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If we were building multiracial, intergenerational social movements that were really rooted in confronting corporate power, then they could say whatever they want and it wouldn’t really bother me. But we’re talking about it less, and the more [conspiracists] talk about it, the more reticent we become. So it’s a dialectic that makes me queasy.

The parts of listening to Bannon that were most destabilizing were when I heard him saying things that sounded like the left, and when I heard him saying things that I agreed with in part – not in whole, but where I saw that kernel of truth and I realized how effective it was going to be in the mix and match with what I see as a fascist project that he’s engaged in.

I expect Steve Bannon to be monstrous on immigration, on gender. I expect that from him. It’s when he’s talking about corporate control of the media and saying things that are true about big tech that I start to get queasy and ask, wait a minute, why is he saying more about this than a lot of people on the liberal side of the spectrum? Have we ceded this territory?

This point seems central. The mirror world isn’t devoid of truth. Instead, it’s destabilizing because elements of truth are there, but warped.

Absolutely. And the destabilizing piece is not simply that they’re saying something true. It’s when you realize people [on the left] have stopped saying that true thing. That’s when you realize that it has power.

I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.

Ehrenreich has a completely different theory, which I think is much more plausible, which is this is the 1980s: people are in the wreckage of the failures of these huge social movements in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There had been this glimpse of collective power that a lot of people really thought was going to change the world, and suddenly they’re living through Thatcherism and Reaganism. And there is this turn towards the self, towards the body as the site of control.

Kneeling before the temple of the body also has fascist roots. Historically, certain ideals of human fitness were a way to communicate the value of citizens.Whenever you are working within a system of a hierarchy of humans and bodies, then you’re in fascism territory. I think that it made perfect sense that Nazis were body obsessives who fetishized the natural and the hyperfit form and genes.

There is a connection between certain kinds of new age ideas and health fads and the fascist project

After the second world war, a lot of people in the world of wellness ran in the opposite direction. But there are some ways in which they are natural affinities and they’re finding each other again

there is a way the quest for wellness and hyper fitness becomes obsessive.

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this really beautifully in her book about wellness culture, where she talks about the silence of the gyms. This is a collective space, right? Why aren’t people chitchatting? But often gyms are very silent and she speculates that maybe it’s because people are talking to someone, it’s just not the other people in the gym, it’s somebody in their head. They’re trying to tame their body into being another kind of body, a perfected body.

Ehrenreich is trying to understand why this exploded in the 1980s. The whole aerobics craze, the whole jogging craze. You know, how does somebody like Jerry Rubin, a member of the Yippies, turn into a health evangelist in the 1980s?

in lots of ways this is what Naomi Wolf was trying to understand in the Beauty Myth. Why was there so much more of a focus in the 1980s on personal appearance? She makes the case that beauty became a third shift for women: there was the work shift, there was the home shift, and on top of that, women were now also expected to look like professional beauties.

But the spread of misinformation across wellness culture was likely attributable to more complex factors, including the limits of conventional medicine and the areas of health that are understudied or dismissed.

Then you have all of these entrepreneurial wellness figures who come in and say, individuals must take charge of their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control and competitive edge.

the flip side of the idea that your competitive edge is your body is that the people who don’t have bodies as fit or strong as yours somehow did something wrong or are less deserving of access, less deserving even of life.

And that is unfortunately all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority and disposable people.

We should be compassionate with ourselves in terms of why we look away. There are lots of ways of distracting oneself from unbearable realities. Conspiracy theories are a kind of distraction. So is hyper fitness, this turn towards the self.

The compassion comes in where we acknowledge that there’s a reason why it is so hard to look at the reality of what has been unveiled by these overlapping crises – you could call it a polycrisis: of the pandemic, climate change, massive racial and economic inequality, realizing that your country was founded on a lie, that the national narratives that you grew up on left out huge parts in the story.

All of this is hard to bear.

Because we live in a hyper-individualist culture, we try to bear it on our own and we should not be surprised that we’re cracking under the weight of that, because we can’t bear it alone.

the weight of our historical moment. We really are alive on the knife’s edge of whether or not this earth is going to be habitable for our species. That is not something that we can handle just on our own.

