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Again and again, the Facebook Papers show staffers sounding alarms about the dangers posed by the platform—how Facebook amplifies extremism and misinformation, how it incites violence, how it encourages radicalization and political polarization. Again and again, staffers reckon with the ways in which Facebook’s decisions stoke these harms, and they plead with leadership to do more.

And again and again, staffers say, Facebook’s leaders ignore them.

Facebook has dismissed the concerns of its employees in manifold ways.

One of its cleverer tactics is to argue that staffers who have raised the alarm about the damage done by their employer are simply enjoying Facebook’s “very open culture,” in which people are encouraged to share their opinions, a spokesperson told me. This stance allows Facebook to claim transparency while ignoring the substance of the complaints, and the implication of the complaints: that many of Facebook’s employees believe their company operates without a moral compass.

When you stitch together the stories that spanned the period between Joe Biden’s election and his inauguration, it’s easy to see Facebook as instrumental to the attack on January 6. (A spokesperson told me that the notion that Facebook played an instrumental role in the insurrection is “absurd.”)

what emerges from a close reading of Facebook documents, and observation of the manner in which the company connects large groups of people quickly, is that Facebook isn’t a passive tool but a catalyst. Had the organizers tried to plan the rally using other technologies of earlier eras, such as telephones, they would have had to identify and reach out individually to each prospective participant, then persuade them to travel to Washington. Facebook made people’s efforts at coordination highly visible on a global scale.

The platform not only helped them recruit participants but offered people a sense of strength in numbers. Facebook proved to be the perfect hype machine for the coup-inclined.

In November 2019, Facebook staffers noticed they had a serious problem. Facebook offers a collection of one-tap emoji reactions. Today, they include “like,” “love,” “care,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.” Company researchers had found that the posts dominated by “angry” reactions were substantially more likely to go against community standards, including prohibitions on various types of misinformation, according to internal documents.

In July 2020, researchers presented the findings of a series of experiments. At the time, Facebook was already weighting the reactions other than “like” more heavily in its algorithm—meaning posts that got an “angry” reaction were more likely to show up in users’ News Feeds than posts that simply got a “like.” Anger-inducing content didn’t spread just because people were more likely to share things that made them angry; the algorithm gave anger-inducing content an edge. Facebook’s Integrity workers—employees tasked with tackling problems such as misinformation and espionage on the platform—concluded that they had good reason to believe targeting posts that induced anger would help stop the spread of harmful content.

By dialing anger’s weight back to zero in the algorithm, the researchers found, they could keep posts to which people reacted angrily from being viewed by as many users. That, in turn, translated to a significant (up to 5 percent) reduction in the hate speech, civic misinformation, bullying, and violent posts—all of which are correlated with offline violence—to which users were exposed.

Facebook rolled out the change in early September 2020, documents show; a Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the change has remained in effect. It was a real victory for employees of the Integrity team.

But it doesn’t normally work out that way. In April 2020, according to Frances Haugen’s filings with the SEC, Facebook employees had recommended tweaking the algorithm so that the News Feed would deprioritize the surfacing of content for people based on their Facebook friends’ behavior. The idea was that a person’s News Feed should be shaped more by people and groups that a person had chosen to follow. Up until that point, if your Facebook friend saw a conspiracy theory and reacted to it, Facebook’s algorithm might show it to you, too. The algorithm treated any engagement in your network as a signal that something was worth sharing. But now Facebook workers wanted to build circuit breakers to slow this form of sharing.

Experiments showed that this change would impede the distribution of hateful, polarizing, and violence-inciting content in people’s News Feeds. But Zuckerberg “rejected this intervention that could have reduced the risk of violence in the 2020 election,” Haugen’s SEC filing says. An internal message characterizing Zuckerberg’s reasoning says he wanted to avoid new features that would get in the way of “meaningful social interactions.” But according to Facebook’s definition, its employees say, engagement is considered “meaningful” even when it entails bullying, hate speech, and reshares of harmful content.

This episode, like Facebook’s response to the incitement that proliferated between the election and January 6, reflects a fundamental problem with the platform

Facebook’s megascale allows the company to influence the speech and thought patterns of billions of people. What the world is seeing now, through the window provided by reams of internal documents, is that Facebook catalogs and studies the harm it inflicts on people. And then it keeps harming people anyway.

“I am worried that Mark’s continuing pattern of answering a different question than the question that was asked is a symptom of some larger problem,” wrote one Facebook employee in an internal post in June 2020, referring to Zuckerberg. “I sincerely hope that I am wrong, and I’m still hopeful for progress. But I also fully understand my colleagues who have given up on this company, and I can’t blame them for leaving. Facebook is not neutral, and working here isn’t either.”

It is quite a thing to see, the sheer number of Facebook employees—people who presumably understand their company as well as or better than outside observers—who believe their employer to be morally bankrupt.

I spoke with several former Facebook employees who described the company’s metrics-driven culture as extreme, even by Silicon Valley standards

Facebook workers are under tremendous pressure to quantitatively demonstrate their individual contributions to the company’s growth goals, they told me. New products and features aren’t approved unless the staffers pitching them demonstrate how they will drive engagement.

e worries have been exacerbated lately by fears about a decline in new posts on Facebook, two former employees who left the company in recent years told me. People are posting new material less frequently to Facebook, and its users are on average older than those of other social platforms.

One of Facebook’s Integrity staffers wrote at length about this dynamic in a goodbye note to colleagues in August 2020, describing how risks to Facebook users “fester” because of the “asymmetrical” burden placed on employees to “demonstrate legitimacy and user value” before launching any harm-mitigation tactics—a burden not shared by those developing new features or algorithm changes with growth and engagement in mind

The note said:We were willing to act only after things had spiraled into a dire state … Personally, during the time that we hesitated, I’ve seen folks from my hometown go further and further down the rabbithole of QAnon and Covid anti-mask/anti-vax conspiracy on FB. It has been painful to observe.

Current and former Facebook employees describe the same fundamentally broken culture—one in which effective tactics for making Facebook safer are rolled back by leadership or never approved in the first place.

That broken culture has produced a broken platform: an algorithmic ecosystem in which users are pushed toward ever more extreme content, and where Facebook knowingly exposes its users to conspiracy theories, disinformation, and incitement to violence.

One example is a program that amounts to a whitelist for VIPs on Facebook, allowing some of the users most likely to spread misinformation to break Facebook’s rules without facing consequences. Under the program, internal documents show, millions of high-profile users—including politicians—are left alone by Facebook even when they incite violence

whitelisting influential users with massive followings on Facebook isn’t just a secret and uneven application of Facebook’s rules; it amounts to “protecting content that is especially likely to deceive, and hence to harm, people on our platforms.”

Facebook workers tried and failed to end the program. Only when its existence was reported in September by The Wall Street Journal did Facebook’s Oversight Board ask leadership for more information about the practice. Last week, the board publicly rebuked Facebook for not being “fully forthcoming” about the program.

As a result, Facebook has stoked an algorithm arms race within its ranks, pitting core product-and-engineering teams, such as the News Feed team, against their colleagues on Integrity teams, who are tasked with mitigating harm on the platform. These teams establish goals that are often in direct conflict with each other.

