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Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is tremendous.

Crypto hides behind all this complexity, and people hear words like blockchain and get confused. You hear about decentralized networks and mining, and it sounds complicated. But you get right down to it, and it’s just a ledger. It’s just like somebody writing down numbers in a book, and it’s page after page of numbers. That’s all it is.

And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody?

The vast majority of people who got involved in this have no interest related to the technology or in the political or ideological aspects of crypto. They just see an opportunity to get rich. And a lot of those people end up absorbing and parroting some of the crypto ideals back to you, but they don’t really care to understand what’s going on. It’s just their excuse for what they’ve already done, which is gamble on something they thought was going to make them wealthy.

I think most crypto companies are, like FTX, just borrowing from customer deposits to keep things afloat. And even the companies that aren’t doing that—I think Coinbase, for example, isn’t doing anything illicit, but their business model is based on this ecosystem where new money comes in. And that’s stopping.

Teachers are not only burnt out and undercompensated, they are also demoralized. They are being asked to do things in the name of teaching that they believe are mis-educational and harmful to students and the profession. What made this work good for them is no longer accessible. That is why we are hearing so many refrains of “I’m not leaving the profession, my profession left me.”

We find there are at least 36,000 vacant positions along with at least 163,000 positions being held by underqualified teachers, both of which are conservative estimates of the extent of teacher shortages nationally.

“The current problem of teacher shortages (I would further break this down into vacancy and under-qualification) is higher than normal.” The data, Nguyen continued, “indicate that shortages are worsening over time, particularly over the last few years

a growing gap between the pay of all college graduates and teacher salaries from 1979 to 2021, with a sharp increase in the differential since 2010

The number of qualified teachers is declining for the whole country and the vast majority of states.

Wages are essentially unchanged from 2000 to 2020 after adjusting for inflation. Teachers have about the same number of students. But, teacher accountability reforms have increased the demands on their positions.

The pandemic was very difficult for teachers. Their self-reported level of stress was about as twice as high during the pandemic compared to other working adults. Teachers had to worry both about their personal safety and deal with teaching/caring for students who are grieving lost family members.

the number of students graduating from college with bachelor’s degrees in education fell from 176,307 in 1970-71 to 104,008 in 2010-11 to 85,058 in 2019-20.

We do see that southern states (e.g., Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia and Florida) have very high vacancies and high vacancy rates.”

By 2021, teachers made $1,348, 32.9 percent less than what other graduates made, at $2,009.

These gaps play a significant role in determining the quality of teachers,

Sixty percent of teachers and 65 percent of principals reported believing that systemic racism exists. Only about 20 percent of teachers and principals reported that they believe systemic racism does not exist, and the remainder were not sure

“We find,” they write, “that teachers’ cognitive skills differ widely among nations — and that these differences matter greatly for students’ success in school. An increase of one standard deviation in teacher cognitive skills is associated with an increase of 10 to 15 percent of a standard deviation in student performance.”

teachers have lower cognitive skills, on average, in countries with greater nonteaching job opportunities for women in high-skill occupations and where teaching pays relatively less than other professions.

the scholars found that the cognitive skills of teachers in the United States fell in the middle ranks:Teachers in the United States perform worse than the average teacher sample-wide in numeracy, with a median score of 284 points out of a possible 500, compared to the sample-wide average of 292 points. In literacy, they perform slightly better than average, with a median score of 301 points compared to the sample-wide average of 295 points.

Increasing teacher numeracy skills by one standard deviation increases student performance by nearly 15 percent of a standard deviation on the PISA math test. Our estimate of the effect of increasing teacher literacy skills on students’ reading performance is slightly smaller, at 10 percent of a standard deviation.

How, then, to raise teacher skill level in the United States? Hanushek and his two colleagues have a simple answer: raise teacher pay to make it as attractive to college graduates as high-skill jobs in other fields.

policymakers will need to do more than raise teacher pay across the board to ensure positive results. They must ensure that higher salaries go to more effective teachers.

The teaching of disputed subjects in schools has compounded many of the difficulties in American education.

The researchers found that controversies over critical race theory, sex education and transgender issues — aggravated by divisive debates over responses to Covid and its aftermath — are inflicting a heavy toll on teachers and principals.

“On top of the herculean task of carrying out the essential functions of their jobs,” they write, “educators increasingly find themselves in the position of addressing contentious, politicized issues in their schools as the United States has experienced increasing political polarization.”

Teachers and principals, they add, “have been pulled in multiple directions as they try to balance and reconcile not only their own beliefs on such matters but also the beliefs of others around them, including their leaders, fellow staff, students, and students’ family members.”

These conflicting pressures take place in a climate where “emotions in response to these issues have run high within communities, resulting in the harassment of educators, bans against literature depicting diverse characters, and calls for increased parental involvement in deciding academic content.”

Forty-eight percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in school leadership or teaching, respectively, was a job-related stressor. By comparison, only 16 percent of working adults indicated that the intrusion of political issues and opinions in their jobs was a source of job-related stress

In 1979, the average teacher weekly salary (in 2021 dollars) was $1,052, 22.9 percent less than other college graduates’, at $1,364

Nearly all Black or African American principals (92 percent) and teachers (87 percent) reported believing that systemic racism exists.

White educators working in predominantly white school systems reported substantially more pressure to deal with politically divisive issues than educators of color and those working in mostly minority schools: “Forty-one percent of white teachers and 52 percent of white teachers and principals selected the intrusion of political issues and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compared with 36 percent of teachers of color and principals of color.

and opinions into their professions as a job-related stressor, compar

A 54 percent majority of teachers and principals said there “should not be legal limits on classroom conversations about racism, sexism, and other topics,” while 20 percent said there should be legislated constraint

Voters, in turn, are highly polarized on the teaching of issues impinging on race or ethnicity in public schools. The Education Next 2022 Survey asked, for example:Some people think their local public schools place too little emphasis on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people in the United States. Other people think their local public schools place too much emphasis on these topics. What is your view about your local public schools?

Among Democrats, 55 percent said too little emphasis was placed on slavery, racism and other challenges faced by Black people, and 8 percent said too much.

Among Republicans, 51 said too much and 10 percent said too little.

Because of the lack of reliable national data, there is widespread disagreement among scholars of education over the scope and severity of the shortage of credentialed teachers, although there is more agreement that these problems are worse in low-income, high majority-minority school systems and in STEM and special education faculties.

Public schools increasingly are targets of conservative political groups focusing on what they term “Critical Race Theory,” as well as issues of sexuality and gender identity. These political conflicts have created a broad chilling effect that has limited opportunities for students to practice respectful dialogue on controversial topics and made it harder to address rampant misinformation.

The chilling effect also has led to marked declines in general support for teaching about race, racism, and racial and ethnic diversity.

These political conflicts, the authors wrote,have made the already hard work of public education more difficult, undermining school management, negatively impacting staff, and heightening student stress and anxiety. Several principals shared that they were reconsidering their own roles in public education in light of the rage at teachers and rage at administrators’ playing out in their communities.