So we need to reach towards each other. That’s really tricky work. It’s a lot easier to come together and agree on things that are not working and things that are bad than it is to come together and develop a horizon of how things could be better.

Things could be beautiful, things could be livable. There could be a world where everyone belongs. But I don’t think we can bear the reality of our moment unless we can imagine something else.

this is like if Russell Moore came out and said that, on the whole, Christianity turns out to be a bad thing. It’s that big of a deal.

Thompson’s case centers around constraints and supply, particularly as they apply to content creation.

In the pre-internet days, creating and distributing content was relatively expensive, which placed content publishers—be they newspapers, or TV stations, or movie studios—high on the value chain.

The internet reduced distribution costs to zero and this shifted value away from publishers and over to aggregators: Suddenly it was more important to aggregate an audience—a la Google and Facebook—than to be a content creator.

Hellscape

What has alarmed Thompson is that AI has now reduced the cost of creating content to zero.

what does the world look like when both the creation and distribution of content are zero?

We’re headed to a place where content is artificially created and distributed in such a way as to be tailored to a given user’s preferences. Which will be the equivalent of living in a hall of mirrors.

At the other end of the spectrum, independent journalists should be okay. A lone reporter running a focused Substack who only needs four digits’ worth of subscribers to sustain them.

What does that mean for news? Nothing good.

It doesn’t really make sense to talk about “news media” because there are fundamental differences between publication models that are driven by scale.

So the challenges the New York Times face will be different than the challenges that NPR or your local paper face.

Two big takeaways:

(1) Ad-supported publications will not survive

Zero-cost for content creation combined with zero-cost distribution means an infinite supply of content. The more content you have, the more ad space exists—the lower ad prices go.

Actually, some ad-supported publications will survive. They just won’t be news. What will survive will be content mills that exist to serve ads specifically matched to targeted audiences.

(2) Size is determinative.

The New York Times has a moat by dint of its size. It will see the utility of its soft “news” sections decline in value, because AI is going to be better at creating cooking and style content than breaking hard news. But still, the NYT will be okay because it has pivoted hard into being a subscription-based service over the last decade.

Audiences were valuable; content was commoditized.

But everything in between? That’s a crapshoot.

Technology writers sometimes talk about the contrast between “builders” and “conservers” — roughly speaking, between those who are most animated by what we stand to gain from technology and those animated by what we stand to lose.

in our moment the builder and conserver types are proving quite mercurial. On issues ranging from Big Tech to medicine, human enhancement to technologies of governance, the politics of technology are in upheaval.

Dispositions are supposed to be basically fixed. So who would have thought that deep blue cities that yesterday were hotbeds of vaccine skepticism would today become pioneers of vaccine passports? Or that outlets that yesterday reported on science and tech developments in reverent tones would today make it their mission to unmask “tech bros”?

One way to understand this churn is that the builder and the conserver types each speak to real, contrasting features within human nature. Another way is that these types each pick out real, contrasting features of technology. Focusing strictly on one set of features or the other eventually becomes unstable, forcing the other back into view.

Since then, it has struggled to assert itself as a credible vehicle for truly mass mobilisation.

Many significant organisations and movements have emerged in its wake. The most attention-grabbing have been from the recent, even more radical flank of the UK’s climate movement – first Insulate Britain and then Just Stop Oil – who have blocked the M25, stopped test matches and much more.

many in the broader climate movement now feel that action that disrupts the general public has become counterproductive – as XR came to learn

Citizens already feel the alarm has been raised. Right now, they don’t need further reminders: they need a journey into positive, effective action that they feel includes them.

I moved on from XR in 2020, judging it likely that it had achieved most of what it was capable of achieving (a huge raising of climate consciousness – not to mention a parliamentary declaration of climate and environment emergency, a net zero law, and a parliament-backed citizens’ assembly on climate).

what is now plainly obvious is that the most important achievement of XR may turn out to be the space it opened up for a new, moderate flank in the climate movement to emerge.