“We can’t pretend we don’t see information consumption patterns, and how deeply problematic they are for the longevity of democratic discourse,” a user-experience researcher wrote in an internal comment thread in 2019, in response to a now-infamous memo from Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a longtime Facebook executive. “There is no neutral position at this stage, it would be powerfully immoral to commit to amorality.”

Zuckerberg has defined Facebook’s mission as making “social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us,” but in internal research documents his employees point out that communities aren’t always good for society:

When part of a community, individuals typically act in a prosocial manner. They conform, they forge alliances, they cooperate, they organize, they display loyalty, they expect obedience, they share information, they influence others, and so on. Being in a group changes their behavior, their abilities, and, importantly, their capability to harm themselves or others

Thus, when people come together and form communities around harmful topics or identities, the potential for harm can be greater.

The infrastructure choices that Facebook is making to keep its platform relevant are driving down the quality of the site, and exposing its users to more dangers

hose dangers are also unevenly distributed, because of the manner in which certain subpopulations are algorithmically ushered toward like-minded groups

And the subpopulations of Facebook users who are most exposed to dangerous content are also most likely to be in groups where it won’t get reported.

And it knows that 3 percent of Facebook users in the United States are super-consumers of conspiracy theories, accounting for 37 percent of known consumption of misinformation on the platform.

Zuckerberg’s positioning of Facebook’s role in the insurrection is odd. He lumps his company in with traditional media organizations—something he’s ordinarily loath to do, lest the platform be expected to take more responsibility for the quality of the content that appears on it—and suggests that Facebook did more, and did better, than journalism outlets in its response to January 6. What he fails to say is that journalism outlets would never be in the position to help investigators this way, because insurrectionists don’t typically use newspapers and magazines to recruit people for coups.

Facebook wants people to believe that the public must choose between Facebook as it is, on the one hand, and free speech, on the other. This is a false choice. Facebook has a sophisticated understanding of measures it could take to make its platform safer without resorting to broad or ideologically driven censorship tactics.

Facebook knows that no two people see the same version of the platform, and that certain subpopulations experience far more dangerous versions than others do

Facebook knows that people who are isolated—recently widowed or divorced, say, or geographically distant from loved ones—are disproportionately at risk of being exposed to harmful content on the platform.

It knows that repeat offenders are disproportionately responsible for spreading misinformation.

All of this makes the platform rely more heavily on ways it can manipulate what its users see in order to reach its goals. This explains why Facebook is so dependent on the infrastructure of groups, as well as making reshares highly visible, to keep people hooked.

It could consistently enforce its policies regardless of a user’s political power.

Facebook could ban reshares.

It could choose to optimize its platform for safety and quality rather than for growth.

It could tweak its algorithm to prevent widespread distribution of harmful content.

Facebook could create a transparent dashboard so that all of its users can see what’s going viral in real time.

It could make public its rules for how frequently groups can post and how quickly they can grow.

It could also automatically throttle groups when they’re growing too fast, and cap the rate of virality for content that’s spreading too quickly.

Facebook could shift the burden of proof toward people and communities to demonstrate that they’re good actors—and treat reach as a privilege, not a right

You must be vigilant about the informational streams you swim in, deliberate about how you spend your precious attention, unforgiving of those who weaponize your emotions and cognition for their own profit, and deeply untrusting of any scenario in which you’re surrounded by a mob of people who agree with everything you’re saying.

It could do all of these things. But it doesn’t.

Lately, people have been debating just how nefarious Facebook really is. One argument goes something like this: Facebook’s algorithms aren’t magic, its ad targeting isn’t even that good, and most people aren’t that stupid.

All of this may be true, but that shouldn’t be reassuring. An algorithm may just be a big dumb means to an end, a clunky way of maneuvering a massive, dynamic network toward a desired outcome. But Facebook’s enormous size gives it tremendous, unstable power.

Facebook takes whole populations of people, pushes them toward radicalism, and then steers the radicalized toward one another.

When the most powerful company in the world possesses an instrument for manipulating billions of people—an instrument that only it can control, and that its own employees say is badly broken and dangerous—we should take notice.

The lesson for individuals is this:

Facebook could say that its platform is not for everyone. It could sound an alarm for those who wander into the most dangerous corners of Facebook, and those who encounter disproportionately high levels of harmful content

Without seeing how Facebook works at a finer resolution, in real time, we won’t be able to understand how to make the social web compatible with democracy.

the one of which the commission is most skeptical is adding seats to the Court. The risks of expansion are “considerable,” the document says, and could “undermine the very goal of some of its proponents of restoring the court’s legitimacy.”

Term limits are presented not as a tired manifestation of cynical partisan maneuvering, but as an opportunity to advance “our Constitution’s commitments to checks and balances and popular sovereignty.”

But for voters of color in Arizona who just watched six Republican-appointed justices hollow out the Voting Rights Act at the Republican Party’s request, for example, expansion would not “politicize” the Court, because the Court’s relentless assault on the right to participate in democracy has been going on for decades. As usual, the people wringing their hands over the Court’s political nature are those who are less likely to be meaningfully affected by the Court’s political choices.

because capping the length of judicial service at some point in the future does nothing to address the crisis that this 6-3 conservative supermajority faces right now.

The commission took care to note its skepticism that Congress can institute term limits by statute, as opposed to the herculean task of enacting them via constitutional amendment

this public trepidation paves the way for savvy Republicans to frame term limits proposals—again, the option that supposedly enjoys “widespread and bipartisan support”—as just another illegitimate Democratic power grab.

which increased significantly in the aftermath of Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s warp-speed pre-election confirmation. Delegating that task to an ad hoc collection of law review enthusiasts who met over Zoom every few weeks was perhaps the least efficacious method of accomplishing that result, short of doing literally nothing.

tasked with writing down lots of big words about this country’s broken legal system while simultaneously saying nothing of consequence.

They all face the same challenge of needing to hedge their sales of gas and electricity to cover price differences across different markets.

In a statement explaining the decision to provide Uniper with extra financing, Fortum said that European gas prices reached “unprecedented levels” in December.

In Britain, the sudden price rise has led to the collapse of several smaller energy suppliers.

In Germany, the price for energy to heat and power homes in November rose more than 101 percent from a year earlier, the country’s official statistics office, Destatis, said.

Global demand for energy jumped last year, after the world economy reawakened from widespread shutdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. When many economies started up again last spring, the need for natural gas shot up. Natural gas is crucial for generating electricity, running factories and heating homes across the continent.

European countries normally stock up on gas in the summer, when prices are relatively cheap, but the pandemic and a cold winter last year drew down levels of stored gas, leading to the wild swings in prices.

Prices for natural gas have risen about sixfold, to record levels. The surge means the wholesale price of electricity has reached stratospheric levels, making headlines across Europe as consumers, battered by the pandemic, are now hit by big increases in their home energy bills. Many European countries have tried to buffer the shock to consumers with price caps, subsidies and direct payments.

These high costs are also undermining the economics of companies that make fertilizer, steel, glass and other materials that require a lot of electricity.

There would also be price limits on insulin, rebates on drugs whose prices rise faster than inflation and some limited government power to negotiate drug prices.

