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what’s most Faustian about Mr. Vance — and by proxy Mr. Trump. Their belief that a movement built on aggrievement and rage can be easily controlled, that there is some way in which you can trick the Devil while holding onto what he’s given you.

In my book on Faust, I argue that the politics of authoritarianism is often embraced as a tool by those who believe that they can contain such forces and use them for political gain.

There is a lesson for Mr. Vance from the Faust story, however, assuming he can hear it. Beyond mere self-interest, what the legend warns against is the embrace of irrational forces and powers, especially when there is the delusion that the person trading their soul can wrangle the Devil

WASHINGTON — Senator Jeff Flake, the Arizona Republican who has tangled with President Trump for months, announced on Tuesday that he would not seek re-election in 2018, declaring on the Senate floor that he “will no longer be complicit or silent” in the face of the president’s “reckless, outrageous and undignified” behavior.Mr. Flake made his announcement in an extraordinary 17-minute speech in which he challenged not only the president but also his party’s leadership. He deplored the “casual undermining of our democratic ideals” and “the personal attacks, the threats against principles, freedoms and institutions, the flagrant disregard for truth and decency” that he said had become prevalent in American politics in the era of Mr. Trump.

Mr. Flake’s private polling had steadily become worse this year as he intensified his criticism of Mr. Trump. His firm stand against the president had alienated Republican voters, but his long, conservative track record dissuaded Democratic voters in the state from coming to his side. One poll showed he had just an 18 percent approval rating among Arizona residents, and a survey that the senator conducted last month led some of his own allies to conclude that he could not win a Republican primary, according to multiple officials directly familiar with the situation in the weeks leading up to Tuesday’s speech.

“We must stop pretending that the degradation of our politics and the conduct of some in our executive branch are normal,” Mr. Flake said. “They are not normal. Reckless, outrageous and undignified behavior has become excused and countenanced as telling it like it is when it is actually just reckless, outrageous and undignified. And when such behavior emanates from the top of our government, it is something else. It is dangerous to a democracy.”

it was the Faustian bargain he struck with the president, normalizing the abnormal and forgiving the unforgivable for the sake of a single mediocre policy win.

It will remember the alacrity and ease with which the supposedly likable face of pro-growth, family-friendly conservatism opportunistically played the sycophant to the congenitally mendacious and previously priapic nativist bigot who, through a bad fluke, captured the White House.

A conservative rejoinder to this critique is that the speaker had no choice; that Trump was the lemon with which he had to make lemonade. Nonsense. Congress and the White House are coequals, and Ryan and other Republicans who saw Trump for what he is never owed him obeisance

In 1995, left-wing academics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron detailed the philosophy and ideas of the new tech wunderkinds, christening it “The Californian Ideology.” This ideology represented a fusion of the cultural bohemianism of San Francisco and entrepreneurial free market zeal. Barbrook and Cameron thought it was appealing because it offered a way out of the traditional political struggles over wealth distribution or fairness

A profound faith in the emancipatory qualities of technology allowed the techies to paper over any inconsistencies, because they promised that when the revolution arrived everyone would be great and cool and fulfilled and rich. All you needed to get to utopia was a belief in “disruption,” the idea that progress is achieved through smashing up old industries and institutions and replacing them with something new and digital.

Money and ideas in Silicon Valley have a very complicated relationship. Even start-up visionaries and wide-eyed socially-minded inventors need money to survive, to pay extortionate Bay Area rent and to hire the best programmers. Silicon Valley runs according to a Faustian pact: money in exchange for world-changing ideas

e keep hearing that this is a war. Is it really? What helps to give the current crisis its wartime feel is the apparent absence of normal political argument.

this is not the suspension of politics. It is the stripping away of one layer of political life to reveal something more raw underneath

In a democracy we tend to think of politics as a contest between different parties for our support. We focus on the who and the what of political life: who is after our votes, what they are offering us, who stands to benefit. We see elections as the way to settle these arguments

all is far from well in the kingdom of Bezos. At a defining moment for the company, it is letting customers down.

the promise to ship anything to our doorstep in a day or two that has gained it the trust of an astonishing 112 million Prime members in the U.S. (a nation of 129 million households) has evaporated nearly overnight.

it feels like Amazon is little better than any other retailer at getting us what we need, when we need it.

n the choices we make as consumers and private citizens, we have always traded some of our autonomy to gain other rewards. Many people, it seems clear, experience surveillance capitalism less as a prison, where their agency is restricted in a noxious way, than as an all-inclusive resort, where their agency is restricted in a pleasing way

Zuboff makes a convincing case that this is a short-sighted and dangerous view — that the bargain we’ve struck with the internet giants is a Faustian one

but her case would have been stronger still had she more fully addressed the benefits side of the ledger.