XR successfully dragged the whole eco-agenda into the light of day

this has made it both necessary and possible for a wave of novel organisations and initiatives to fill the vacuum; groups such as Wild Card, Community Climate Action, Lawyers for Net Zero, Purpose Disruptors and Zero Hour.

many of the successes of historical movements that inspired XR (the Suffragettes, for instance) followed a similar pattern: an agenda-shift prompted by radical-flank initiatives paving the way for actual political success by more moderate agents of change.

in order to make any real impact on the desperate situation we are slipping into, movements must now unite people in campaigns that they can actually get on board with. That means acting with others where they live, or work or pray – and within the law.

XR itself knows this is the way forward, and seems to have learned from past mistakes. As of 2023, it will no longer disrupt the public

XR’s new strategy, optimistically titled “Here comes everyone”, plans to build on the clearest success of the movement so far. In April, it mobilised about 60,000 people – considerably more than at any previous moment in its history – in a peaceful march on the climate crisis

If there is to be any chance of achieving a transformative adaptation to the self-imposed threat of ecological collapse, it’s going to require not just a minority, but most of us, to step up.

In decades to come, the only question our children will have any real interest in is: now that it’s becoming clearer what can effectively achieve change, how will you act? And once you knew, what did you do?

There are a few important take-aways. First, this one didn’t come from the government, it was a private case by a video game maker that sued Google over its terms for getting access to the Google Play app store for Android, decided not by a fancy judge with an Ivy League degree but by a jury of ordinary people in San Francisco. In other words, private litigation, the ‘ambulance-chasing’ lawyers, are vital parts of our justice system.

Second, juries matter, even if they are riskier for everyone involved. It’s kind of like a mini poll, and the culture is ahead of the cautious legal profession. This quick decision is a sharp contrast with the 6-month delay to an opinion in the search case that Judge Mehta sought in the D.C. trial.

Third, tying claims, which is a specific antitrust violation, are good law. Tying means forcing someone to buy an unrelated product in order to access the actual product they want to buy. The specific legal claim here was about how Google forced firms relying on its Google Play app store to also use its Google Play billing service, which charges an inflated price of 30% of the price of an app. Tying is pervasive throughout the economy, so you can expect more suits along these lines.

And finally, big tech is not above the law. This loss isn’t just the first antitrust failure for Google, it’s the first antitrust loss for any big tech firm. I hear a lot from skeptics that the fix is in, that the powerful will always win, that justice in our system is a mirage. But that just isn’t true. A jury of our peers just made that clear.

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.”

“It’s symbolic — all of these thoughts and choices have gone into that piece,” she said. “It’s making fashion out of something that’s already existed. It’s saying there’s value in something that’s been discarded.”

“It’s not like we use every ounce of fabric. There are fabrics that we have to sell back off. But in every choice that we make, we just try.”

The Wagner Group refers to a network of operatives and companies that serve as what the U.S. Treasury Department has called a “proxy force” of Russia’s ministry of defense. Analysts describe the group as an extension of Russia’s foreign policy through deniable activities, including the use of mercenaries and disinformation campaigns.

They ally with embattled political and military leaders who can pay for their services in cash, or with lucrative mining concessions for precious minerals like gold, diamonds and uranium, according to interviews conducted in recent weeks with dozens of analysts, diplomats and military officials in Africa and Western countries.

However, Russian foreign minister Sergey V. Lavrov said in May on Italian television that Wagner was present in Mali “on a commercial basis,” providing “security services.”

“From Monday to Thursday, the killings didn’t stop,” said Hamadoun, a tailor working near the market when the helicopters arrived. “The whites and the Malians killed together.”

The death toll in Moura is the highest in a growing list of human rights abuses committed by the Malian military, which diplomats and Malian human rights observers say have increased since the military began conducting joint operations with the Wagner Group in January.

nearly 500 civilians have been killed in the joint operations,

Some abuses could amount to crimes against humanity, the U.N. said in one report.

The foreigners, according to diplomats, officials and human rights groups, belonged to the Russian paramilitary group known as Wagner.

Wherever there are Russian contractors, real or fictional, they never violate human rights.”