Democrats have shrunk their proposal considerably — from $3.5 trillion to about half that size — largely to win his support and that of Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, another centrist holdout.

Mr. Manchin found fault not only with the overall price tag, but the way the bill is structured. Its authors have phased in some policies over time and abruptly ended most of the programs — some of them after a single year — in hopes of showing that over 10 years, the plan would not raise the deficit.

Mr. Manchin called dishonest gimmickry that he said would threaten the future of Social Security and Medicare. (Those programs are financed through dedicated trust funds, which are not directly affected by the bill.)

Joe Manchin does not get to dictate the future of our country,” Representative Cori Bush, Democrat of Missouri, said in a statement. “I do not trust his assessment of what our communities need the most.

Mr. Biden’s framework omitted any mention of prescription savings, infuriating some Democrats, animating the older Americans’ lobby AARP and prompting late negotiations that lasted through the weekend.

Many Democratic lawmakers ran on a promise to lower prescription drug prices, a popular message supported by majorities of both Democratic and Republican voters. But that pledge has encountered strong resistance from the powerful pharmaceutical industry, which has been spending millions in television advertisements and deploying lobbyists to Capitol Hill to plead its case.

“When a member uses his or her national platform to encourage violence, tragically, people listen,” Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California said, adding that “depictions of violence can foment actual violence, as witnessed by this chamber on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Mr. Gosar showed no remorse.

The last time the House censured one of its members, the vote capped months of humiliating headlines over tax evasion, self-dealing and other ethical lapses that had blemished the reputation of one of Congress’s most powerful and colorful characters, Representative Charles B. Rangel, Democrat of New York. Ms. Pelosi herself read out that rebuke, which passed overwhelmingly with the support of many Democrats.

e posting online of a crudely edited video drawn from a popular anime series — and more sinister. In his video, Mr. Gosar is depicted slashing the neck of Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, amid imagery of violence meted out against hordes of refugees and migrants.

“There’s an old definition of abuse of power: rules for thee but not for me,” Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the Republican leader, said, repeating the phrase over and over. Going through a litany of House Democrats who have offended Republicans, he warned that every one of them might soon be serving — and potentially penalized — under the rules of a Republican-led House.

And many warned that a Republican majority — which could come as soon as 2023 — would not hesitate to take advantage of the precedents set by Democrats.

“They are really setting an ugly precedent, and the bad news for Democrats is that we’re going to take back the House and we’re going to hold the majority,” Ms. Greene said.

Not only does Mr. Gosar’s character kill Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s, and swing swords at one with the face of Mr. Biden, but the makers of the video also include images of refugees and migrants making their way into the United States only to be repelled by brutal force.

Mr. Gosar has not apologized for posting the video, downplaying it as “symbolic” and privately blaming staff aides for circulating it.

“I don’t think this should be an issue about party, about partisan politics,” Ms. Cheney said. “If a Democrat had done this, that would require censure as well.”

Censure fell out of favor, and the bar for it was raised considerably, in the 20th century. In 1978, Representative Charles C. Diggs was censured after he was convicted on 11 counts of mail fraud and 18 counts of false statements in a payroll fraud investigation. On one day in 1983, Representatives Gerry E. Studds and Daniel B. Crane were both censured for having sex with 17-year-old congressional pages, criminal offenses that would likely warrant a far more dramatic response today.

in fact, that the birds eventually went extinct; the last known passenger pigeon died in 1914.

The Compleat Housewife would likely have been found in any well-to-do household in the late colonial era, when the mid-day “dinner” could consist of three courses, with multiple dishes per course.

Though regional, seasonal and other differences make it difficult to generalize about a typical colonial diet, the following seven foods and beverages are a small sample of what might have been found on many colonial tables.

Pickles

umble cookies—sometimes spelled “jumbal”—can be considered the ancestors of modern sugar cookies, though far less sweet. Recipes appeared in cookbooks in England as early as 1585, and the cookies became a popular staple in the colonies. “You will find recipes for jumble cookies by the thousands,” says Nahon; even Martha Washington was said to have her own.

Black pepper’s antibacterial properties make it a good preservative, and this imported spice took center stage in the pepper cake, a gingerbread-like loaf flavored with black pepper and molasses and studded with candied fruits.

Colonial Americans drank a lot of alcohol, and this popular drink-dessert dating to the 18th century combined sweetened whipped cream with wine or hard cider. The resulting frothy concoction was often served on special occasions. Amelia Simmons’ American Cookery, which in 1796 became the first cookbook by an American to be published in the United States, included a recipe for syllabub that called for the cook to flavor cider with sugar, grate nutmeg into it—and milk a cow directly into the liquor. 

Doctors in the top 10 percent averaged $1.3 million

And those in the top 1 percent averaged an astounding $4 million, though most of that (85 percent) came from business income or capital gains.

In certain specialties, doctors see substantially more in their peak earning years: Neurosurgeons (about $920,000), orthopedic surgeons ($789,000) and radiation oncologists ($709,000) all did especially well for themselves. Specialty incomes cover 2005 to 2017 and are expressed in 2017 dollars.

family-practice physicians made around $230,000 a year. General practice ($225,000) and preventive-medicine ($224,000) doctors earned even less — though that’s still enough to put them at the top of the heap among all U.S. earners.

“There is this sense of, well, if you show that physician incomes put them at the top of the income distribution, then you’re somehow implying that they’re instead going into medicine because they want to make money. And that narrative is uncomfortable to people.”

why did those figures ruffle so many physician feathers?

“You can want to help people and you can simultaneously want to earn money and have a nicer lifestyle and demand compensation for long hours and long training. That’s totally normal behavior in the labor market.”

Yale University economist Jason Abaluck notes that when he asks the doctors and future doctors in his health economics classes why they earn so much, answers revolve around the brutal training required to enter the profession. “Until they finish their residency, they’re working an enormous number of hours and their lifestyle is not the lifestyle of a rich person,” Abaluck told us.

why do physicians make that much?

On average, doctors — much like anyone else — behave in ways that just happen to drive up their income. For example, the economists found that graduates from the top medical schools, who can presumably write their own ticket to any field they want, tend to choose those that pay the most.

“Our analysis shows that certainly physicians respond to earnings when choosing specialties,” Polyakova told us. “And there’s nothing wrong with that, in my opinion.

“In general, U.S. physicians are making about 50 percent more than German physicians and about more than twice as much as U.K. physicians,

Grover said the widest gaps were “really driven by surgeons and a handful of procedural specialties,” doctors who perform procedures with clear outcomes, rather than preventing disease or treating chronic condition

“we’re not about prevention, you know?” he said, noting that his own PhD is in public health. “I wish it was different, but it ain’t!”

The United States has fewer doctors per person than 27 out of 31 member countries tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

In 1970, based on a slightly different measure that’s been tracked for longer, America had more licensed physicians per person than all but two of the 10 countries for which we have data. What caused the collapse?

the United States has far fewer residency slots than qualified med school graduates, which means thousands of qualified future physicians are annually shut out of the residency pipeline, denied their chosen career and stuck with no way to pay back those quarter-million-dollar loans.

