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“It became apparent just how many hypotheses there were out there,” Dr. Harper said. “Thirty-plus over the past 10 years.”

it’s a mistake to search for a single cause. They propose that a tangled web of factors and feedbacks were responsible for evolution’s big bang.

Long before the Cambrian explosion, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper argue, one lineage of animals had already evolved the genetic capacity for spectacular diversity. Known as the bilaterians, they probably looked at first like little crawling worms.

It took a global flood to tap that capacity,

They offered evidence that the Cambrian Explosion was preceded by a rise in sea level that submerged vast swaths of land, eroding the drowned rocks.

“There’s a big kick that correlates with the sea level rise,” Dr. Smith said of the fossil record. He and Dr. Harper propose that this kick happened thanks to the new habitats created by the sea level rise. These shallow coastal habitats were bathed in sunlight and nourished with eroding nutrients like phosphates. Animals colonized these new fertile habitats, Dr. Smith and Dr. Harper argue, and evolved to take up new ecological niches.

The erosion of the coastlines released calcium, which can be toxic to cells. In order to survive, animals had to evolve ways to rid themselves of the poison. One solution may have been to pack the calcium into crystals, which eventually evolved into shells, bones, and other hard tissues.

These shells and other hard tissues sped up animal evolution even more. Predators could grow hard claws and jaws for killing prey, and their prey could evolve hard shells and spines to defend themselves. Animals became locked in an evolutionary arms race.

“It was just kind of sitting there, and I couldn’t believe no one had taken it on,” said Mr. Neri, author of six books for teenagers, including “Ghetto Cowboy.” “Both she and Truman used their real lives as fodder for their fiction, and I figured if they did it, maybe I could do it too.”

“Go Set a Watchman,” which takes place 20 years after “Mockingbird” when Scout is an adult, is punctuated by flashbacks to her childhood adventures with her brother, Jem, and her best friend, Dill, the Capote figure: “He was a short, square-built, cotton-headed individual with the face of an angel and the cunning of a stoat,” Ms. Lee wrote. “He was a year older than she, but she was a head taller.”

In one scene of “Watchman” that parallels an actual childhood incident, Dill, Scout and Jem put on a mock Baptist revival, culminating with a baptism in the fish pond. To their mortification, their antics are interrupted by dinner guests, the minister and his wife. In reality, Nelle, Truman and his cousin put on a mock carnival sideshow on a similar occasion, shocking the visitors, an episode woven into Mr. Neri’s book.

Born a year and a half apart, the young Harper and Truman both had active imaginations and distant mothers. Neither of them fit in especially well in a small Southern community.“Nelle was too rough for the girls, and Truman was scared of the boys, so he just tagged on to her and she was his protector,” a family friend, Charles Ray Skinner, recalled in “Mockingbird,” Charles J. Shields’s biography of Ms. Lee. When schoolyard bullies ganged up on Truman, who was small for his age, Nelle, who was younger, got in fistfights to protect him.

Ms. Lee, who stopped giving formal interviews in the 1960s, once described feeling bound to Mr. Capote by “a common anguish” and said of her childhood, “We lived in our imagination most of the time.” Mr. Capote recalled in an interview that the two often felt like “apart people.”

He conceded defeat and will resign as leader of the party, but said he'll remain in parliament as a lawmaker.

Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition, as Harper's Conservatives will now officially be designated, have 99 seats.As the crowd chanted his name, Trudeau said the Liberals won because "we listened.""We beat fear with hope, we beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together," he said. "Most of all we defeated the idea that Canadians should be satisfied with less, and that better isn't possible. My friends, this is Canada, where better is always possible."

The son of Pierre Trudeau and scion of Canada's first, nascent political dynasty, the 43-year-old surged into the lead in recent weeks, largely on the back of anti-Conservative sentiment that saw Harper's party lagging as Canadians went to the polls.Before the grueling, 78-day electioneering cycle began, many dismissed the younger Trudeau as trading off of his father's achievements and the famous family name. But pundits in Canada have praised his campaign and the way he has led the Liberals to what transpired to be a sweeping victory.

The trenches, near the town of Gosport, about 80 miles (130 kilometers) south of London, were rediscovered a few months ago by Robert Harper, head of conservation at the local council. A military history buff, he noticed some crenellated lines on a 1950s aerial photograph of the area, and was startled to recognize the pattern of “the classic British trench system.”

the aim at the mock battlefield is “to repopulate the landscape,” to tell the stories of some of the troops who trained there. Soldiers from Britain, Canada, New Zealand and the U.S. all passed through this area, close to the major naval base of Portsmouth, on their way to the front.

Now Trump is consciously attacking the very concept of bipartisan consensus, recasting it not as a manifestation of healthy national unity but as an inherently corrupt bargain that spawns a “deep state.”

Only when sectional and partisan battles gave way to new international responsibilities, and (relative) domestic harmony, in the 20th century could Republicans and Democrats define shared national interests and accept the need for permanent secret agencies to protect them.