State University of New York tracked trends on “four interrelated constructs: professional prestige, interest among students, preparation for entry, and job satisfaction” for 50 years, from the 1970s to the present and founda consistent and dynamic pattern across every measure: a rapid decline in the 1970s, a swift rise in the 1980s, relative stability for two decades, and a sustained drop beginning around 2010. The current state of the teaching profession is at or near its lowest levels in 50 years.

Who among the next generation of college graduates will choose to teach?

Perceptions of teacher prestige have fallen between 20 percent and 47 percent in the last decade to be at or near the lowest levels recorded over the last half century

Interest in the teaching profession among high school seniors and college freshmen has fallen 50 percent since the 1990s, and 38 percent since 2010, reaching the lowest level in the last 50 years

the proportion of college graduates that go into teaching is at a 50-year low

Teachers’ job satisfaction is also at the lowest level in five decades, with the percent of teachers who feel the stress of their job is worth it dropping from 81 percent to 42 percent in the last 15 years

The combination of these factors — declining prestige, lower pay than other professions that require a college education, increased workloads, and political and ideological pressures — is creating both intended and unintended consequences for teacher accountability reforms mandating tougher licensing rules, evaluations and skill testing.

Education policy over the past decade has focused considerable effort on improving human capital in schools through teacher accountability. These reforms, and the research upon which they drew, were based on strong assumptions about how accountability would affect who decided to become a teacher. Counter to most assumptions, our findings document how teacher accountability reduced the supply of new teacher candidates by, in part, decreasing perceived job security, satisfaction and autonomy.

The reforms, Kraft and colleagues continued, increasedthe likelihood that schools could not fill vacant teaching positions. Even more concerning, effects on unfilled vacancies were concentrated in hard-to-staff schools that often serve larger populations of low-income students and students of color

We find that evaluation reforms increased the quality of newly hired novice teachers by reducing the number of teachers that graduated from the least selective institutions

We find no evidence that evaluation reforms served to attract teachers who attended the most selective undergraduate institutions.

In other words, the economic incentives, salary structure and work-life pressures characteristic of public education employment have created a climate in which contemporary education reforms have perverse and unintended consequences that can worsen rather than alleviate the problems facing school systems.

If so, to improve the overall quality of the nation’s more than three million public schoolteachers, reformers may want to give priority to paychecks, working conditions, teacher autonomy and punishing workloads before attempting to impose higher standards, tougher evaluations and less job security.

To the uninitiated, the fact that Bankman-Fried saw a special urgency in preventing killer robots from taking over the world might sound too outlandish to seem particularly effective or altruistic. But it turns out that some of the most influential E.A. literature happens to be preoccupied with killer robots too.

Holden Karnofsky, a former hedge funder and a founder of GiveWell, an organization that assesses the cost-effectiveness of charities, has spoken about the need for “worldview diversification” — recognizing that there might be multiple ways of doing measurable good in a world filled with suffering and uncertainty

The books, however, are another matter. Considerations of immediate need pale next to speculations about existential risk — not just earthly concerns about climate change and pandemics but also (and perhaps most appealingly for some tech entrepreneurs) more extravagant theorizing about space colonization and A.I.

there’s a remarkable intellectual homogeneity; the dominant voices belong to white male philosophers at Oxford.

Among his E.A. innovations has been the career research organization known as 80,000 Hours, which promotes “earning to give” — the idea that altruistic people should pursue careers that will earn them oodles of money, which they can then donate to E.A. causes.

each of those terse sentences glosses over a host of additional questions, and it takes MacAskill an entire book to address them. Take the notion that “future people count.” Leaving aside the possibility that the very contemplation of a hypothetical person may not, for some real people, be “intuitive” at all, another question remains: Do future people count for more or less than existing people count for right now?

MacAskill cites the philosopher Derek Parfit, whose ideas about population ethics in his 1984 book “Reasons and Persons” have been influential in E.A. Parfit argued that an extinction-level event that destroyed 100 percent of the population should worry us much more than a near-extinction event that spared a minuscule population (which would presumably go on to procreate), because the number of potential lives dwarfs the number of existing ones.

If you’re a utilitarian committed to “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the arithmetic looks irrefutable. The Times’s Ezra Klein has written about his support for effective altruism while also thoughtfully critiquing longtermism’s more fanatical expressions of “mathematical blackmail.”

In 2015, MacAskill published “Doing Good Better,” which is also about the virtues of effective altruism. His concerns in that book (blindness, deworming) seem downright quaint when compared with the astral-plane conjectures (A.I., building an “interstellar civilization”) that he would go on to pursue in “What We Owe the Future.”

In both books he emphasizes the desirability of seeking out “neglectedness” — problems that haven’t attracted enough attention so that you, as an effective altruist, can be more “impactful.” So climate change, MacAskill says, isn’t really where it’s at anymore; readers would do better to focus on “the issues around A.I. development,” which are “radically more neglected.

In his recent best seller, “What We Owe the Future” (2022), MacAskill says that the case for effective altruism giving priority to the longtermist view can be distilled into three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.”

“Earning to give” has its roots in the work of the radical utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” has been a foundational E.A. text. It contains his parable of the drowning child: If you’re walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, you should wade in and save the child, even if it means muddying your clothes

Extrapolating from that principle suggests that if you can save a life by donating an amount of money that won’t pose any significant problems for you, a decision not to donate that money would be not only uncharitable or ungenerous but morally wrong.

Singer has also written his own book about effective altruism, “The Most Good You Can Do” (2015), in which he argues that going into finance would be an excellent career choice for the aspiring effective altruist. He acknowledges the risks for harm, but he deems them worth it

Chances are, if you don’t become a charity worker, someone else will ably do the job; whereas if you don’t become a financier who gives his money away, who’s to say that the person who does become a financier won’t hoard all his riches for himself?

On Nov. 11, when FTX filed for bankruptcy amid allegations of financial impropriety, MacAskill wrote a long Twitter thread expressing his shock and his anguish, as he wrestled in real time with what Bankman-Fried had wrought.

“If those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community,” MacAskill wrote in a Tweet, followed by screenshots from “What We Owe the Future” and Ord’s “The Precipice” that emphasized the importance of honesty and integrity.

I’m guessing that Bankman-Fried may not have read the pertinent parts of those books — if, that is, he read any parts of those books at all. “I would never read a book,” Bankman-Fried said earlier this year. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”

Avoiding books is an efficient method for absorbing the crudest version of effective altruism while gliding past the caveats

For all of MacAskill’s galaxy-brain disquisitions on “A.I. takeover” and the “moral case for space settlement,” perhaps the E.A. fixation on “neglectedness” and existential risks made him less attentive to more familiar risks — human, banal and closer to home.

tens of thousands of young people moved across the Channel, an exodus that caught the eye of the New York Times in 2014. One of the French people the paper interviewed explained that ‘in London, there’s this can-do attitude, and a sense that anything’s possible.’