“I’d like to see an in-depth analysis of the effect of the government capping the number of residency spots and how it’s created an artificial ‘physician shortage’ even though we have thousands of talented and graduated doctors that can’t practice due to not enough residency spots,”

Such an analysis would begin with a deeply influential 1980 report,

That report, by a federal advisory committee tasked with ensuring the nation had neither too few nor too many doctors, concluded that America was barreling toward a massive physician surplus. It came out just before President Ronald Reagan took office, and the new administration seemed only too eager to cut back on federal spending on doctor-training systems.

ssociation of American Medical Colleges (AAMC), a coalition of MD-granting medical schools and affiliated teaching hospitals, slammed the brakes on a long expansion. From 1980 to around 2004, the number of medical grads flatlined, even as the American population rose 29 percent.

Federal support for residencies was also ratcheted down, making it expensive or impossible for hospitals to provide enough slots for all the medical school graduates hitting the market each year. That effort peaked with the 1997 Balanced Budget Act which, among other things, froze funding for residencies — partially under the flawed assumption that HMOs would forever reduce the need for medical care in America, Orr writes. That freeze has yet to fully unwind.

or decades, many policymakers believed more doctors caused higher medical spending. Orr says that’s partly true, but “the early studies failed to differentiate between increased availability of valuable medical services and unnecessary treatment and services.”

“In reality, the greater utilization in places with more doctors represented greater availability, both in terms of expanded access to primary care and an ever-growing array of new and more advanced medical services,” he writes. “The impact of physician supply on levels of excessive treatment appears to be either small or nonexistent.”

“People have a narrative that physician earnings is one of the main drivers of high health-care costs in the U.S.,” Polyakova told us. “It is kind of hard to support this narrative if ultimately physicians earn less than 10 percent of national health-care expenditures.”

Polyakova and her collaborators find doctor pay consumes only 8.6 percent of overall health spending. It grew a bit faster than inflation over the time period studied, but much slower than overall health-care costs.

Regardless, the dramatic limits on medical school enrollment and residencies enjoyed strong support from the AAMC and the AMA. We were surprised to hear both organizations now sound the alarm about a doctor shortage. MD-granting medical schools started expanding again in 2005.

it’s because states have responded to the shortage by empowering nurse practitioners and physician assistants to perform tasks that once were the sole province of physicians. Over the past 20 years, the number of registered nurses grew almost twice as quickly as the number of doctors, and the number of physician assistants grew almost three times as rapidly, our analysis showed.

While there still aren’t enough residency positions, we’re getting more thanks in part to recent federal spending bills that will fund 1,200 more slots over the next few years.

Carlson was a key in answering the question; he helped drive the G.O.P. to be just as cruel, just as dishonest and sometimes even more populist than Donald Trump himself.

Initially, there were good reasons for confusion about Trump and the G.O.P. During the campaign, he was all over the map ideologically

And if personnel is policy, then it was difficult to define his early administration as well

Moreover, many of his early moves were straight out of the standard Republican playbook

When Trump was elected, friends and colleagues told me that his populism could be moderated and his cruelty and dishonesty were aberrations.

It was not to be, and not just because of the sheer force of Trump’s personality. Carlson played an important role.

He helped mold the G.O.P. in his race-obsessed, conspiracy-addled image, helped perpetuate a culture of cruel and punitive Republican communication and helped build an infrastructure of new-right voices who copy his substance and style.

He was known, however, as an opportunist. And for enterprising and dishonest members of the infotainment right, the Trump era was a cornucopia of opportunity. Trump’s ideological incoherence wasn’t a problem. It was a vacuum that could be filled with ideas that identified and fed his resentments.

In fact, Trumpism was never truly about ideas. It was a vague amalgam of Trump’s ethics, attitudes and grievances — and Carlson imitated them, adopted them and broadcast them to his millions of viewers.

Carlson put the lie to the idea that Trump’s cruelty was an aberration, that it was somehow alien to the Republican character, to be tolerated only because the greater good of defeating Clinton had demanded it. In Trump’s cruelty, there was again, opportunity. There were millions who would thrill to his most crude and personal attacks.

On Tucker’s program truth was optional, insults were mandatory, and racism was all but explicit.

The narrative was consistent: “They” were after “you.” “They” were lying to “you.” And “they” were terrible, horrible people.

it’s typical of both Trump and Tucker: invent a partisan grievance, mislead the audience and cap off the conversation with a direct insult.

Tucker’s influence went beyond substance and style. He gave a platform to a number of the Trump right’s most notorious and most fringe voices

We knew Trump was more populist, more dishonest and more cruel than the typical Republican. But we did not know whether the G.O.P. would become more like the man or if the man would become more like the G.O.P.

If all that is true, then what could possibly be unimportant about Carlson? The fact is that at the end of the day, he was not bigger than Fox. The secret of Tucker’s fame is that it was always rooted far more in his Fox News time slot than in his (or his ideas’) inherent appea

while Carlson’s ratings were impressive, they were comparable to those of his predecessor Bill O’Reilly. Which raises the question: To what extent was Tucker popular and influential because of his distinct voice, and to what extent was it because he occupied the most coveted time slot on the most popular cable news channel in the United States?

I’ve written before about the network’s singular place in the culture of red America. Without the power of Fox, Carlson’s ability to influence the right will likely be permanently diminished.

The city’s population remains about 85 percent white — in a state that is among the whitest in the nation. But Burlington is a college town, drawing people from around the country. It’s also a refugee resettlement hub, where people from war-torn countries in Asia and Africa come to live.

The measure capped the number of officers at 74, down from a maximum of about 100. Most of the reduction was expected to happen over time through attrition.

Still, the Burlington Police say many kinds of crimes have increased in 2022. Larceny of all types is up 107 percent this year in Burlington compared with the five-year average from 2017 to 2021, and downtown businesses have begun to react.

“And 85 percent of the time that is probably true,” she said, “but there is the other 15 percent that has to be dealt with.”

“Street level crime, like bike thefts, they are not being dealt with before it escalates into something bigger,’’ said Joseph Corrow, a patrol officer and president of the local police union.

The police say making arrests for bike thefts could be challenging. They cite a memo from the local prosecutor which stipulates that, according to Vermont law, in order to effectively prosecute someone the police must prove the person “actually knew” the property was stolen.

Tammy Boudah, a street outreach worker in Burlington, said she supported the broad examination of race and class by the city government. But the notion of replacing the police with more social workers, she said, “is predicated on the idea that everyone just wants to get along.”

Mr. Weinberger readily admits, however, that the police cuts do not explain everything that’s going wrong in Burlington, particularly the increase in violence.Over the course of two weeks in September, a man in a wheelchair was hit in the face and robbed while withdrawing money from an A.T.M., another man suffered multiple skull fractures and nearly lost an eye after being beaten outside a Walgreens and a third man, a college student, was robbed at gunpoint and forced to strip naked.

“We are not used to this level of violence in Vermont,” Mr. Weinberger said at a news conference announcing a double murder in early October.

“I no longer feel safe going into City Hall Park at any time of the day,” said Ms. Toof, who has worked in street outreach for seven years.Those concerns are exacerbated because the outreach workers say they can no longer depend on the police to accompany them on certain calls because of staffing constraints.