This consensus almost broke down amid the revelations of major abuses by the FBI and CIA during the 1960s and 1970s. Bipartisan reforms — enhanced congressional oversight, coupled with limited judicial review of spying by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) — salvaged it.

the American national consensus about intelligence, and many other things, was already in deep trouble long before Trump came on the scene. If there were still a robust political center, Trump never would have been elected in the first place.

“Those who would counter the illiberalism of Trump with the illiberalism of unfettered bureaucrats would do well to contemplate the precedent their victory would set,” Tufts University constitutional scholar Michael J. Glennon warns in a 2017 Harper’s article.

We are witnessing a democratic nightmare: partisan competition over secret and semi-secret intelligence and law-enforcement agencies. And as Glennon notes, it would be unwise to bet against Trump; he has favors to dispense and punishments to dish out.

The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.

AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”

AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.

Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.

n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.

One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.

erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.

“There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).

A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.

Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”

Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”

Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”

One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)

AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.

Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.

With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”

His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”

Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.

Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.

Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”

Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”

A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.

Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.

Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.

ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load

We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”

Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits

But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.

n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.

Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.

ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”

the overwhelming majority of self-identifying addicts—about 90 percent—are male. Women are more often categorized as “love addicts,” with a compulsive tendency to fall into dependent relationships and form unrealistic bonds with partners. That’s partly because women are more apt than men to be stigmatized by association with sex addiction

“Sex addiction” remains a controversial designation—often dismissed as a myth

between 3 and 5 percent of the U.S. population—or more than 9 million people—could meet the criteria for addiction. Some 1,500 sex therapists treating compulsive behavior are practicing today, up from fewer than 100 a decade ago, say several researchers and clinicians, while dozens of rehabilitation centers now advertise treatment programs, up from just five or six in the same period.

“sex addiction isn’t really about sex,” as Weiss puts it; it’s about “being wanted.” X3LA’s Steven Luff says, “Sex is the perfect match for that. ‘I matter right now. In this moment, I am loved.’ In that sense, an entire culture, an entire nation is looking for meaning.”

Sex addicts are compelled by the same heightened emotional arousal that can drive alcoholics or drug addicts to act so recklessly, say addiction experts. Research shows that substance abusers and sex addicts alike form a dependency on the brain’s pleasure-center neurotransmitter, dopamine. “It’s all about chasing that emotional high: losing yourself in image after image, prostitute after prostitute, affair after affair,

The demographics are changing, too. “Where it used to be 40- to 50-year-old men seeking treatment, now there are more females, adolescents, and senior citizens,”

The worst part, he says, was that his sex drive ultimately changed “what I think is normal,” as his tolerance grew for increasingly hard-core forms of pornography. “It really is like that monster you can’t ever fulfill,” says Harper, 30, who has avoided dating for the past eight months and attends a recovery group. “Both with the porn and the sex, something will be good for a while and then you have to move on to other stuff.

An estimated 40 million people a day in the U.S. log on to some 4.2 million pornographic websites, according to the Internet Filter Software Review. And though watching porn isn’t the same as seeking out real live sex, experts say the former can be a kind of gateway drug to the latter.

The website AshleyMadison.com promises “affairs guaranteed” by connecting people looking for sex outside their marriages; the site says it has 12.2 million members

for any closet revolutionary who has ever dreamed of overthrowing the present economic order in favour of one a little less likely to cause Italian pensioners to hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because it makes the ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but rather one of species-wide existential necessity.

Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate policies – all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned – that we are now facing cuts so drastic that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else.

Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon international target of keeping warming below 2° Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than a billion people still don’t have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to come a lot sooner.

To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now.

a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year “have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval”, as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.

Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually, according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre

If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe as “radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations”. Which is fine, except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be entrusted).

in order to appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had sailed on gradual change. “Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the millennium, 2°C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the ‘evolutionary change’ afforded by our earlier (and larger) 2°C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2°C budget demands revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony” (his emphasis).

there are many people who are well aware of the revolutionary nature of climate science. It’s why some of the governments that decided to chuck their climate commitments in favour of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their nations’ scientists

If you want to know where this leads, check out what’s happening in Canada, where I live. The Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning “the death of evidence”. Their placards said, “No Science, No Evidence, No Truth”.

The trouble is, the conventional wisdom is wrong. America’s beleaguered working and middle classes have lost their illusions about American goodness and virtue in the world. They just want a raise, and Mr. Obama and the Democrats didn’t deliver it.

The shootings came amid heightened concern among Canadians about terrorist attacks

As the police locked down buildings in downtown Ottawa and asked stores to close, an eerie still, broken only by screaming emergency sirens, descended on the district.

The easy access to the grounds of Parliament Hill reflected the general Canadian view that an attack was unlikely. Mr. Harper and other members of his cabinet, however, have frequently warned that terrorist attacks might come to Canada.