“They have no incentive to end the conflict, because they are financially motivated,”

“They are the government in the region,”

The mass executions began on the Monday, and the victims were both civilians and unarmed militants, witnesses said. Soldiers picked out up to 15 people at a time, inspected their fingers and shoulders for the imprint left by regular use of weapons, and executed men yards away from captives.

“cadavers everywhere.”

The soldiers and their Russian allies left on Thursday, after killing six last prisoners in retaliation for four who had escaped. A Malian soldier told a group of captives that the soldiers had killed “all the bad people,” said Hamadou.

The soldier apologized for the good people who “died by accident.”

Investigators from the U.N. peacekeeping mission in Mali have so far been denied access to Moura. Russia and China blocked a vote at the U.N. Security Council on an independent investigation.

Some Malians in these regions are losing trust in the government.

Soon after, the militants returned and kidnapped the deputy mayor. He hasn’t been heard from since.

who got the future most right? For the truth is that dystopia is now, not in some future date.

Science fiction provides us with a large sample of imagined discontinuities that might not occur if we only looked backwards.

Fahrenheit 451 (published in 1953 but set in 1999) describes an illiberal America where books are banned and the job of firemen is to burn them. (Though the novel is sometimes interpreted as a critique of McCarthyism, Bradbury’s real message was that the preference of ordinary people for the vacuous entertainment of TV and the willingness of religious minorities to demand censorship together posed a creeping threat to the book as a form for serious content.)

In a remarkable letter written in October 1949, Aldous Huxley — who had been Orwell’s French teacher at Eton — warned him that he was capturing his own present rather than the likely future. ‘The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ Huxley wrote, ‘is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion… Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World’. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a very different dystopia. Citizens submit to a caste system, conditioned to be content with physical pleasure. Self-medication (‘soma’), constant entertainment (the ‘feelies’), regular holidays and ubiquitous sexual titillation are the basis for mass compliance. Censorship and propaganda play a part, but overt coercion is rarely visible. The West today seems more Huxley than Orwell: a world more of corporate distraction than state brutality.

Yet none of these authors truly foresaw our networked world, which has combined the rising technological acceleration with a slackening of progress in other areas, such as nuclear energy, and a degeneration of governance. The real prophets are less known figures, like John Brunner, whose Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is set at a time — 2010 — when population pressure has caused social division and political extremism. Despite the threat of terrorism, US corporations are booming, thanks to a supercomputer. China is America’s new rival. Europe has united. Brunner envisaged affirmative action, genetic engineering, Viagra, Detroit’s collapse, satellite TV, in-flight video, gay marriage, laser printing, electric cars, the decriminalisation of marijuana and the decline of tobacco. There’s even a progressive president (albeit of the Africa state of Beninia, not America) named ‘Obomi’

With comparable prescience, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) anticipates the world wide web and AI. Opening in the dystopian Japanese underworld of Chiba City, it imagines a global computer network in cyberspace called the ‘matrix’. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), which was especially popular among Facebook employees in the company’s early years, foresaw corporate overreach and virtual reality in an almost anarchic America. The state has withered away in California; everything has been privatised. Most people spend half their time in virtual reality, where their avatars have more fun than they themselves do in the real world. Meanwhile, flotillas of refugees approach via the Pacific. These cyberpunk Americas are much closer to the US in 2021 than the fascist dystopias of Lewis, Atwood or Roth.

Orwell and Huxley — have been outflanked when it comes to making sense of today’s totalitarian countries

Take China, which better resembles Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We: a book written in 1921, but suppressed by the Bolsheviks. It is set in a future ‘One State’ led by ‘the Benefactor’, where the ‘ciphers’ — who have numbers, not names, and wear standardised ‘unifs’ — are under constant surveillance. All apartments are made of glass, with curtains that can be drawn only when one is having state-licensed sex. Faced with insurrection, the omnipotent Benefactor orders the mass lobotomisation of ciphers, as the only way to preserve universal happiness is to abolish the imagination.

Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009) — which is banned in China. In this story, tap water is laced with drugs that render people docile, but at a cost. The month of February 2011 has been removed from public records and popular memory. This was when drastic emergency measures were introduced to stabilise the Chinese economy and assert China’s primacy in east Asia. Chan is one of a number of recent Chinese authors who have envisioned the decline of America, the corollary of China’s rise. The Fat Years is set in an imagined 2013, after a second western financial crisis makes China the world’s no. 1 economy.

Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2006), a Chinese nanotechnology expert and a Beijing cop lead the global defence against an alien invasion that’s the fault of a misanthropic Chinese physicist.

And suppose it takes five days between a person’s getting infected and their infecting others. After 30 days, the more transmissible virus is now causing 26, or 64, times as many new cases as the less transmissible one.

Not every case will be mild, though, and even a small hospitalization rate on top of a huge case number will be a big number.

Now, as my colleague Ed Yong reports, Omicron could push a collapsing health-care system further into disaster. Hospitals are already dealing with the flu and other winter viruses. They’re already canceling elective surgeries.

If there are no changes to behavior or policy, this year’s winter wave would peak at about double the hospitalizations of last winter at its worst, and 20 percent more deaths, according to the most pessimistic of projections

The most optimistic projection sees a caseload similar to last winter’s, but hospitalizations and deaths at about half of where they were back then, assuming the vaccines keep up their very high protection against severe illness.

If that holds, it’s a “huge decrease,” Meyers says, and one that matches the assumptions of her team’s grimmer—but not grimmest—projections. When they modeled scenarios where vaccine effectiveness against hospitalization dropped by about that much, they saw a difference of tens of thousands of deaths.

Very preliminary data from South Africa’s largest health insurer suggest that two doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine were 70 percent effective at preventing hospitalization from Omicron infections, down from 93 percent before.

Vaccine protection against severe illness should be more durable than it is against infection, but may still take a hit

The available evidence on Omicron’s inherent severity is likely to be biased in ways that make it appear more promising. First of all, hospitalizations lag infections.

Second, the first people infected may skew young and are thus more likely to have mild cases regardless of the variant

third, some of the mildness attributed to the virus may result instead from existing immunity. In South Africa, where doctors are reporting relatively low hospitalizations compared with previous waves, many cases are probably reinfections

The South Africa health-insurer data suggest that Omicron might carry a 29 percent lower risk of hospitalization than the original virus, when adjusted for risk factors including age, sex, vaccination status, and documented prior infection—but many prior infections may be undocumented, which would make the reduction in risk seem bigger than it really is. (A recent analysis of early U.K. cases found “at most, limited changes in severity compared with Delta.”)

Either way, in the short run, we will have a massive number of Omicron cases on top of a massive number of Delta cases. Together they will infect huge numbers of people, vaccinated or not

While there are substitutes for Russian nickel, there’s no good substitute for the U.S. dollar and U.S. technology. It is very hard to get paid for things you sell if you can’t use SWIFT messaging and have been cut off by the U.S. regulated financial institutions that “clear” transactions in dollars. And it’s hard to build sophisticated machines without semiconductors that are made with U.S. intellectual property.

The barrier isn’t just that the payment networks of Russia and China are three or four decades behind. Others also fear how they would abuse these networks if they controlled them. The United States has its problems, but it at least provides some legal protections to businesses and countries that have fallen afoul of its harsh measures.

Often, U.S. officials treat these rules as an obstacle preventing them from taking strong actions. Yet these restrictions provide America with a strategic advantage: They give foreign countries and businesses some reason for trust.

Overreach, then, is the more immediate threat

they illustrate a deeper danger. As a new book by the historian Nicholas Mulder emphasizes, the “economic weapon” of sanctions and blockades doesn’t work nearly as predictably or effectively as its proponents imagine. The more powerful sanctions are, the greater the danger that they will lead to an unpredictable response. As Mr. Mulder demonstrates, fears of sanctions helped propel Nazi Germany’s territorial ambitions

measures should be just harsh enough to reach specific goals: to protect Ukrainian independence and to limit, to the greatest extent possible, Russia’s aggressive gains.