Michael Hutchins, who moved to Florida last October to get away from the drug scene in Burlington, said some meth users he knew in Burlington stole bikes for transportation. “To get from Point A to Point B,” he said.

Others stole for the sheer thrill of taking something. Up for days without sleeping, some rode the bikes around with no real purpose. Mr. Davis said he had watched one bike change hands six times in the park

Last year, when the police dismantled a large encampment in an empty lot, they found the “severed limbs of hundreds of bikes” strewn about, Chief Murad said.

“Bikes were a quick easy grab that fulfilled the need to take something for an adrenaline rush,” Mr. Hutchins, 40, said in a phone interview from Florida.

Stealing and hoarding were common among the people Mr. Hutchins knew in Burlington struggling with addiction.

“This is something that European politicians and consumers didn’t want to admit for quite a long time. It sounds terrible, but that’s the reality. In wartime the economy is mobilized. The decisions are made by the governments, not by the free market. This is the case for Europe this winter,” she said, adding that we may see forced rationing, price controls, the suspension of energy markets and shutdowns of whole industrial sectors. “We are not actually talking about extremely high prices, but we are talking about physical absence of energy resources in certain parts of Europe.”

It’s increasingly clear that Vladimir Putin is using gas as a weapon and trying to supply just enough gas to Europe to keep Europe in a perpetual state of panic about its ability to weather the coming winter.

Europe has been finding all the supplies that it can, but governments are realizing that’s not going to be sufficient. There are going to have to be efforts taken to curb demand as well and to prepare for the possibility of really severe energy rationing this winter.

If things become really severe this winter, I fear that you could see European countries start to look out for themselves rather than one another.

I think we could start to see governments saying, “Well, we’re going to restrict exports. We’re going to keep our energy at home.” Everyone starts to just look out for themselves, which I think would be exactly what Putin would hope for.

it would be wise to assume that Russia will use every opportunity it can to turn the screws on Europe.

I think you would see Russia continue to restrict gas exports and maybe cut them off completely to Europe — and a very cold winter. I think a combination of those two things would mean sky-high energy prices.

governments will have to ration energy supplies and decide what’s important.

Since Russia invaded Ukraine and maybe until very recently, I’ve had the sense that the European public and the public beyond Europe, as well as policymakers, have been a little bit sleepwalking into a looming crisis.

here was some unrealistic optimism about how quickly Europe could do without Russian gas. And we took too long to confront seriously just how bad the numbers would look if the worst came to pass.

I think there was continued skepticism that Putin would really cut the gas supply. “It might be declining. It might be a little bit lower,” people thought. “But he’s not really going to shut off the supply.” And I think now everyone’s recognizing that’s a real possibility.

Putin has the ability to do a lot of damage to the global economy — and himself, to be sure — if he cuts oil exports as well.

There’s no extra oil supply in the world at all, as OPEC Plus reminded everyone by saying: No, we’re not going to be increasing production much, and we can’t even if we wanted to.

For all the talk about high gasoline prices and the rhetoric of Putin’s energy price hike, Russia’s oil exports have not fallen very much. If that were to happen — either because the U.S. and Europe forced oil to come off the market to put economic pressure on Putin or because he takes the oil off the market to hurt all of us — oil prices go up enormously.

it depends how much he takes off the market. We don’t know exactly. If Russia were to cut its oil exports completely, the prices would just skyrocket — to hundreds of dollars a barrel, I think.

That’s because there’s just no extra supply out there today at all. There’s a very little extra supply that the Saudis and the Emiratis can put on the market. And that’s about it. We’ve used the strategic petroleum reserve, and that’s coming to an end in the next several months.

We’re heading into a winter where markets might simply not be able to work anymore as the instrument by which you determine supply and demand.

if prices just soar to uncontrollable levels, markets are not going to work anymore. You’re going to need governments to step in and decide who gets the scarce energy supplies — how much goes to heating homes, how much goes to industry. There’s going to be a pecking order of different industries, where some industries are deemed more important to the economy than others.

a lot of governments in Europe are putting in place those kinds of emergency plans right now.

if the worst comes to pass, governments will, by necessity, step in to say: Homes get the natural gas, and parts of industry get dumped. Probably they would set price caps on energy or massively subsidize it. So it’s going to be very painful.

Worryingly for the European economy, this may mean that factories that can’t switch fuels will go dormant.

Today, before winter comes, gas prices in Europe are around $60 per million British thermal units. That compares to around $7 to $8 here in the United States

if the worst comes to pass, the market, as a mechanism, simply won’t work. The market will break. The prices will go too high. There’s just not enough energy for the market to balance at a certain price.

don’t forget, the amount of liquid natural gas that Europe is importing today — Asia is competing for those shipments. What happens if the Asia winter is very bad? What happens if China and others are willing to pay very high prices for it?

I think we’re in a multiyear potential energy crisis.

one thing that hasn’t gotten enough attention and that I worry most about is the impact this is having on emerging markets and the developing economies, because it is an interconnected market. When Europe is competing to buy L.N.G. at very high prices, not to mention Asia, that means if you’re in Pakistan or Bangladesh or lower-income countries, you’re really struggling to afford it. You’re just priced out of the market for natural gas — and coal. Coal is incredibly expensive now,

I think that that is a real potential humanitarian crisis, as a ripple effect of what’s happening in Europe right now.

right now, the price of gas in Europe is about four times what it was last year. Russia has cut flows to Europe by two-thirds but is earning the same revenue as it did last year. So Putin is not being hurt by the loss of gas exports to Europe. Europe’s being hurt by that.

this situation could last for several years.

Could the energy crisis bring about a change of heart, in which European countries withdraw some of their support or even begin to pressure Ukraine to negotiate a settlement? Is it possible that could even happen in advance of this winter?

you would imagine that, over time, when you don’t see Ukraine on the front page each and every day, eventually people’s attention wanes a bit and at a certain point the economic pain of high energy prices or other economic harms from the conflict reach a point where support may start to fracture a bit.

Whether that reaches a point where you start to see the West put pressure on Ukraine to capitulate, I think we’re pretty far away from that now, because everyone recognizes how outrageous and unacceptable Putin’s conduct is.

Mr. Gutfeld has said he initially connected with network executives through his friendship with Andrew Breitbart, a fellow Californian and an early contributor to The Huffington Post. Mr. Gutfeld had been writing there as he moved beyond magazines, embracing the rollicking venom of the nascent blogosphere and tormenting the in-house liberals.

“He’s like America’s latchkey kid, grown up,” said Nick Gillespie, an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine, and a “Red Eye” regular. “You are constantly searching out new things to pass the day when the adults aren’t around.”

What he did not know was that Fox was looking for someone like him — or at least someone unusual enough to advance an unusual new venture: proving that the right knew how to laugh.

“In every situation there’s that polarity where the Republicans are Dean Wormer in ‘Animal House,’” Mr. Gutfeld said, naming the film’s antagonist. And Democrats, he continued, came off as “the fun, Jon Stewart, ‘let’s have a great time and make fun of Dean Wormer.’ And I said that my goal was to flip that.”

“He was using a lot of all-caps,” Arianna Huffington recalled, mostly warmly.

