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It’s only now becoming clear how little we understood what the United States experienced during that unforgettable year and how deeply it shaped us

I’ve come to think of our current condition as a kind of long Covid, a social disease that intensified a range of chronic problems and instilled the belief that the institutions we’d been taught to rely on are unworthy of our trust

On a wide range of outcomes, including many that were less visible at the time, this country fared much worse during the Covid pandemic than comparable nations did. Distrust, division and disorganized leadership contributed to the scale of our negative health outcomes.

There are many explanations for complicity, Applebaum argued. A potent one is fear. Many Republican elected officials, she wrote, “don’t know that similar waves of fear have helped transform other democracies into dictatorships.”

None of the 43 senators who allowed Donald Trump to escape conviction made fear their argument, of course. Not publicly anyway. The excuses ranged widely

On February 13, 2021, Romney was joined by six other Republicans—North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Louisiana’s Bill Cassidy, Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski, Maine’s Susan Collins, Nebraska’s Ben Sasse, and Pennsylvania’s Pat Toomey—in voting to convict. If the United States and its Constitution survive the coming challenge from Trump and Trumpism, statues will one day be raised to these seven.

In one 2022 poll, 43 percent of Americans said they thought a civil war within the next decade was at least somewhat likely. I wouldn’t go that far, but I won’t be surprised if political violence spikes after the upcoming election and eventually spirals out of control.

now that I’ve seen “Civil War,” which is neither glib nor cynical, Garland’s decision to keep the film’s politics a little ambiguous seems like a source of its power. The emphasis here should be on “a little” because, contrary to some of what I’d read, its values aren’t inscrutable, just lightly worn

Part of what makes it so searing, though, is that aside from its unlikely California-Texas alliance, its story doesn’t require too much explanation to make sense.

Chocolate has had “mounting problems for years,” Sophia Carodenuto, an environmental scientist at the University of Victoria, in Canada, told me. The farmers who grow them are chronically underpaid. And cocoa trees—the fruits of which contain beans that are fermented and roasted to create chocolate—are tough to grow, and thrive only in certain conditions. A decade ago, chocolate giants warned that the cocoa supply, already facing environmental challenges, would soon be unable to keep up with rising demand. “But what we’re seeing now is a little bit of an explosion”

The simplest explanation for the ongoing cocoa shortage is extreme weather, heightened by climate change. Exceptionally hot and dry conditions in West Africa, partly driven by the current El Niño event, have led to reduced yields. Heavier-than-usual rains have created ideal conditions for black pod disease, which causes cocoa pods to rot on the branch. All of this has taken place while swollen shoot, a virus fatal to cocoa plants, is spreading more rapidly in cocoa-growing regions. Global cocoa production is expected to fall by nearly 11 percent this season,

Already, some West African farmers are racing to plant new trees. But they may not be able to plant their way out of future cocoa shortages. “Climate change is definitely a challenge” because it will make rainfall less predictable, which is a problem for moisture-sensitive cocoa trees, Debenham told me. Furthermore, rising temperatures and more frequent droughts will render some cocoa-growing regions unusable.

Think about any concept that we might want to teach somebody—for instance, the Pythagorean theorem. There must be thousands of old and new explanations of the Pythagorean theorem online. The real thing we need is to understand each child’s learning style so we can immediately connect them to the one out of those thousands that is the best fit for how they learn. That to me sounds like an AI kind of project, but it’s a different kind of AI application from DALL-E or large language models.

Right now a lot of generative AI is free, but the technology is also very expensive to run. How do you think access to generative AI might play out?

Stephenson: There was a bit of early internet utopianism in the book, which was written during that era in the mid-’90s when the internet was coming online. There was a tendency to assume that when all the world’s knowledge comes online, everyone will flock to it

Instagram makes it easy for strangers to find photos of children, and its algorithm is built to identify users’ interests and push similar content. Investigations by The Wall Street Journal and outside researchers have found that, upon recognizing that an account might be sexually interested in children, Instagram’s algorithm recommends child accounts for the user to follow, as well as sexual content related to both children and adults.

That algorithm has become the engine powering the growth of an insidious world in which young girls’ online popularity is perversely predicated on gaining large numbers of male followers. 

Instagram photos of young girls become a dark currency, swapped and discussed obsessively among men on encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram. The Journal reviewed dozens of conversations in which the men fetishized specific body parts and expressed pleasure in knowing that many parents of young influencers understand that hundreds, if not thousands, of pedophiles have found their children online.   

a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China.

If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

Too many on the left wing of American politics have become inured to the effect of their overheated rhetoric and histrionic displays of fealty to in-group norms

Bowman’s supporters sought easy explanations for his defeat, including that redistricting had shifted his district northward out of much of the Bronx and into Westchester. But Bowman in fact had fared well in the predominantly Democratic suburban county in his 2020 and 2022 campaigns.

claims that the massive spending of pro-Israel groups was responsible for Bowman’s defeat warrant skepticism