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This was clearest in his attitude to India. When Gandhi began his campaign of peaceful resistance, Churchill raged that he “ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back.” He later added: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”

If Churchill had been interested only in saving the empire, he could probably have cut a deal with Hitler. No: he had a deeper repugnance to Nazism than that. He may have been a thug, but he knew a greater thug when he saw one — and we may owe our freedom today to this wrinkle in history.

Hussein Onyango Obama is unusual among Churchill’s victims only in one respect: his story has been rescued from the slipstream of history. Churchill believed the highlands, the most fertile land in Kenya, should be the sole preserve of the white settlers, and approved of the clearing out of the local “kaffirs.” When the Kikuyu rebelled under Churchill’s postwar premiership, some 150,000 of them were forced at gunpoint into detention camps, later called “Britain’s gulag” by the historian Caroline Elkins. Obama never truly recovered from the torture he endured.

In 1943, to give just one example, a famine broke out in Bengal, caused, as the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen has proven, by British mismanagement. To the horror of many of his colleagues, Churchill raged that it was their own fault for “breeding like rabbits” and refused to offer any aid for months while hundreds of thousands died.

This is the great, enduring paradox of Churchill’s life. In leading the charge against Nazism, he produced some of the richest prose poetry in defense of freedom and democracy ever written. It was a check he didn’t want black or Asian people to cash, but as the Ghanaian nationalist Kwame Nkrumah wrote, “all the fair brave words spoken about freedom that had been broadcast to the four corners of the earth took seed and grew where they had not been intended.”

One sign of a failed state is that networks of favors and obligations among friends begin to subsume the formal institutional pathways of power in governmen

When rich businesspeople shower lavish favors on powerful jurists—at a moment when questions of economic inequality, business regulation, and corporate power are among the most divisive matters before the courts—can those jurists credibly say they do no service in return?

Crow’s firm did have business before the Supreme Court in 2004—a case from which Thomas did not recuse himself. This brings the Thomas-Crow relationship into a gray area in which no overt crime has occurred, but over which hangs a cloud of suggestive obscurity incompatible with democratic legitimacy.

when elites—both corporate and political—conduct their affairs through “friendly” exchanges of favors and gifts, the result is corruption that can render democracy nonfunctional.

As Gambetta has pointed out, even people who might seem insignificant can play a vital role in a Mafia-style system. They “may be short of cash but capable of returning valuable favors,” he writes. “Services not for sale elsewhere gain common currency here: votes, … bureaucratic dispensations, … selective privileges of all sorts.”

These favors are the great leveler between the rich and powerful and the network of people who “owe” them.

When Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court, he was part owner of a Colorado property that had languished on the market for two years. Shortly after his confirmation, Gorsuch and his co-owners sold it to the chief executive of a law firm with frequent business before the Court. Although Gorsuch declared the amount he earned from the sale on his ethics disclosure form (between $250,001 and $500,000), he notably left blank the name of the buyer. Since then, the law firm has argued at least 22 cases before Gorsuch and his colleagues; in the 12 cases where Gorsuch’s decision is recorded, he decided in favor of the firm’s clients eight times. A coincidence, perhaps. But if it was in any way a “bureaucratic dispensation” in return for taking a justice’s share of a white-elephant property off his hands, the public would never know. That’s the problem. Legitimacy has always been mostly a matter of appearances.

According to whistleblower documents obtained by Insider, Jane Roberts earned more than $10 million in commissions as a legal recruiter from 2007 to 2014, with clients including at least one firm that later appeared before her husband. The Supreme Court operates mostly on an honor system—which becomes untenable if lawyers appear to be seeking favor before the high court by enriching its members’ households, and if justices’ spouses can be plausibly accused of monetizing their proximity to official power.

“Friends of John were mostly friends of Jane, and while it certainly did not harm her access to top people to have John as her spouse, I never saw her ‘use’ that inappropriately,” one of Jane Roberts’s former colleagues told Insider. But another colleague saw her actions as corrupt and filed a whistleblower complaint. As part of her sworn testimony in that case, Jane summed up the modus operandi of the Supreme Court and its circle with a line that could have come straight from the Godfather’s lips: “Successful people have successful friends.”

there are huge consequences to this technology. And it’s not just the danger of ripping our industry apart, but also ripping other industries apart, all the creative industries. How many jobs are going to be lost? What’s the damage to the economy going to be if these rapacious organisations can continue to operate without any legal ramifications?

The danger is that these huge platforms end up in an arms race with each other. They’re like elephants fighting and then everybody else is like mice that get stamped on without them even realising the consequences of their actions.”

The risk was that the internet had become an echo chamber of stories produced by special interest groups and rogue states, he said.

Rothermere revealed that DMGT had experimented with using AI to help journalists to publish stories faster, but that it then took longer “to check the accuracy of what it comes up” than it would have done to write the article.

The complication that Gordon and other internet-skeptical researchers like Ha-Joon Chang have introduced is to question just how meaningful those digital technologies have been for a) economic growth and b) the daily experience of human life. It can be hard for people who stare at their phones all day to consider the possibility that digital technology just isn’t that important. But ask yourself: if you were forced to live either without your iPhone or without indoor plumbing, could you really choose the latter?

Certainly the improvements in medical care in the past half-century feel very important to me as someone living now, and one saved life has immensely emotional and practical importance for many people. What’s more, advances in communication sciences and computer technology genuinely have been revolutionary; going from the Apple II to the iPhone in 30 years is remarkable.

we can always debate what constitutes major or revolutionary change

The question is, who in 2023 ever says to themselves “smartphone cameras just aren’t good enough”?

continued improvements in worldwide mortality in the past 75 years have been a matter of spreading existing treatments and practices to the developing world, rather than the result of new science.