‘Britain’s young are giving up hope’, John Oxley described a ‘generation that has soured on ambition… the under forties [are] drifting towards professional apathy.’

French-bashing became de rigueur for British politicians and business leaders. Few were as withering as Andy Street, the managing director of John Lewis, who in October 2014 described France as ‘sclerotic, hopeless and downbeat’, a country where ‘nothing works and, worse, nobody cares about it.’

Within months of taking office Macron slashed the wealth tax and corporate tax rates have steadily fallen from 33 to 25 per cent. Last week the French government passed a budget for 2023 that includes an €8 billion tax cut on businesses. 

In Britain, the corporation tax rate has moved in the other direction, and last month Chancellor Jeremy Hunt announced it will rise in April from 19 to 25 per cent; the Daily Telegraph could barely bring itself to acknowledge that because of Hunt’s business tax raid, UK shareholders will now be ‘worse off than the French’. 

Tory Britain is no longer a friend of business and nor is it particularly pally with its young. More and more aspirational British twenty-somethings are doing what the ambitious young French did a decade ago and heading to countries where they feel they have more chance of fulfilling their potential.

Yet would people vote for a politician honest enough to say these things? No. We force them to lie then complain they’re liars. It is we who are the hypocrites. Whence comes this persistent, subterranean sense of British entitlement, even as the economy on which it depends begins to sink?

The elastication of any link between what we demand and our ability to afford it began long ago but it has been sharply accelerated by the Covid-19 lockdowns: by the idea we could retreat into our living rooms and expect public money to come feathering electronically down into our bank accounts like falling leaves from the Treasury’s magic money tree, until it was safe to go back to work. To this day many haven’t even bothered to do that, as early pensions replace furlough.

Ukrainians are aware of their new superiority in conventional arms and want to press their advantage to the maximum.

Nuclear escalation seems to be a joker that Putin wants to keep in play. What will he do if more retreat and humiliation come his way? The discussion tends to go in circles, focusing on Putin’s megalomania and his habit of surprising people. All of which leaves a room for a disconcerting level of uncertainty. Clearly, Putin intends to keep it that way. So far, the Russian ruler links the preservation of Russia’s “sovereignty” not to successful diplomacy but to nuclear deterrence and, if need be, brinkmanship.

In Moscow, the environment is quite the opposite. Putin, his propagandists and top military no longer say “nuclear war must not be waged”. Instead, they seem to be stoking fears of nuclear conflict. The story of Khrushchev’s gamble and retreat is rarely discussed, and its details have not been digested by the current cohort of decision-makers. Many crucial files still remain secret and forgotten, gathering dust in archives

The Ukrainian offensive, backed by US weapons and intelligence, has become part of a precarious web of international security. Will the Ukrainians push to regain all their lost territory or stop at the border of Crimea? Will they start shelling Sevastopol with US-provided missile launchers? If they do, the pressure on Putin to escalate would increase enormously

Imagine what Kennedy would have done in October 1962 had the Cubans been given the opportunity to shell cities in Florida. If the Kremlin has no more conventional ways to escalate, the temptation to use a tactical nuclear device will grow.

As his delusional gamble in Ukraine produces one military retreat after another, Putin has to find an exit. We simply have no means of knowing what kind of an exit he will choose, and whether it will come with a bang.

The Musk messages also reveal how some of the richest and most powerful men in the world treat actual billions of dollars with a level of care more appropriate for a 3-year-old tossing around Monopoly cash.

Oracle’s founder, Larry Ellison, essentially writes Musk a blank check over text, pledging, “A billion … or whatever you recommend.” The venture capitalist Marc Andreessen unsolicitedly offers Musk “$250M with no additional work required.” And Michael Grimes, a top investment banker at Morgan Stanley, proposes a meeting with Bankman-Fried as a way to “get us $5bn equity in an hour.”

The blitheness is the point. It is a total power move to talk about getting “$5bn in equity in an hour” the same way we mere mortals talk about Venmo-ing a friend $15 for lunch. The texts make it clear that these men are fundamentally alienated from the rest of the world by their wealth.

“These are absolutely not normal people with a normal understanding of the world.”

The men in Musk’s phone also appear wildly confident in their own abilities and those of their peers. Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of the media conglomerate Axel Springer, infamously texted Musk his bullet-pointed plan for Twitter, which began with the line item “1.),, Solve Free Speech.”

They teach us what happens when a small group of people with too much money come to view that money not just as a reward for success, but as its own form of merit—a specious achievement that totally alienates them from reality.

Ultimately, Exhibit H documents the loneliness and isolation of being the world’s richest man. As told via the texts, the seed of Musk’s Twitter purchase was planted by sycophants deferential to the billionaire who will never give him hard, truthful advice, because they wish to stay close to him.

the one time he receives actual, honest feedback from Agrawal, Musk behaves aggressively and impulsively, sealing his fate.

Our minds are asymmetric judges, applying harsher moral judgment to present and future transgressions than past ones. It is as if the past becomes blurry. We even tend to blame the victim of a past event more than we blame the victim of a future one.

Third, our minds struggle with the negative emotions that our country’s complicated past gives rise to.

Research shows we are drawn to a sentimental form of history—nostalgia—which leads us to feel more loved, more protected, and even more competent in our ability to start and maintain relationships.

Nostalgia is often tied to the identities that we care most deeply about, such as our family or national identity. And, nostalgia is big business—in fashion, advertising, music and tourism, among other things.

Second, our minds tend to overplay sweet memories that favor our ancestors from the past.

When we learn about historical atrocities, particularly ones that expose our limited knowledge, contradict the narratives we believe, or implicate our own ancestors, we might experience shame, guilt, disbelief or anger. In response, we have a natural desire to pull away from the new knowledge and perhaps even refute it, rather than try to better understand it.

Fourth, our minds want to pick either a beautiful or a brutal narrative.

Contradictions, though, pocket our history, beginning with forefathers who had an extraordinary vision of equality, and simultaneously enslaved other humans

Our minds resist the paradoxes that characterize our country’s past. It’s so much less psychologically painful to pick one path than to grapple with both ideas at the same time.

Tools to useWhile the past is in the past, we can address the psychological challenge, however formidable, in the present. We have tools that will help, and I anticipate (and hope) that our debates will take on more psychological nuance as we shift from arguments over whether to explore our history more fully to how to do it.

For example, research shows the importance of returning to our values again and again as a way of inoculating us from setbacks

The daily arguments over curfews or messy rooms or study habits can cause us to shut down (“Do whatever you want”) or double down (“I’m your parent and you’ll do what I say”). Instead, it’s helpful to remind ourselves and our children that a parent has three jobs—to teach them, to protect them and to love them. Just doing that can ground us, and enable us to stay engaged, resilient and calm.

Similarly, when we confront a historical event, it can help to reflect on questions like, “Which American ideals do you most value?” and, “How do you hope others see your country?

