, back to the present day, where it’s arguably not all good news

In the House of Commons, though, control of the legislative agenda had been handed to the cry-laugh emoji