The United States should also explicitly lay out the circumstances under which the executive branch will apply such economic measures, the range of permissible goals that they can accomplish, the review procedures that will ensure they are proportionate and the circumstances under which they will be withdrawn.

that would be on par with what we experience with flu viruses, which scientists estimate hit us about every two to five years, less often in adulthood. It also matches up well with the documented cadence of the four other coronaviruses that seasonally trouble humans, and cause common colds.

For now, every infection, and every subsequent reinfection, remains a toss of the dice. “Really, it’s a gamble,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and long-COVID researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. Vaccination and infection-induced immunity may load the dice against landing on severe disease, but that danger will never go away completely, and scientists don’t yet know what happens to people who contract “mild” COVID over and over again

Or maybe not. This virus seems capable of tangling into just about every tissue in the body, affecting organs such as the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, and gut; it has already claimed the lives of millions, while saddling countless others with symptoms that can linger for months or years.

considering our current baseline, “less dangerous” could still be terrible—and it’s not clear exactly where we’re headed. When it comes to reinfection, we “just don’t know enough,”

Perhaps, as several experts have posited since the pandemic’s early days, SARS-CoV-2 will just become the fifth cold-causing coronavirus.

Bodies, wised up to the virus’s quirks, can now react more quickly, clobbering it with sharper and speedier strikes.

Future versions of SARS-CoV-2 could continue to shape-shift out of existing antibodies’ reach, as coronaviruses often do. But the body is flush with other fighters that are much tougher to bamboozle—among them, B cells and T cells that can quash a growing infection before it spirals out of control

Those protections tend to build iteratively, as people see pathogens or vaccines more often. People vaccinated three times over, for instance, seem especially well equipped to duke it out with all sorts of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron and its offshoots.

promising patterns: Second infections and post-vaccination infections “are significantly less severe,” she told me, sometimes to the point where people don’t notice them at all

A third or fourth bout might be more muted still; the burden of individual diseases may be headed toward an asymptote of mildness that holds for many years

Gordon and Swartz are both hopeful that the slow accumulation of immunity will also slash people’s chances of developing long COVID.

Immunity, though, is neither binary nor permanent. Even if SARS-CoV-2’s assaults are blunted over time, there are no guarantees about the degree to which that happens, or how long it lasts.

A slew of factors could end up weighting the dice toward severe disease—among them, a person’s genetics, age, underlying medical conditions, health-care access, and frequency or magnitude of exposure to the virus.

for everyone else, no amount of viral dampening can totally eliminate the chance, however small it may be, of getting very sick.

Long COVID, too, might remain a possibility with every discrete bout of illness. Or maybe the effects of a slow-but-steady trickle of minor, fast-resolving infections would sum together, and bring about the condition.

Every time the body’s defenses are engaged, it “takes a lot of energy, and causes tissue damage,” Thomas told me. Should that become a near-constant barrage, “that’s probably not great for you.”

Bodies are resilient, especially when they’re offered time to rest, and she doubts that reinfection with a typically ephemeral virus such as SARS-CoV-2 would cause mounting damage. “The cumulative effect is more likely to be protective than detrimental,” she said, because of the immunity that’s laid down each time.

people who have caught the virus twice or thrice may be more likely to become long-haulers than those who have had it just once.

Some other microbes, when they reinvade us, can fire up the immune system in unhelpful ways, driving bad bouts of inflammation that burn through the body, or duping certain defensive molecules into aiding, rather than blocking, the virus’s siege. Researchers don’t think SARS-CoV-2 will do the same. But this pathogen is “much more formidable than even someone working on coronaviruses would have expected,

Seasonal encounters with pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2 don’t often worry us—but perhaps that’s because we’re still working to understand their toll. “Have we been underestimating long-term consequences from other repeat infections?” Thomas said. “The answer is probably, almost certainly, yes.”

the rhythm of reinfection isn’t just about the durability of immunity or the pace of viral evolution. It’s also about our actions and policies, and whether they allow the pathogen to transmit and evolve. Strategies to avoid infection—to make it as infrequent as possible, for as many people as possible—remain options, in the form of vaccination, masking, ventilation, paid sick leave, and more.