You can even write out your responses, share them with others, and reread what you have written. Think of it as a values booster shot

Say, for instance, that you deeply value freedom. Keeping this value in your thoughts can help you notice the ways in which this country has delivered on the promise of freedom in important ways. But it also enables you to consider the disheartening realizations when those freedoms are not upheld.

esearch by Wendy Smith and others shows that we are capable of embracing paradox, rather than rejecting it. It doesn’t always come naturally. But we simply need to give ourselves permission to allow multiple truths to coexist.

In a paradox mind-set, we allow both of these things to be true. When both are true, we can challenge our either/or assumptions, and be more creative in finding solutions.

When you spot the paradox, allow both things to be true and observe if your mind shifts from solving the unsolvable puzzle (reconciling how can both of these things be true) to more deeply processing the knowledge that you may otherwise have pushed away. This is the greater resilience and creativity that comes with a paradox mind-set.

We simply need to accept that the formidable challenge will require us to be intentional in our approach.

In doing so, we become what I call “gritty patriots.” Psychologist Angela Duckworth defines grit as “passion and perseverance in pursuit of a meaningful, long-term goal.” Love of country is not something we are entitled to; it is something we work toward, with grit.

it is easy to forget how much we have in common as people. I can’t think of any major nation after the United States with more of a Protestant work ethic and naturally capitalist population than China.

These days, it is extremely difficult for a visiting columnist to get anyone — a senior official or a Starbucks barista — to speak on the record. It was not that way a decade ago.

The Communist Party’s hold is also a product of all the hard work and savings of the Chinese people, which have enabled the party and the state to build world-class infrastructure and public goods that make life for China’s middle and lower classes steadily better.

Beijing and Shanghai, in particular, have become very livable cities, with the air pollution largely erased and lots of new, walkable green spaces.

some 900 cities and towns in China are now served by high-speed rail, which makes travel to even remote communities incredibly cheap, easy and comfortable

Just when trust has become more important than ever between the U.S. and China, it also has become scarcer than ever. Bad trend.

China’s stability is a product of both an increasingly pervasive police state and a government that has steadily raised standards of living. It’s a regime that takes both absolute control and relentless nation-building seriously.

For an American to fly from New York’s Kennedy Airport into Beijing Capital International Airport today is to fly from an overcrowded bus terminal to a Disney-like Tomorrowland.

China got an early jump on A.I. in two realms — facial recognition technology and health records — because there are virtually no privacy restrictions on the government’s ability to build huge data sets for machine learning algorithms to find patterns.

“ChatGPT is prompting some people to ask if the U.S. is rising again, like in the 1990s,”

“I understand your feeling: You have been in the first place for a century, and now China is rising, and we have the potential to become the first — and that is not easy for you,” Hu said to me. But “you should not try to stop China’s development. You can’t contain China in the end. We are quite smart. And very diligent. We work very hard. And we have 1.4 billion people.”

Before the Trump presidency, he added: “We never thought China-U.S. relations would ever become so bad. Now we gradually accept the situation, and most Chinese people think there is no hope for better relations. We think the relationship will be worse and worse and hope that war will not break out between our two countries.”

A lot of people hesitated when I asked. Indeed, many would answer with some version of “I’m not sure, I just know that it’s THEIR fault.”

t was repeated conversations like these that got me started asking American, Chinese and Taiwanese investors, analysts and officials a question that has been nagging at me for a while: What exactly are America and China fighting about?

the real answer is so much deeper and more complex than just the usual one-word response — “Taiwan” — or the usual three-word response — “autocracy versus democracy.”

Let me try to peel back the layers. The erosion in U.S.-China relations is a result of something old and obvious — a traditional great-power rivalry between an incumbent power (us) and a rising power (China) — but with lots of new twists

One of the twists, though, is that this standard-issue great-power rivalry is occurring between nations that have become as economically intertwined as the strands of a DNA molecule. As a result, neither China nor America has ever had a rival quite like the other.

in modern times, China, like America, has never had to deal with a true economic and military peer with which it was also totally intertwined through trade and investment.

Another new twist, and a reason it’s hard to define exactly what we’re fighting about, has a lot to do with how this elusive issue of trust and the absence of it have suddenly assumed much greater importance in international affairs.

This is a byproduct of our new technological ecosystem in which more and more devices and services that we both use and trade are driven by microchips and software, and connected through data centers in the cloud and high-speed internet

so many more things became “dual use.” That is, technologies that can easily be converted from civilian tools to military weapons, or vice versa.

no one country or company can own the whole supply chain. You need the best from everywhere, and that supply chain is so tightly intertwined that each company has to trust the others intimately.

when we install the ability to sense, digitize, connect, process, learn, share and act into more and more things — from your GPS-enabled phone to your car to your toaster to your favorite app — they all become dual use, either weapons or tools depending on who controls the software running them and who owns the data that they spin off.

As long as most of what China sold us was shallow goods, we did not care as much about its political system — doubly so because it seemed for a while as if China was slowly but steadily becoming more and more integrated with the world and slightly more open and transparent every year. So, it was both easy and convenient to set aside some of our worries about the dark sides of its political system.

when you want to sell us ‘deep goods’ — goods that are dual use and will go deep into our homes, bedrooms, industries, chatbots and urban infrastructure — we don’t have enough trust to buy them. So, we are going to ban Huawei and instead pay more to buy our 5G telecom systems from Scandinavian companies we do trust: Ericsson and Nokia.”

as we’ve seen in Ukraine, a smartphone can be used by Grandma to call the grandkids or to call a Ukrainian rocket-launching unit and give it the GPS coordinates of a Russian tank in her backyard.

So today, the country or countries that can make the fastest, most powerful and most energy efficient microchips can make the biggest A.I. computers and dominate in economics and military affairs.

As more and more products and services became digitized and electrified, the microchips that powered everything became the new oil. What crude oil was to powering 19th- and 20th-century economies, microchips are for powering 21st-century economies.

When you ask them what is the secret that enables TSMC to make 90 percent of the world’s most advanced logic chips — while China, which speaks the same language and shares the same recent cultural history, makes zero — their answer is simple: “trust.”

TSMC is a semiconductor foundry, meaning it takes the designs of the most advanced computer companies in the world — Apple, Qualcomm, Nvidia, AMD and others — and turns the designs into chips that perform different processing functions

TSMC makes two solemn oaths to its customers: TSMC will never compete against them by designing its own chips and it will never share the designs of one of its customers with another.

“Our business is to serve multiple competitive clients,” Kevin Zhang, senior vice president for business development at TSMC, explained to me. “We are committed not to compete with any of them, and internally our people who serve customer A will never leak their information to customer C.”

But by working with so many trusted partners, TSMC leverages the partners’ steadily more complex designs to make itself better — and the better it gets, the more advanced designs it can master for its customers. This not only requires incredibly tight collaboration between TSMC and its customers, but also between TSMC and its roughly 1,000 critical local and global suppliers.