“If you can kill a disbelieving American or European — especially the spiteful and filthy French — or an Australian, or a Canadian, or any other disbeliever from the disbelievers waging war, including the citizens of the countries that entered into a coalition against the Islamic State, then rely upon Allah, and kill him in any manner or way however it may be

Trudeau and his Liberal party came to power after elections in October, ousting the once-entrenched conservative government of former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Trudeau's cabinet is the most diverse in the country's history; he has reasserted Canada's role at the forefront of climate change policy; his government has brought in more some 25,000 Syrian refugees in the space of just a few months.

As WorldViews has cataloged over the past few months, the Republican debates have been a showcase for crude, simplistic discussions about foreign policy and global challenges, heavy on sound and fury, light on substance.

A lack of understanding of the strictures of the U.S. refugee vetting process led many in the United States to see Syria's destitute refugees as terror threats rather than people desperately fleeing a hideous, brutal war.

he prime minister will always state his values," said a Canadian government official, quoted anonymously in an article by the Canadian Press news agency. "But he’s not interested in stirring up domestic politics."

The belief of one group that it is the victim, justifying any action. Many in Trump's base of white, working-class voters feel threated by immigrants, so Trump's solution to that, whether with Mexico (build a wall) or the Islamic world (keep them out), speaks to them.

"The need for authority by natural leaders (always male) culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group's destiny." This seems like quite a good description of Trump's appeal.

In Paxton's checklist of the foundational traits of fascism there is a big one that Trump does not share, which is "the beauty of violence and the efficacy of will when they are devoted to the group's success."

Trump has updated the paranoid right for the post-9/11 era: Instead of a communist plot to take over America, the conspiracy theory favored in the 1950s, the threat is now immigrants, whether they are Mexicans or Muslims.

- 1705: The Virginia General Assembly passes a law that made it a crime, punishable by imprisonment, for a free white person to marry a black person — to prevent “that abominable mixture and spurious issue.” The law went on to state that if a slave happened to be killed while being punished, no crime would be attached, and the murder would be viewed “as if such incident had never happened.”

- 1877 to 1950: An estimated 76 lynchings of African Americans take place in Virginia. This is far fewer than the 500-plus in both Georgia and Mississippi, according to Encyclopedia Virginia, but equally as brutal

- 1956: Segregationist Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia heads what comes to be called the “Massive Resistance” movement to block court-ordered integration of Virginia’s public schools. Across the state, schools shut down rather than integrate and instead set up private schools for whites.

- 1959: Virginia’s Prince Edward County closes its school system rather than integrate. The county’s schools remained closed until forced by the Supreme Court to reopen in 1964. But many students had already been denied education for five years, and many never recovered from the loss.

Those with power inside institutions love splashy progressive gestures—solemn, monochrome social media posts deploring racism; appointing their first woman to the board; firing low-level employees who attract online fury—because they help preserve their power. Those at the top—who are disproportionately white, male, wealthy and highly educated—are not being asked to give up anything themselves.

It is strange that “cancel culture” has become a project of the left, which spent the 20th century fighting against capricious firings of “troublesome” employees. A lack of due process does not become a moral good just because you sometimes agree with its targets

We all, I hope, want to see sexism, racism, and other forms of discrimination decrease.

Activists regularly challenge criticisms of “cancel culture” by saying: “Come on, we’re just some people with Twitter accounts, up against governments and corporate behemoths.”

In the United States, diversity training is worth $8 billion a year, according to Iris Bohnet, a public-policy professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School. And yet, after studying programs in both the U.S. and post-conflict countries such as Rwanda, she concluded, “sadly enough, I did not find a single study that found that diversity training in fact leads to more diversity.

we should be aware of the economic incentives here, particularly given the speed of social media, which can send a video viral, and see onlookers demand a response, before the basic facts have been established.

“Implicit-bias tests” are controversial, and the claim that they can predict real-world behavior, never mind reduce bias, is shaky. A large-scale analysis of research in the sector found that “changes in implicit measures are possible, but those changes do not necessarily translate into changes in explicit measures or behavior.”

Diversity training offers the minimum possible disruption to your power structures: Don’t change the board; just get your existing employees to sit through a seminar.

the training programs are typically no more scientifically grounded than previous management-course favorites, such as Myers-Briggs personality classifications

But when you look at the economic incentives, almost always, the capitalist imperative is to yield to activist pressure. Just a bit. Enough to get them off your back

Real institutional change is hard; like politics, it is the “slow boring of hard boards.” Persuading a company to toss someone overboard for PR points risks a victory that is no victory at all. The pitchforks go down, but the corporate culture remains the same. The survivors sigh in relief. The institution goes on.

If you care about progressive causes, then woke capitalism is not your friend. It is actively impeding the cause, siphoning off energy, and deluding us into thinking that change is happening faster and deeper than it really is

When people talk about the “excesses of the left”—a phenomenon that blights the electoral prospects of progressive parties by alienating swing voters—in many cases they’re talking about the jumpy overreactions of corporations that aren’t left-wing at all.

Remember the iron law of woke institutions: For those looking to preserve their power, it makes sense to do the minimum amount of social radicalism necessary to survive … and no economic radicalism at all. The latter is where activists need to apply their pressure.