Like media personalities before and since — including Joe Rogan and a constellation of other podcaster-comedians — Mr. Gutfeld took care to convey a vital quality to his audience: that he was getting away with something, saying what should not be said. He names Norm Macdonald, David Letterman and Tim Dillon as favored comedy minds.

Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor and Mr. Marx’s co-author of “That’s Not Funny,” said Mr. Gutfeld’s emergence was a signal accomplishment for the right: “somehow claiming conservativism or right-wing-ness as being against the squares.”

Around this period, he also often did something that feels disorienting to rewatch, given the host’s present disdain for those who moralize about Mr. Trump: He moralized about Mr. Trump.

“I’ve heard people defend him about making fun of a disability, making fun of John McCain, making fun of women,” he said on “The Five” in December 2015, accusing a Fox colleague of “Trumpsplaining” away his behavior. “No one will ever stop defending the crass stuff he says.”

“He is a salesman,” Mr. Gutfeld said, cradling his French bulldog, Gus, on his lap in the home the host shares with his wife, Elena Moussa. “Once you understand that, the derangement just kind of washes away.”

While Mr. Gutfeld mostly agrees with other Fox personalities in the lineup of Republican-friendly hours — that progressives are nuts, that Mr. Trump is unduly targeted, that President Biden is a doddering mess — “Gutfeld!” does land differently, with a host who seems adamant that his exclamation point is in on the joke.

“He’s today’s Don Rickles,” Candace Caine, a devotee from Birmingham, Ala., said after a recent taping — her third visit to see Mr. Gutfeld — where she leaned over a railing to shout “I love you!” during a commercial break.

the authors argue that the first job of a strategic leader is to get the big ideas right. Those who have succeeded include Gerald Templer, who became Britain’s high commissioner for Malaya in 1952 and whose reference to winning “the hearts and minds of the people,”

“remains the most succinct explanation for how to win a counter-insurgency.”

By contrast, the nationalist forces in China, the French in Algeria and the Americans in Vietnam got the big ideas wrong and paid a steep price.

On the 2021 collapse of Afghanistan’s government troops, who had been so expensively trained and equipped under Presidents Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden, Mr. Petraeus remarks that “the troops were brave enough—the 66,000 dead Afghan soldiers killed during the war attest to that. But they fought for an often corrupt and incompetent government that never gained the trust and confidence of local communities, which had historically determined the balance of power within Afghanistan.”

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 serves as the book’s case study on how badly Goliath can stumble against David

Elon Musk’s control of the Starlink satellite internet system, they note, gave him a unique veto power over Ukrainian operations in Crimea. “With individual tycoons such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos wielding such extraordinary power,” the authors tell us, “wars of the future will have to take their influence into account.”

The final chapter teases out the contours of future conflicts. Artificial intelligence, strategic mineral monopolies and “hybrid wars”—where weapons include deepfake disinformation, political manipulation, proxy forces and cyberattacks—cap an incisive look at the next phase of warfare. “Hybrid warfare particularly appeals to China and Russia, since they are much more able to control the information their populaces receive than are their Western adversaries,”

. And with the line between limited and total wars growing fuzzier every year, the combatant of the next war might be a woman sitting at a drone desk, a computer geek hacking into a power grid or a robotics designer refining directed-energy weapons systems.

“Conflict” is, in some ways, an extension of Mr. Roberts’s thesis in “The Storm of War” (2009)—that dictatorships tend to crack under the stress of a sustained war against popular democracies. While autocracies enjoy some advantages at war’s outset—they are nimble and can achieve true strategic surprise, for instance—if the sucker punch doesn’t end the fight quickly, democracies, shocked into action, may bring to bear more motivated, more efficient and often larger forces to turn the tide.

Both men see modern military history as a succession of partnerships created to counter violent challenges from nationalists, terrorists and dictators.

But researchers say that’s not how supervolcanoes work and cast doubts for a prophetic outburst.

“When a volcano is called a supervolcano, what we really mean is it had a super eruption once, at least, in the past,”

The last V8 eruption occurred around 27,000 years ago in Taupo, New Zealand.

Scientists can’t see what is stirring below the surface of Campi Flegrei with their naked eyes, but Kilburn said the recent activity could be underground molten rock and fluids readjusting themselves. Those movements appear as earthquakes on the surface.

Out of more than 1,000 known volcanoes in the world, only about 20 are supposedly supervolcanoes. Technically, they are defined as those that register the highest on the volcanic explosivity index, which runs from V1 (nonexplosive) to V8 (colossal eruption

“But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to have other super eruptions in the future. … Very, very, very large eruptions are much, much rarer.”

Such a super eruption ejects a volume of around 1,000-cubic kilometers or more — about a thousand times bigger than Mount St. Helens (V5), which caused mudslides, fires, floods and more than 50 deaths in 1980.

Yellowstone, one of the world’s most famous supervolcanoes, measures 30 by 45 miles and welcomes millions of tourists to its park. Its largest eruption occurred 2.1 million years ago, ejecting more than 2,400 cubic kilometers of material. Like many caldera systems, the majority of Yellowstone’s eruptions have since been much smaller.

Supervolcano is “a made-up word,” said volcanologist Michael Poland, scientist in charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. “I think it’s misleading. I think it’s misapplied. I can’t stand that term. I wish it would go into the dustbin, but it’s too sexy.”

It implies an apocalyptic-like explosion, but no volcanic eruption has caused a mass extinction to our knowledge

The largest volcanic explosion in the geologic record is thought to have occurred in Toba, Indonesia, around 74,000 years ago, registering a V8 on the volcanic explosivity index. S

scientists initially speculated that the eruption almost wiped out humanity because populations declined shortly after, but archaeological evidence showed Homo sapiens farther away were thriving after the eruption.

“No explosive volcanic eruption that we know of has ever been associated with a mass extinction of plant or animal life,” said Poland, who’s also a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). “That’s not to say it wouldn’t be devastating or hard to live.”

Contemporary billionaires appear to understand civics and civilians as impediments to their progress, necessary victims of the externalities of their companies’ growth, sad artefacts of the civilisation they will leave behind in their inexorable colonisation of the next dimension

on an individual basis today’s tech billionaires are not any wealthier than their early 20th-century counterparts. Adjusted for inflation, John Rockefeller’s fortune of $336bn and Andrew Carnegie’s $309bn exceed Musk’s $231bn, Bezos’s $165bn and Gates’s $114bn.

as chronicled by Peter Turchin in End Times, his book on elite excess and what it portends, today there are far more centimillionaires and billionaires than there were in the gilded age, and they have collectively accumulated a much larger proportion of the world’s wealth

In 1983, there were 66,000 households worth at least $10m in the US. By 2019, that number had increased in terms adjusted for inflation to 693,000

Back in the industrial age, the rate of total elite wealth accumulation was capped by the limits of the material world. They could only build so many railroads, steel mills and oilwells at a time. Virtual commodities such as likes, views, crypto and derivatives can be replicated exponentially.

Digital businesses depend on mineral slavery in Africa, dump toxic waste in China, facilitate the undermining of democracy across the globe and spread destabilising disinformation for profit – all from the sociopathic remove afforded by remote administration.