“There are still very good reasons” to keep exposures few and far between, Landon, of the University of Chicago, told me. Putting off reinfection creates fewer opportunities for harm: The dice are less likely to land on severe disease (or chronic illness) when they’re rolled less often overall. It also buys us time to enhance our understanding of the virus, and improve our tools to fight it.

The outlooks of the experts I spoke with spanned the range from optimism to pessimism, though all agreed that uncertainty loomed. Until we know more, none were keen to gamble with the virus—or with their own health. Any reinfection will likely still pose a threat, “even if it’s not the worst-case scenario,” Abdool Karim told me. “I wouldn’t want to put myself in that position.”

The resulting address was heartfelt. It was eloquent. Yet it helped sink his presidency.

“For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years,”

By 1979, this country had experienced a recent string of traumatic political assassinations, urban riots that dwarfed the summer riots of 2020 in scale and intensity, campus unrest that makes the current controversies over “wokeness” look civil and quaint, the defeat in Vietnam, and the deep political corruption of Richard Nixon. At the same time, inflation rates dwarfed what we experience today.

Carter took a step back. With his trademark understated warmth, he described his own period of reflection. He’d taken the time to listen to others, he shared what he heard, and then he spoke words that resonate today. “The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us,” he said, and he described symptoms that mirror our current reality.

Read the speech now, and you’ll see its truth and its depth. But, ironically, it’s an address better suited to our time than to its own. Jimmy Carter’s greatest speech was delivered four decades too soon.

There was more. “As you know,” he told viewers, “there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions.”

We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate.

Carter’s central insight was that even if the country’s political branches could deliver peace and prosperity, they could not deliver community and belonging. Our nation depends on pre-political commitments to each other, and in the absence of those pre-political commitments, the American experiment is ultimately in jeopardy.

we’re not familiar with speeches that ask the American people to reflect on their own role in a national crisis. Carter called for his audience to look in the mirror:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.

Carter correctly described a country of mutual, interlocking responsibilities between the government and the people. Yet he was ultimately unable to deliver the results that matched his pastoral message.

the speech was successful, at first. His approval rating shot up a remarkable 11 points. Then came chaos — some of it Carter’s fault, some of it not. Days after the speech, he demanded the resignation of his entire cabinet. (He ultimately fired five.) It was a move that communicated confusion more than conviction.

The failed rescue was a hinge moment in history. It’s hard to imagine the morale boost had it succeeded, and we know the crushing disappointment when it failed. Had the Army’s Delta Force paraded down New York’s “Canyon of Heroes” with the liberated hostages, it would have probably transformed the public’s perception of the president. But just as presidents own military victories, they also own defeats.

The story of the next 10 years, moreover, cast Carter’s address in a different light. The nation went from defeat to victory: Inflation broke, the economy roared, and in 1991 the same military that was humiliated in the sands of Iran triumphed

The history was written. Carter was wrong. There wasn’t a crisis of confidence. There was no malaise. There was instead a failure of leadership. Better, or at least luckier, leaders revived a broken nation.

Yet with every passing year, the deeper truths of Carter’s speech become more apparent. His insights become more salient. A speech that couldn’t precisely diagnose the maladies of 1979 more accurately describes the challenges of 2023. The trends he saw emerging two generations ago now bear their poisonous fruit in our body politic.

last year a record 58 percent of Americans told NBC News pollsters that our nation’s best years are behind it.)

In 1979, Carter spoke of our civil liberties as secure. They’re more secure now.

We’re free, prosperous and strong to a degree we couldn’t imagine then. Yet we’re tearing each other apart now.

We are at a turning point in our history. There are two paths to choose. One is a path I’ve warned about tonight, the path that leads to fragmentation and self-interest. Down that road lies a mistaken idea of freedom, the right to grasp for ourselves some advantage over others. That path would be one of constant conflict between narrow interests ending in chaos and immobility.

With these words, Carter raised the question, what is our freedom for, exactly? While we want to better ourselves and our families, we cannot become self-regarding. We have obligations to each other. We have obligations to our community. The best exercise of freedom is in service to others.