As the physics of chip making gets more and more extreme, “the investment from customers is getting bigger and bigger, so they have to work with us more closely to make sure they harvest as much [computing power] as they can. They have to trust you.”

China also has a foundry, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation, which is partly state-owned. But guess what? Because no global chip designers trust SMIC with their most advanced designs, it is at least a decade behind TSMC.

It’s for these reasons that the erosion in U.S.-China relations goes beyond our increasingly sharp disagreements over Taiwan. It is rooted in the fact that just when trust, and its absence, became much bigger factors in international affairs and commerce, China changed its trajectory. It made itself a less trusted partner right when the most important technology for the 21st century — semiconductors — required unprecedented degrees of trust to manufacture and more and more devices and services became deep and dual use.

when American trade officials said: “Hey, you need to live up to your W.T.O. commitments to restrict state-funding of industries,” China basically said: “Why should we live by your interpretation of the rules? We are now big enough to make our own interpretations. We’re too big; you’re too late.”

Combined with China’s failure to come clean on what it knew about the origins of Covid-19, its crackdown on democratic freedoms in Hong Kong and on the Uyghur Muslim minority in Xinjiang, its aggressive moves to lay claim to the South China Sea, its increasing saber rattling toward Taiwan, its cozying up to Vladimir Putin (despite his savaging of Ukraine), Xi’s moves toward making himself president for life, his kneecapping of China’s own tech entrepreneurs, his tighter restrictions on speech and the occasional abduction of a leading Chinese businessman — all of these added up to one very big thing: Whatever trust that China had built up with the West since the late 1970s evaporated at the exact moment in history when trust, and shared values, became more important than ever in a world of deep, dual-use products driven by software, connectivity and microchips.

it started to matter a lot more to Western nations generally and the United States in particular that this rising power — which we were now selling to or buying from all sorts of dual-use digital devices or apps — was authoritarian.

eijing, for its part, argues that as China became a stronger global competitor to America — in deep goods like Huawei 5G — the United States simply could not handle it and decided to use its control over advanced semiconductor manufacturing and other high-tech exports from America, as well as from our allies, to ensure China always remained in our rearview mirror

Beijing came up with a new strategy, called “dual circulation.” It said: We will use state-led investments to make everything we possibly can at home, to become independent of the world. And we will use our manufacturing prowess to make the world dependent on our exports.

Chinese officials also argue that a lot of American politicians — led by Trump but echoed by many in Congress — suddenly seemed to find it very convenient to put the blame for economic troubles in the U.S.’s middle class not on any educational deficiencies, or a poor work ethic, or automation or the 2008 looting by financial elites, and the crisis that followed, but on China’s exports to the United States.

As Beijing sees it, China not only became America’s go-to boogeyman, but in their frenzy to blame Beijing for everything, members of Congress started to more recklessly promote Taiwan’s independence.

Xi told President Biden at their summit in Bali in November, in essence: I will not be the president of China who loses Taiwan. If you force my hand, there will be war. You don’t understand how important this is to the Chinese people. You’re playing with fire.

at some level Chinese officials now understand that, as a result of their own aggressive actions in recent years on all the fronts I’ve listed, they have frightened both the world and their own innovators at precisely the wrong time.

I don’t buy the argument that we are destined for war. I believe that we are doomed to compete with each other, doomed to cooperate with each other and doomed to find some way to balance the two. Otherwise we are both going to have a very bad 21st century.

I have to say, though, Americans and Chinese remind me of Israelis and Palestinians in one respect: They are both expert at aggravating the other’s deepest insecurities.

China’s Communist Party is now convinced that America wants to bring it down, which some U.S. politicians are actually no longer shy about suggesting. So, Beijing is ready to crawl into bed with Putin, a war criminal, if that is what it takes to keep the Americans at bay.

Americans are now worried that Communist China, which got rich by taking advantage of a global market shaped by American rules, will use its newfound market power to unilaterally change those rules entirely to its advantage. So we’ve decided to focus our waning strength vis-à-vis Beijing on ensuring the Chinese will always be a decade behind us on microchips.

I don’t know what is sufficient to reverse these trends, but I think I know what is necessary.

If it is not the goal of U.S. foreign policy to topple the Communist regime in China, the United States needs to make that crystal clear, because I found a lot more people than ever before in Beijing think otherwise.

As for China, it can tell itself all it wants that it has not taken a U-turn in recent years. But no one is buying it. China will never realize its full potential — in a hyper-connected, digitized, deep, dual-use, semiconductor-powered world — unless it understands that establishing and maintaining trust is now the single most important competitive advantage any country or company can have. And Beijing is failing in that endeavor.

In his splendid biography of the great American statesman George Shultz, Philip Taubman quotes one of Shultz’s cardinal rules of diplomacy and life: “Trust is the coin of the realm.”

what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.

never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.

That percentage is far higher than the (still troubling) 22 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats who shared the same view.

In 2011, they were the American cohort least likely to agree that a politician could commit immoral acts in private yet “still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”

They went from least likely to most likely to excuse the immoral behavior of politicians.

An increasing percentage are now tempted to embrace political violence. Last October, a startling 33 percent of Republicans (and an even larger 41 percent of pro-Trump Americans) agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Polling data again and again backs up the reality that the right is abandoning decency, and doing so in the most alarming of ways. It began happening almost immediately with white evangelicals

As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.

While political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.

The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”

in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.

For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I’ve appreciated that quote because it recognizes the obligations of a free people in a constitutional republic to exercise their liberty toward virtuous purposes.

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory.

if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.

Dr. Monteiro and his colleagues developed a food classification system called Nova, named after the Portuguese and Latin words for “new.” It has since been adopted by researchers across the world.

Unprocessed or minimally processed foods, like fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables, beans, lentils, meat, poultry, fish, eggs, milk, plain yogurt, rice, pasta, corn meal, flour, coffee, tea and herbs and spices.

Processed culinary ingredients, such as cooking oils, butter, sugar, honey, vinegar and salt.

If you look at the ingredient list and you see things that you wouldn’t use in home cooking, then that’s probably an ultraprocessed food,”

his group includes freshly baked bread, most cheeses and canned vegetables, beans and fish. These foods may contain preservatives that extend shelf life.

Ultraprocessed foods made using industrial methods and ingredients you wouldn’t typically find in grocery stores — like high-fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils and concentrated proteins like soy isolate.

They often contain additives like flavorings, colorings or emulsifiers to make them appear more attractive and palatable.

Think sodas and energy drinks, chips, candies, flavored yogurts, margarine, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, sausages, lunch meats, boxed macaroni and cheese, infant formulas and most packaged breads, plant milks, meat substitutes and breakfast cereals.

Processed foods made by combining foods from Category 1 with the ingredients of Category 2 and preserving or modifying them with relatively simple methods like canning, bottling, fermentation and baking

That has led to debate among nutrition experts about whether it’s useful for describing the healthfulness of a food, partly since many UPFs — like whole grain breads, flavored yogurts and infant formulas — can provide valuable nutrients

Most research linking UPFs to poor health is based on observational studies, in which researchers ask people about their diets and then track their health over many years.