Zuckerberg had to go all the way back to Augustus Caesar for a role model, and his admiration for the emperor borders on obsession. He models his haircut on Augustus; his wife joked that three people went on their honeymoon to Rome: Mark, Augustus and herself; he named his second daughter August; and he used to end Facebook meetings by proclaiming “Domination!”

Zuckerberg told the New Yorker “through a really harsh approach, he established two hundred years of world peace”, finally acknowledging “that didn’t come for free, and he had to do certain things”. It’s that sort of top down thinking that led Zuckerberg to not only establish an independent oversight board at Facebook, dubbed the “Supreme Court”, but to suggest that it would one day expand its scope to include companies across the industry.

In response to the accusation that the US government organised a coup against Evo Morales in Bolivia in order for Tesla to secure lithium there, Musk tweeted: “We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.”

Today’s billionaire philanthropists, frequently espousing the philosophy of “effective altruism”, donate to their own organisations, often in the form of their own stock, and make their own decisions about how the money is spent because they are, after all, experts in everything

Their words and actions suggest an approach to life, technology and business that I have come to call “The Mindset” – a belief that with enough money, one can escape the harms created by earning money in that way. It’s a belief that with enough genius and technology, they can rise above the plane of mere mortals and exist on an entirely different level, or planet, altogether.

By combining a distorted interpretation of Nietzsche with a pretty accurate one of Ayn Rand, they end up with a belief that while “God is dead”, the übermensch of the future can use pure reason to rise above traditional religious values and remake the world “in his own interests”

Nietzsche’s language, particularly out of context, provides tech übermensch wannabes with justification for assuming superhuman authority. In his book Zero to One, Thiel directly quotes Nietzsche to argue for the supremacy of the individual: “madness is rare in individuals, but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule”.

In Thiel’s words: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.”

This distorted image of the übermensch as a godlike creator, pushing confidently towards his clear vision of how things should be, persists as an essential component of The Mindset

Any new business idea, Thiel says, should be an order of magnitude better than what’s already out there. Don’t compare yourself to everyone else; instead operate one level above the competing masses

For Thiel, this requires being what he calls a “definite optimist”. Most entrepreneurs are too process-oriented, making incremental decisions based on how the market responds. They should instead be like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, pressing on with their singular vision no matter what. The definite optimist doesn’t take feedback into account, but ploughs forward with his new design for a better world.

This is not capitalism, as Yanis Varoufakis explains in his new book Technofeudalism. Capitalists sought to extract value from workers by disconnecting them from the value they created, but they still made stuff. Feudalists seek an entirely passive income by “going meta” on business itself. They are rent-seekers, whose aim is to own the very platform on which other people do the work.

The antics of the tech feudalists make for better science fiction stories than they chart legitimate paths to sustainable futures.

Migrants are in politicians’ cross hairs, threatened with deportation and reduced support.

And the country’s commitment to fighting antisemitism seems not only to be failing but also to have given rise to an outpouring of anti-Muslim sentiment.

The truth is that Germany never fully deserved its vaunted reputation. The export-led economy depended on a large low-wage sector and the country’s position in the European Union.

The far right — ensconced in parts of the state — never went away, and the celebrated Willkommenskultur, short lived in any case, couldn’t conceal enduring xenophobia and suspicion about foreigners.

The culture of remembrance and historical reckoning, too, was far from perfect

Even so, the sudden coarsening of public life in the service of a warped sense of national identity is striking. Germany, supposed model of fair-minded moderation, has become mean.

the government’s habit of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has had some disturbing effects. Most notably, it has created an atmosphere where advocacy for Palestinian rights or a cease-fire in Gaza is seen as suspect, running afoul of the state-mandated position

The police, for example, have cracked down on pro-Palestinian protests in several cities and outright banned numerous demonstrations.

politicians, seizing on some evidence of antisemitic displays at pro-Palestinian protests to link Muslims and migrants with antisemitism, have taken the opportunity to advance an anti-migrant agenda

When Mr. Scholz was asked about antisemitism among people “with Arab roots” in an October interview, he said Germany needed to sort out more precisely who is allowed to come into the country and who is not. “We are limiting irregular migration,” Mr. Scholz pronounced, before adding a little later, “We must finally deport on a large scale.”

More spending cuts are expected. In an economy on the cusp of recession — Germany is the only country among Group of 7 nations not expected to register growth in 2023 — this is bad news for Germans, who, according to a recent study, are predominantly worried about living expenses, increasing rents, tax hikes and cuts to benefits.

everal other high-ranking politicians have also pushed the need for stricter border controls in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, spoke out against taking in refugees from Gaza, claiming that Germany already has “enough antisemitic young men in the country.”

In early November, after months of intense discussions, the federal government and the 16 state governors agreed on stricter measures to curb the number of migrants entering the country. Asylum seekers now receive less cash and have to wait twice as long to get on welfare, taking even more autonomy away from their lives. According to the new plan, Germany will also extend its border checks, speed up asylum procedures and look into the idea of offshoring asylum centers.

Worryingly, antisemitic incidents have been on the rise in recent weeks

it is troubling that Germany, of all places, should frame antisemitism as an imported problem. Crime statistics show that a vast majority of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing extremists and not by Islamists, let alone migrants or Muslims.

Germany’s leaders, aided by major media figures, are using the fight against antisemitism as a pretext to encourage racist resentment and anti-migrant sentiment.

Alternative for Germany, which has pulled the political center of gravity to the right since its formation in 2013, has never been stronger. Polling at over 20 percent, the party and its concerns, once fringe, are firmly mainstream. Questions of national identity and immigration dominate political discussion, in keeping with a broader rise of nativism across Europe.

The country’s anti-migrant turn is often justified in terms of economic concerns.

Opponents of immigration point to the underfunding of schools and hospitals, the lack of affordable housing, the miserable public transport and the general decline of the domestic economy.

German infrastructure is indeed in crisis. But this has little to do with immigration and everything to do with austerity policies that have been in place for the past two decades.

Central to those policies is the so-called debt brake. Enshrined in the German Constitution in 2009, it restricts the annual public deficit to 0.35 percent of gross domestic product, ensuring strict limits on spending.

The effects have been immediate: Mr. Lindner announced an early end to a price cap on energy bills, making it likely that German citizens will have to pay more for their heating in the coming year.

Christian Lindner, the finance minister and head of the center-right Free Democratic Party, called for a fundamental change in immigration policy to “reduce the appeal of the German welfare state.”

It’s bad news for the government, too. The coalition, composed of the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, came to office in 2021 with a mandate to modernize the country and lead it in a progressive direction

Instead, with programs of fiscal restriction and stances of social reaction, Germany’s leaders are only serving the far-right party they claim to want to keep at bay.

Helen Toner, the director of strategy and foundational research grants for Center for Security and Emerging Technology at Georgetown, and Tasha McCauley, whose LinkedIn profile says she began work as an adjunct senior management scientist at Rand Corporation earlier this year. Toner has previously spoken at conferences for a philanthropic movement closely tied to AI safety. McCauley is also involved in the work.

Sutskever helped create AI software at the University of Toronto, called AlexNet, which classified objects in photographs with more accuracy than any previous software had achieved, laying much of the foundation for the field of computer vision and deep learning.