Based strictly on the standard of advancing causes that conservative evangelicals most care about, a fair-minded assessment of the Trump record is that some important things were achieved, especially in appointing federal judges. That clearly would not have happened in a Hillary Clinton presidency. But in virtually every other area, including the outcome of several key Supreme Court decisions, Trump has fallen short of the promises and expectations.

My hunch is that at the beginning of this Faustian bargain, most evangelicals didn’t imagine it would come to this, with them defending the indefensible, tarnishing their reputations, and doing incalculable damage to their causes.

This is the worst year for America in more than a half century; a stunning 87 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the way things are going and only 17 percent feel proud when thinking about the state of the nation, while 71 percent feel angry and 66 percent are fearful

The GOP made its Faustian bargain years ago. Early in Trump’s presidency there was a transmutation; his brutal style of politics, his lies and conspiracy theories, and his corruption, which were once tolerated, became celebrated.

The effect is to sow distrust in our legal institutions. That’s the point. Delegitimize them. Shatter confidence in institutions and sources of authority that can hold liars and lawbreakers accountable. Manipulate people into doubting what is true. As James Poniewozik of The New York Times has put it, if Trump and his allies succeed in convincing his supporters that there is no truth, then they will be left to conclude that “you should just follow your gut & your tribe.” You can get away with a lot if you can make up your own facts. Donald Trump has gotten away with a lot, at least until now.

It never came, because most Republicans—some cynical, some too afraid to speak out, some cultlike in their devotion to Trump—decided early on to reject any evidence that would discomfort them, that would call into question their partisan loyalties, that would cause them to have serious second thoughts. Most of all, they decided to reject any evidence showing that their opponents were right about Trump and they were wrong. They decided that the awful things Trump has done can’t be true because they don’t want them to be true. This is their political a priori.

the brief return of one of my favorite discursive topics—are the kids all right?—in one of my least-favorite variations: why shouldn’t each of them have a smartphone and tablet?

Smartphones offer a tactile portal to a novel digital environment, and this environment is not the kind of space you enter and leave

complaints about screen time merely conceal a desire to punish hard-working parents for marginally benefiting from climbing luxury standards, provide examples of the moral panic occasioned by all new technologies, or mistakenly blame screens for ill effects caused by the general political situation.

Slowly and without fanfare, around the end of the aughts, social media took its place. The change was almost invisible, but it had enormous consequences. Instead of facilitating the modest use of existing connections—largely for offline life (to organize a birthday party, say)—social software turned those connections into a latent broadcast channel. All at once, billions of people saw themselves as celebrities, pundits, and tastemakers.

A global broadcast network where anyone can say anything to anyone else as often as possible, and where such people have come to think they deserve such a capacity, or even that withholding it amounts to censorship or suppression—that’s just a terrible idea from the outset. And it’s a terrible idea that is entirely and completely bound up with the concept of social media itself: systems erected and used exclusively to deliver an endless stream of content.

“social media,” a name so familiar that it has ceased to bear meaning. But two decades ago, that term didn’t exist

Every few years, it seems, there is a new bestselling Big History book. And not infrequently, they have rather grandiose titles.

, I hope to convince you why I think this book will stand the test of time better.

First, rather than one author’s pet theory, The Dawn of Everything is the brainchild of two outspoken writers: anthropologist David Graeber (a figurehead in the Occupy Wall Street movement and author of e.g. Bullshit Jobs) and archaeologist David Wengrow (author of e.g. What Makes Civilization?). I expect a large part of their decade-long collaboration consisted of shooting holes in each other’s arguments

Mr. Altman said he fears what could happen if AI is rolled out into society recklessly. He co-founded OpenAI eight years ago as a research nonprofit, arguing that it’s uniquely dangerous to have profits be the main driver of developing powerful AI models.

He is so wary of profit as an incentive in AI development that he has taken no direct financial stake in the business he built, he said—an anomaly in Silicon Valley, where founders of successful startups typically get rich off their equity. 

His goal, he said, is to forge a new world order in which machines free people to pursue more creative work. In his vision, universal basic income—the concept of a cash stipend for everyone, no strings attached—helps compensate for jobs replaced by AI. Mr. Altman even thinks that humanity will love AI so much that an advanced chatbot could represent “an extension of your will.”

To some, it all sounds like noise. “Whether Covid came accidentally from a lab in Wuhan or a seafood market is almost beside the point,” Edward Luce wrote in The Financial Times last month,

This has always struck me as an exceedingly strange perspective. Perhaps it is a truism to say that the events that brought about the deaths of perhaps 20 million people around the world and the jagged disruption of many billions of other lives are of enormous consequence and that dismissing the matter of its cause as simply a “blame game” is a form of not just historical but moral incuriosity.

It is consequential as long as it remains unresolved, as well. That’s because our collective uncertainty about the origin of the pandemic has itself shaped the way we’ve come to think about what we’ve all just lived through, the way we responded in the first place and the way the pandemic has played out, often weaponized, in geopolitics.