Why might UPFs be harmful?

In a large review of studies that was published in 2024, scientists reported that consuming UPFs was associated with 32 health problems, with the most convincing evidence for heart disease-related deaths, Type 2 diabetes and common mental health issues like anxiety and depression.

Such studies are valuable, because they can look at large groups of people — the 2024 review included results from nearly 10 million — over the many years it can take for chronic health conditions to develop

She added that the consistency of the link between UPFs and health issues increased her confidence that there was a real problem with the foods.

But the observational studies also have limitations,

It’s true that there is a correlation between these foods and chronic diseases, she said, but that doesn’t mean that UPFs directly cause poor health.

Dr. O’Connor questioned whether it’s helpful to group such “starkly different” foods — like Twinkies and breakfast cereals — into one category. Certain types of ultraprocessed foods, like sodas and processed meats, are more clearly harmful than others

UPFs like flavored yogurts and whole grain breads, on the other hand, have been associated with a reduced risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

Clinical trials are needed to test if UPFs directly cause health problems, Dr. O’Connor said. Only one such study, which was small and had some limitations, has been done, s

In that study, published in 2019, 20 adults with a range of body sizes lived in a research hospital at the National Institutes of Health for four weeks. For two weeks, they ate mainly unprocessed or minimally processed foods, and for another two weeks, they ate mainly UPFs. The diets had similar amounts of calories and nutrients, and the participants could eat as much as they wanted at each meal.

During their two weeks on the ultraprocessed diet, participants gained an average of two pounds and consumed about 500 calories more per day than they did on the unprocessed diet

During their time on the unprocessed diet, they lost about two pounds.

That finding might help explain the link between UPFs, obesity and other metabolic conditions

The Nova system notably doesn’t classify foods based on nutrients like fat, fiber, vitamins or minerals. It’s “agnostic to nutrition,”

There are many “strong opinions” about why ultraprocessed foods are unhealthy, Dr. Hall said. “But there’s actually not a lot of rigorous science” on what those mechanisms are

Because UPFs are often cheap, convenient and accessible, they’re probably displacing healthier foods from our diets

the foods could be having more direct effects on health. They can be easy to overeat — maybe because they contain hard-to-resist combinations of carbohydrates, sugars, fats and salt, are high-calorie and easy to chew

It’s also possible that resulting blood sugar spikes may damage arteries or ramp up inflammation, or that certain food additives or chemicals may interfere with hormones, cause a “leaky” intestine or disrupt the gut microbiome.

Researchers, including Dr. Hall and Dr. Davy, are beginning to conduct small clinical trials that will test some of these theories.

most researchers think there are various ways the foods are causing harm. “Rarely in nutrition is there a single factor that fully explains the relationship between foods and some health outcome,”

In 2014, Dr. Monteiro helped write new dietary guidelines for Brazil that advised people to avoid ultraprocessed foods.

Other countries like Mexico, Israel and Canada have also explicitly recommended avoiding or limiting UPFs or “highly processed foods.”

The U.S. dietary guidelines contain no such advice, but an advisory committee is currently looking into the evidence on how UPFs may affect weight gain, which could influence the 2025 guidelines.

It’s difficult to know what to do about UPFs in the United States, where so much food is already ultraprocessed and people with lower incomes can be especially dependent on them,

“At the end of the day, they are an important source of food, and food is food,” Dr. Mattei added. “We really cannot vilify them,”

While research continues, expert opinions differ on how people should approach UPFs.

the safest course is to avoid them altogether

to swap flavored yogurt for plain yogurt with fruit, for example, or to buy a fresh loaf from a local bakery instead of packaged bread, if you can afford to do so

Dr. Vadiveloo suggested a more moderate strategy, focusing on limiting UPFs that don’t provide valuable nutrients, like soda and cookies

She also recommended eating more fruits, vegetables, whole grains (ultraprocessed or not), legumes, nuts and seeds.

Cook at home as much as you can, using minimally processed foods

guided by a fascination with the wayward paths to fame, he half-unwittingly sows doubt about the justice of the American rise to artistic leadership in the postwar era. In his erudite account, artistic success owes little to vision and purpose, more to self-promotion, but most to unanticipated adoption by bigger systems with other aims, principally oriented toward money, political advantage, or commercial churn

For the greatness and inevitability of artistic consecration, Menand substitutes the arbitrary confluences of forces at any given moment.

The curriculum runs chapter by chapter through George Kennan, George Orwell, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hannah Arendt, Jackson Pollock, Lionel Trilling, Allen Ginsberg, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, Elvis and the Beatles, Isaiah Berlin, James Baldwin, Jack Kerouac, Andy Warhol, Susan Sontag, and Pauline Kael. Each biography opens a door to a school or trend of work

Menand’s is not a “great man” view of history, because no one seems particularly great. One gets a feeling for Sartre as a person, a limited knowledge of how Sartre made Being and Nothingness, and a vivid sense of how the book made Sartre a celebrity. Then one learns how a troupe of others came along and rode his success like a sled.

Menand zooms in and out between individual egomaniacs and the milieus that facilitated their ascent and profited from their publicity.

group biographies, in miniature, of the existentialists, the Beats, the action painters, the Black Mountain School, the British Invasion, the pop artists, and many coteries more—are enchanting singly but demoralizing as they pile up

All of these enterprises look like hives of social insects, not selfless quests for truth or beauty. Menand is a world-class entomologist: He can name every indistinguishable drone, knows who had an oversize mandible, who lost a leg, who carried the best crumbs.

From this vantage, the monuments really are just anthills.

Menand is truly one of the great explainers. He quotes approvingly a lesson taken by Lionel Trilling from his editor Elliot Cohen: “No idea was so difficult and complex but that it could be expressed in a way that would make it understood by anyone to whom it might conceivably be of interest.”

The underlying theory of the book rests on a picture of what makes for “cultural winners,” works and ideas that Menand defines as

He is accurate, he is insightful, and he is not a dumber-downer

Menand’s account of each is an abbreviated tour de force. His explanations work at all levels: interpretation for scholars, review for general readers, introductions for neophytes. Where another writer would take 20 pages to tell us why someone or something mattered historically, Menand does it in two.

goods or styles that maintain market share through “generational” taste shifts—that is, through all the “the king is dead; long live the king” moments that mark the phases of cultural history for people living through it.

Menand’s recountings are less concerned with the changing meanings of individual works than with their successive adoptions and co-optations, in defiance of depth and meaning. It is a process of “winning” often based on cults of personality, indifference to complex origins, and the fortune or misfortune of timing

Menand is notably excellent on how commercial, regulatory, and technological changes determined which kinds of artwork made it to the public. His analysis helps demystify trends in commercial forms like film and pop music, especially when they otherwise seemed to run against the grain of pure profit

Often Menand’s point seems to be that the culture’s reigning talkers and salespeople and debaters need to conjure figures to venerate and attack (in ceaseless alternation) for short-range purposes of attention and competition. Any given work—1984, say, or Bonnie and Clyde—isn’t much of anything until it becomes a counter in other people’s games.