When you got your first smartphone, and you thought about what the future would hold, were your first thoughts about more durable casing? I doubt it. I know mine weren’t.

Why is Apple going so hard on TITANIUM? Well, where else does smartphone development have to go?

The elephant in the room, obviously, is AI.

The processors will get faster. They’ll add more RAM. They’ll generally have more power. But for what? To run what? To do what? To run the games that we were once told would replace our PlayStation and Xbox games, but didn’t?

Smartphone development has been a good object lesson in the reality that cool ideas aren’t always practical or worthwhile

And as impressive as some new development in medicine has been, there’s no question that in simple terms of reducing preventable deaths, the advances seen from 1900 to 1950 dwarf those seen since. To a rem

We developed this technology for typewriters and terminals and desktops, it Just Works, and there’s no reason to try and “disrupt” it

Instead of one device to rule them all, we developed a norm of syncing across devices and cloud storage, which works well. (I always thought it was pretty funny, and very cynical, how Apple went from calling the iPhone an everything device to later marketing the iPad and iWatch.) In other words, we developed a software solution rather than a hardware one

I will always give it up to Google Maps and portable GPS technology; that’s genuinely life-altering, probably the best argument for smartphones as a transformative technology. But let me ask you, honestly: do you still go out looking for apps, with the assumption that you’re going to find something that really changes your life in a significant way?

some people are big VR partisans. I’m deeply skeptical. The brutal failures of Meta’s new “metaverse” is just one new example of a decades-long resistance to the technology among consumers

maybe I just don’t want VR to become popular, given the potential ugly social consequences. If you thought we had an incel problem now….

There were, in those breathless early days, a lot of talk about how people simply wouldn’t own laptops anymore, how your phone would do everything. But it turns out that, for one thing, the keyboard remains an input device of unparalleled convenience and versatility.

It’s not artificial intelligence. It thinks nothing like a human thinks. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that it has evolved sentience or consciousness. There is nothing at present that these systems can do that human being simply can’t. But they can potentially do some things in the world of bits faster and cheaper than human beings, and that might have some meaningful consequences. But there is no reasonable, responsible claim to be made that these systems are imminent threats to conventional human life as currently lived, whether for good or for bad. IMO.

Let’s mutually agree to consider immediate plausible human technological progress outside of AI or “AI.” What’s coming? What’s plausible?

The most consequential will be our efforts to address climate change, and we have the potential to radically change how we generate electricity, although electrifying heating and transportation are going to be harder than many seem to think, while solar and wind power have greater ecological costs than people want to admit. But, yes, that’s potentially very very meaningful

It’s another example of how technological growth will still leave us with continuity rather than with meaningful change.

I kept thinking was, privatizing space… to do what? A manned Mars mission might happen in my lifetime, which is cool. But a Mars colony is a distant dream

This is why I say we live in the Big Normal, the Big Boring, the Forever Now. We are tragic people: we were born just too late to experience the greatest flowering of human development the world has ever seen. We do, however, enjoy the rather hefty consolation prize that we get to live with the affordances of that period, such as not dying of smallpox.

I think we all need to learn to appreciate what we have now, in the world as it exists, at the time in which we actually live. Frankly, I don’t think we have any other choice.

With Mahinda Rajapaksa, the president, then at the peak of his powers, he did what many nationalist strongmen do: erect tributes to himself.

That’s now all gone. Sri Lanka is an international basket case whose foreign reserves — which once stood at over $6 billion under the Rajapaksas — have dwindled to almost nothing.

The collapse is partly a result of the loss of tourism during the pandemic, a problem made worse as war has kept away many of the Russians and Ukrainians who used to visit in large numbers. But the family’s economic mismanagement and denial of festering problems have also contributed mightily.

With food prices rising, electricity often cut and lifesaving medicines scarce, protesters have pushed Mr. Rajapaksa, 76, out of his latest position — prime minister — and are demanding that his brother Gotabaya, 72, give up the presidency.

Just outside the private residence of Mr. Rajapaksa, the Carlton House, they tied ropes to a gold-colored statue of his father, D.A. Rajapaksa. When they couldn’t drag it down, they dug under its feet until it collapsed. And around the corner from the family’s sprawling ancestral estate, they torched the museum memorializing the resting place of the patriarch and his wife.

“Whatever the politics, they shouldn’t have done this to their parents’ resting place.”

Before the economy crashed, she would sell 30 to 40 pots a day. That number has since dropped to about 20, as people have saved for other necessities. Most days in recent weeks, she has come back with half of her stack of 15 unsold.

During her grocery trips, she can buy only half of what she did in the past.

She was clear about who was to blame: the Rajapaksas.

“If you are investing in debt, you should really be looking at return — and quick return. You can’t do all your long-term, hard infrastructure projects on debt,” said Eran Wickramaratne, a former banker turned state minister of finance. “We completely overleveraged ourselves, and the returns are not there.”

With their power consolidated, they announced broad tax cuts — rapidly undoing the work of aligning Sri Lanka’s spending more with its means — and made a disastrous decision to ban chemical fertilizers in hopes of turning the country toward organic farming.

At the airport, which for a time was used to store grain, the only outsiders are the crews of occasional cargo flights, or groups of curious villagers on tours to see the complex. The cricket stadium, where the scoreboard clock is stuck in some afternoon past, was at one point rented out as a wedding venue to produce some revenue. It has a capacity of 35,000, more than the town of Hambantota’s entire population, 25,000.

“But these megaprojects were meaningless,” he said. “This region still has elephants crossing the roads, and people are still cultivating paddy as a livelihood. So these projects were unnecessary.”

“They did a lot — they won the war, they built roads,” Ms. Niroshani said.

But what about economic hardship, Ms. Wijeyawickrama asked.

“In a few days it may be that we have nothing to eat.”