He recently shared a radically different vision for how AI might evolve in the near term. Within five to 10 years, there could be “data centers that are much smarter than people,” Sutskever said on a recent episode of the AI podcast “No Priors.” Not just in terms of memory or knowledge, but with a deeper insight and ability to learn faster than humans.

At the bare minimum, Sutskever added, it’s important to work on controlling superintelligence today. “Imprinting onto them a strong desire to be nice and kind to people — because those data centers,” he said, “they will be really quite powerful.”

OpenAI has a unique governing structure, which it adopted in 2019. It created a for-profit subsidiary that allowed investors a return on the money they invested into OpenAI, but capped how much they could get back, with the rest flowing back into the company’s nonprofit. The company’s structure also allows OpenAI’s nonprofit board to govern the activities of the for-profit entity, including the power to fire its chief executive.

As news of the circumstances around Altman’s ouster began to come out, Silicon Valley circles have turned to anger at OpenAI’s board.

“What happened at OpenAI today is a board coup that we have not seen the likes of since 1985 when the then-Apple board pushed out Steve Jobs,” Ron Conway, a longtime venture capitalist who was one of the attendees at OpenAI’s developer conference, said on X. “It is shocking, it is irresponsible, and it does not do right by Sam and Greg or all the builders in OpenAI.”

All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in

In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias

on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether

the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.

far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage:

the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.

leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around

This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered

. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred

This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified.

as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.

here have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions

The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.

As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole.

It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe.

The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact.

It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other.

I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.

Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise.

Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views. If Times Opinion demonstrated the same kind of intellectual courage and curiosity that my colleagues at the Atlantic had shown, I hoped, the rest of the media would follow.

You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.

The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world.

Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day

They were brilliant, gutsy writers, and their disagreements were deep enough that I used to joke that my main work as editor was to prevent fistfights.

Under its owner, David Bradley, my colleagues and I distilled our purpose as publishing big arguments about big ideas

we also began producing some of the most important work in American journalism: Nicholas Carr on whether Google was “making us stupid”; Hanna Rosin on “the end of men”; Taylor Branch on “the shame of college sports”; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the case for reparations”; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “the coddling of the American mind”.

I was starting to see some effects of the new campus politics within the Atlantic. A promising new editor had created a digital form for aspiring freelancers to fill out, and she wanted to ask them to disclose their racial and sexual identity. Why? Because, she said, if we were to write about the trans community, for example, we would ask a trans person to write the story

There was a good argument for that, I acknowledged, and it sometimes might be the right answer. But as I thought about the old people, auto workers and abortion opponents I had learned from, I told her there was also an argument for correspondents who brought an outsider’s ignorance, along with curiosity and empathy, to the story.

A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.

In the age of the internet it is hard even for a child to sustain an “innocent eye”, but the alternative for journalists remains as dangerous as ever, to become propagandists. America has more than enough of those already.

When I looked around the Opinion department, change was not what I perceived. Excellent writers and editors were doing excellent work. But the department’s journalism was consumed with politics and foreign affairs in an era when readers were also fascinated by changes in technology, business, science and culture.

Fairly quickly, though, I realised two things: first, that if I did my job as I thought it should be done, and as the Sulzbergers said they wanted me to do it, I would be too polarising internally ever to lead the newsroom; second, that I did not want that job, though no one but my wife believed me when I said that.

there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were

On the right and left, America’s elites now talk within their tribes, and get angry or contemptuous on those occasions when they happen to overhear the other conclave. If they could be coaxed to agree what they were arguing about, and the rules by which they would argue about it, opinion journalism could serve a foundational need of the democracy by fostering diverse and inclusive debate. Who could be against that?

The large staff of op-ed editors contained only a couple of women. Although the 11 columnists were individually admirable, only two of them were women and only one was a person of colour

Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative.

This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing. “Too many liberals,” read my notes about the Opinion line-up from a meeting I had with him and Mark Thompson, then the chief executive, as I was preparing to rejoin the paper. “Even conservatives are liberals’ idea of a conservative.” The last note I took from that meeting was: “Can’t ignore 150m conservative Americans.”

As I knew from my time at the Atlantic, this kind of structural transformation can be frightening and even infuriating for those understandably proud of things as they are. It is hard on everyone

experience at the Atlantic also taught me that pursuing new ways of doing journalism in pursuit of venerable institutional principles created enthusiasm for change. I expected that same dynamic to allay concerns at the Times.

If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom.

New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them.

The Opinion department mocked the paper’s claim to value diversity. It did not have a single black editor

Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters.

Out of naivety or arrogance, I was slow to recognise that at the Times, unlike at the Atlantic, these values were no longer universally accepted, let alone esteemed

After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology. Some readers complained that I was providing a platform for terrorists, but there was never any objection from within the Times.

Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.

Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation

Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm.

After the profile of the Ohio man was published, media Twitter lit up with attacks on the article as “normalising” Nazism and white nationalism, and the Times convulsed internally. The Times wound up publishing a cringing editor’s note that hung the writer out to dry and approvingly quoted some of the criticism, including a tweet from a Washington Post opinion editor asking, “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies”?

the Times lacked the confidence to defend its own work

The editor’s note paraded the principle of publishing such pieces, saying it was important to “shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life”. But less light is what the readers got. As a reporter in the newsroom, you’d have to have been an idiot after that explosion to attempt such a profile

Empathetic reporting about Trump supporters became even more rare. It became a cliché among influential left-wing columnists and editors that blinkered political reporters interviewed a few Trump supporters in diners and came away suckered into thinking there was something besides racism that could explain anyone’s support for the man.

After a year spent publishing editorials attacking Trump and his policies, I thought it would be a demonstration of Timesian open-mindedness to give his supporters their say. Also, I thought the letters were interesting, so I turned over the entire editorial page to the Trump letters.

I wasn’t surprised that we got some criticism on Twitter. But I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues. I found myself facing an angry internal town hall, trying to justify what to me was an obvious journalistic decision

Didn’t he think other Times readers should understand the sources of Trump’s support? Didn’t he also see it was a wonderful thing that some Trump supporters did not just dismiss the Times as fake news, but still believed in it enough to respond thoughtfully to an invitation to share their views?

And if the Times could not bear to publish the views of Americans who supported Trump, why should it be surprised that those voters would not trust it?

Two years later, in 2020, Baquet acknowledged that in 2016 the Times had failed to take seriously the idea that Trump could become president partly because it failed to send its reporters out into America to listen to voters and understand “the turmoil in the country”. And, he continued, the Times still did not understand the views of many Americans

Speaking four months before we published the Cotton op-ed, he said that to argue that the views of such voters should not appear in the Times was “not journalistic”.

Conservative arguments in the Opinion pages reliably started uproars within the Times. Sometimes I would hear directly from colleagues who had the grace to confront me with their concerns; more often they would take to the company’s Slack channels or Twitter to advertise their distress in front of each other

This environment of enforced group-think, inside and outside the paper, was hard even on liberal opinion writers. One left-of-centre columnist told me that he was reluctant to appear in the New York office for fear of being accosted by colleagues.