The central question of this period in culture might be whether U.S. artists lived up to expectations

In 1945, Europe was in ruins. America was rich and productive and dictated the terms of the postwar economic and political order. Certainly the U.S. had the power to pretend to cultural glory, too. But was it a pretense, or did Americans really continue and exceed the prewar triumphs of European modernism?

Most histories of the arts after 1945 assume that the greatest American successes deserved their fame.

The thrust of many of Menand’s retellings is that “in the business of cultural exchange, misprision is often the key to transmission.” Fame comes through misreadings, fantasies, unintended resonances, charisma, and publicity.

Menand’s book bequeaths the sense that the last laugh may truly have been on the self-seriousness of a whole historical period, one that treated its most publicized and successful arts figures far too generously, giving them too much credit for depth and vision, while missing the cynical forces by which they’d been buoyed up and marketed

“Foreign film” in America in the ’50s and ’60s—when independent art cinemas emerged, showing imports such as work by Ingmar Bergman and the French New Wave—proves to have been energized by a successful federal-government antitrust action against the monopolistic Hollywood studios

The idea of a “culture industry”

is used unironically by Menand to name the vastly scaled-up production and consumption of all artistic experience. “The culture industries, as they expanded, absorbed and commercialized independent and offbeat culture-makers, and the university, as it expanded, swallowed up the worlds of creative writing and dissident political opinion.”

With his eye on this process, we miss out on artists and thinkers who dug deep and stayed home, who produced as hermits or eccentrics or introverted students of their art

Where did rock ’n’ roll come from?” Menand wonders. He answers that it was “the by-product of a number of unrelated developments in the American music business” that redirected sales to teenagers, and also the result of new radio-station competition, the partial racial desegregation of the music charts, and the arrival of 200-disc jukeboxes

I can imagine The Free World leaving my hypothetical college senior, denizen of the bleak attention economy of the 21st century, feeling liberated to discover that culture was no better—no more committed to a quest for what is true, noble, lasting, and beautiful—in the world of the Baby Boomers and beaming grandparents.

The book is so masterful, and exhibits such brilliant writing and exhaustive research, that I wonder whether Menand could truly have intended where his history of the postwar era landed me. I learned so much, and ended up caring so much les

how many are aware that President Biden is among the more popular — well, less unpopular — leaders in the Western world?

First, let’s talk about some other international comparisons that seem relevant to the current situation.

But public perception of our economic performance is strongly colored by rising prices. Inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — has subsided a lot, but prices haven’t and won’t come down

No matter what we did, many people were going to die — but the death toll was affected by politics, perhaps especially by the way vaccines became a front in the culture war. And America had a really bad pandemic, even compared with its peers. U.S. life expectancy was already lagging behind comparable countries’ by 2019, but the gap widened after Covid-19 struck.

On the other hand, the U.S. economy experienced an exceptionally strong bounce back from the pandemic recession. Even after adjusting for inflation, U.S. gross domestic product per capita is up 7 percent since the eve of the pandemic, greatly exceeding growth in other major wealthy economies

This would seem on the face of it to say something good about Biden’s economic policies.

Although we hear politicians on the campaign trail trying to make hay with the old Reagan-era question — Are you better off than you were four years ago? — there’s a lot of amnesia about what was actually happening in 2020, namely a deadly, terrifying pandemic

there have been huge recriminations against policymakers, both the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve, either for supposedly causing the bout of inflation or at any rate failing to prevent it.

the similarities between the wealthiest nations are more revealing than their differences.

Inflation surged almost everywhere after the pandemic. And if you take care to compare “apples to Äpfel” — to use the same consumer price measures — inflation has been remarkably similar in different countries.

Since the eve of the pandemic, the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices has risen 19.6 percent in the United States and 19.8 percent in the euro area.

This strongly suggests that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than national policies, were inflation’s main driver.

Still, inflation rankles voters. Even when income growth exceeds inflation, as it has in the United States, people tend to feel that they earned their higher wages only to have them snatched away by higher prices

this is probably the most important reason that, according to tracking polls conducted by Morning Consult, every single leader of a Group of 7 nation is underwater, with more voters disapproving than approving of their leadership.

So who’s the winner of this unpopularity contest? Who has the least bad net approval? The answer is Joe Biden, with Giorgia Meloni of Italy a close second. The other Group of 7 leaders are even more unpopular

this has political consequences

every political analysis that says the fault for Biden’s low approval lies with the president and his campaign — that he’s too old (although that narrative, after suddenly peaking, mostly faded away after his State of the Union address) or is out of touch with the concerns of “real” Americans — needs to explain why he’s doing less badly than his foreign peers.

Dr. Longo, who is also a professor of gerontology and director of the U.S.C. Longevity Institute in California, has long advocated longer and better living through eating Lite Italian, one of a global explosion of Road to Perpetual Wellville theories about how to stay young in a field that is itself still in its adolescence.

In addition to identifying genes that regulate aging, he has created a plant and nut-based diet with supplements and kale crackers that mimics fasting to, he argues, allow cells to shed harmful baggage and rejuvenate, without the down side of actually starving.

He has patented and sold his ProLon diet kits; published best-selling books (“The Longevity Diet”); and been called an influential “Fasting Evangelist” by Time magazine.

Last month, he published a new study based on clinical trials of hundreds of older people — including in the Calabria town from which his family hails — that he said suggests that periodic cycles of his own faux-fasting approach could reduce biological age and stave off illnesses associated with aging.

“It’s very similar to the original Mediterranean diet, not the present one,” she said, pointing at photographs on the wall of a bowl of ancient legumes similar to the chickpe

“Almost nobody in Italy eats the Mediterranean diet,”

He added that many Italian children, especially in the country’s south, are obese, bloated on what he calls the poisonous five Ps — pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and pane (or bread).

in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires who hope to be forever young have funded secretive labs. Wellness articles have conquered newspaper home pages and Fountains-of-Youth workout and diet ads featuring insanely fit middle-aged people teem on the social media feeds of not insanely fit middle-aged people.

he said Italy’s lack of investment in research was a disgrace.

even as concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting and biological age — you’re only as old as your cells feel! — have gained momentum, governments like Italy’s are fretting over a creakier future in which booming populations of old people drain resources from the dwindling young.

many scientists, nutritionists and longevity fanatics the world over continue to stare longingly toward Italy, seeking in its deep pockets of centenarians a secret ingredient to long life.

“Probably they kept breeding between cousins and relatives,” Dr. Longo offered, referring to the sometimes close relations in little Italian hill towns. “At some point, we suspect it sort of generated the super-longevity genome.”

The genetic drawbacks of incest, he hypothesized, slowly vanished because those mutations either killed their carriers before they could reproduce or because the town noticed a monstrous ailment — like early onset Alzheimer’s — in a particular family line and steered clear.

Dr. Longo wonders whether Italy’s centenarians had been protected from later disease by a starvation period and old-fashioned Mediterranean diet early in life, during rural Italy’s abject war-era poverty. Then a boost of proteins and fats and modern medicine after Italy’s postwar economic miracle protected them from frailty as they got older and kept them alive.

At age 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives and couldn’t help notice that his middle-aged aunts and uncles fed on the “Chicago diet” of sausages and sugary drinks suffered diabetes and cardiovascular disease that their relatives back in Calabria did not.

He eventually earned his Ph.D in biochemistry at U.C.L.A. and did his postdoctoral training in the neurobiology of aging at U.S.C. He overcame early skepticism about the field to publish in top journals and became a zealous evangelizer for the age-reversing effects of his diet. About 10 years ago, eager to be closer to his aging parents in Genoa, he took a second job at the IFOM oncology institute in Milan.

He found a fount of inspiration in the pescatarian-heavy diet around Genoa and all the legumes down in Calabria.

he also found the modern Italian diet — the cured meats, layers of lasagna and fried vegetables the world hungered for — horrendous and a source of disease.

His private foundation, also based in Milan, tailors diets for cancer patients, but also consults for Italian companies and schools, promoting a Mediterranean diet that is actually foreign to most Italians today.

“Italy’s got such incredible history and a wealth of information about aging,” he said. “But spends virtually nothing.”

He talked about how he and others had identified an important regulator of aging in yeast, and how he has investigated whether the same pathway was at work in all organisms.

Dr. Longo said he thinks of his mission as extending youth and health, not simply putting more years on the clock, a goal he said could lead to a “scary world,” in which only the rich could afford to live for centuries, potentially forcing caps on having children

A more likely short-term scenario, he said, was division between two populations. The first would live as we do now and reach about 80 or longer through medical advancements. But Italians would be saddled with long — and, given the drop in the birthrate, potentially lonely — years burdened by horrible diseases.

The other population would follow fasting diets and scientific breakthroughs and live to 100 and perhaps 110 in relative good health.

In my talks with more than 100 voters, no one mentioned the word “authoritarian.” But that was no surprise — many everyday people don’t think in those terms. Focusing solely on these labels can miss the point.

Authoritarian leaders project qualities that many voters — not just Trump voters — admire: strength, a sense of control, even an ends-justify-the-means leadership style

Our movie-hero presidents, Top Gun pilots and crusading lawyers often take matters into their own hands or break the rules in ways that we cheer.

they have something in common with Trump: They are seen as having special or singular strengths, an “I alone can fix it” power.

argued that it’s just Trump who’s strong and honest enough to say it out loud — for them, a sign that he’s honest.

also see him as an authentic strongman who is not a typical politician

during Trump’s presidency, “there weren’t any active wars going on except for Afghanistan, which he did not start. He started no new wars. Our economy was great. Our gas prices were under 2 bucks a gallon. It’s just common sense to me. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Trump’s vulgar language, his penchant for insults (“Don’t call him a fat pig,” he said about Chris Christie) and his rhetoric about political opponents (promising to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country”) are seen as signs of authenticity and strength by his supporters

Jan. 6, 2021, at the Capitol. I didn’t encounter a single outright supporter of what happened, but many people explained the events away. Increasingly separate information environments and our fractured media ecology shape the way people view that day.

they think Biden is too weak and too old to be president. They talk about him with attack lines frequently used by Trump, saying that he’s senile, falling down stairs, losing his train of thought while talking and so on

What I heard from voters drawn to Trump was that he had a special strength in making the economy work better for them than Biden has, and that he was a tough, “don’t mess with me” absolutist, which they see as helping to prevent new wars.

Many Trump supporters told me that had Trump been president, the war in Ukraine wouldn’t have happened because he would have been strong enough to be feared by Vladimir Putin or smart enough to make a deal with him, if necessary

Neither would Hamas have dared attack Israel, a few added. Their proof was that during Trump’s presidency, these wars indeed did not happen.

Like many of these right-wing populists, Trump leans heavily on the message that he alone is strong enough to keep America peaceful and prosperous in a scary world

In Iowa, Trump praised Orban himself before telling a cheering crowd: “For four straight years, I kept America safe. I kept Israel safe. I kept Ukraine safe, and I kept the entire world safe.”

from Trump, these statements often resulted in the crowds leaping to their feet (actually, some rallygoers never sat down) and interrupting him with applause and cheering.

That’s charisma. Charisma is an underrated aspect of political success — and it’s not necessarily a function of political viewpoint. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama oozed it, for example, and so does Trump.

Charismatic leaders, Weber wrote, “have a certain quality of an individual personality, by virtue of which he is set apart from ordinary men,” and is sought as a leader, especially when people feel the times are troubled.

Polls also show that voters believe that Trump would do a better job than Biden on the economy, foreign policy and immigration. It was Trump’s perceived strength, in contrast with Biden’s perceived weakness, that was the common theme that tied it all together for his supporters.

“I’m not concerned with Jan. 6,” Finch said. “I don’t trust our government. I don’t trust anything they’re saying. They’ve been doing this to Black people for so long, railroading them, so they have zero credibility. So I don’t even care about it, and I don’t want to hear about Jan. 6.”

For her, biased mainstream media is misrepresenting him. “He was making the point that he’d use executive orders on Day 1, like the others do — executive orders bypass Congress, but that’s how it’s done these days,” she said. “He was being sarcastic, not saying he’d be a real dictator.”

What’s a bit of due process overstepped here, a trampled emoluments clause there, when all politicians are believed to be corrupt and fractured information sources pump very different messages about reality?

Politicians projecting strength at the expense of the rules of liberal democracy isn’t a new phenomenon in the United States, or the world. Thomas Jefferson worried about it. So did Plato. Perhaps acknowledging that Trump’s appeal isn’t that mysterious can help people grapple with its power.

Opening the marriage wasn’t just about doing whatever — and whoever — she wanted, she said. She had to cast off internalized sexism and her tendency to put others’ needs before her own, issues she worked through in therapy. What began as sexual thrill-seeking led unexpectedly to self-discovery.

“I thought non-monogamy was going to be all about the sex,” she said. “I thought I was going on a big sexual adventure, and it was going to be super exciting. And it was, until it wasn’t.”

Eventually, Winter swore off men who were cheating and began seeing people who were also in open relationships, a demographic that became easier to find when online dating services added non-monogamous to their menus. Even then, options were limited.

Winter and her husband struggled with when and how to tell their sons about their arrangement, and wanted to wait until their children were mature enough to handle it. That plan failed when their oldest son, then 13, saw his dad’s online dating profile on his laptop, and texted his mother in a panic, asking if they were in an open marriage. Her youngest son found out in a similar way a few years ago, when he was 14, she said.