Yet one of the stories of our time is the abuse of liberty, including the use of our freedoms — whether it’s to boycott, condemn or shame — to try to narrow the marketplace of ideas, to deprive dissenters of their reputations and their livelihoods.

as Carter noted, our huge wealth cannot heal the holes in our hearts, because “consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

there’s another word: prophetic. His words were not the clarion call necessary for his time, but they are words for this time. As Jimmy Carter spends his last days on this earth, we should remember his call for community, and thank a very good man for living his values, serving his neighbors, and reminding us of the true source of strength for the nation he loved.

On July 15, 1979, President Jimmy Carter emerged from days of isolation to deliver the most important and memorable address of his life

The speech was among the most unusual in presidential history. The word that has clung to it, “malaise,” was a word that didn’t even appear in the text.

I think that the age of the New Democrats, which was a very successful political project for the Democratic Party, has come to an end. The assumption of that politics, which began in earnest in the late 1980s and early 1990s, was that the Cold War had been settled, that democracy had prevailed, that the West was ascendant. But with China’s decision to take the route that they’ve gone on, with Russia now having waged this intense insurgency against the West, the assumption that that system is going to prevail in the world is now under question.

Rosenberg: Any honest assessment of the New Democrat project has to view it as wildly successful, because when I went to work for Clinton in 1992, Democrats had lost five out of the six previous presidential elections. And the central project of the New Democrats was to make the Democratic Party competitive at the presidential level again. Since then, we’ve won more votes in seven of eight presidential elections

I think that it’s birthing now for the United States a different era of politics, where we must be focused on two fundamental, existential questions. Can democracy prevail given the way that it’s being attacked from all sides? And can we prevent climate change from overwhelming the world that we know?

I want to try to write a book and to take the perspective of having been part of the beginning of the last big shift in American politics, the emergence of the New Democrats, and start imagining what’s going to come next for the center left in the United States and around the world.

Simon Rosenberg:

You have to recognize just how central to that is this narrative of the white tribe rallying around itself, and the sense of grievance, the sense of loss, the sense of decline. That’s what MAGA is. That’s all it is

what’s the main lesson you take from his emergence?

Rosenberg: Yeah, it’s obviously disappointing. The emergence of what I call “Greater MAGA” has been a dark period in our history.

We’ve also seen three Democratic presidents that have served [since then]—Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden have also made the country materially better during their presidencies.

We know from history, we know from other countries, when countries go into sectarian or tribal warfare, it can destroy a country, pull it apart. And Trump has created a domestic argument here that could potentially destroy the U.S. Look at Marjorie Taylor Greene this week—advocating for the country to split into two, red and blue.

Part of the reason I’m taking a step back from NDN is that I don’t think that we have yet figured out how to talk to the American people about the nature of the conflict we’re in right now, with rising authoritarianism around the world, the weakening of democratic institutions here and in other places.

I think the way we have to think of the war room now, it’s 4 million proud patriots getting up every day, spending a little bit of their day putting good information into our daily discourse to try to crowd out the poisonous information and right-wing propaganda. There’s a lot that average citizens can do in this.

Rosenberg: The threat is still here. Look, I think [Florida Governor] Ron DeSantis is even more MAGA than Trump. This idea that in 2024, Republicans are going to end up with a moderate, center-right candidate and distance themselves from the insanity of the Trump years, that’s just fantasy talk.

DeSantis has decided to double down on extremism and on MAGA. We will learn in the next year and a half about how it all plays out. But I think he misread the room; he’s misread the moment in history. He needed to become an anti-Trump; instead, he became more Trump than Trump

In this last election, there were really two elections. There was a bluer election inside the battlegrounds, and there was a redder election outside the battlegrounds. We actually gained ground in seven battleground states: Arizona, Colorado, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania. It’s an extraordinary achievement given high inflation, a low Biden approval rating, traditional midterm dynamics. My view is, that happened because the fear of MAGA has created a supercharged grass roots; our candidates are raising unprecedented amounts of money; we have more labor to work in these races than we’ve ever had before. And where we have these muscular campaigns, we were able to control the information environment. And also push turnout up through the roof.

But outside the battlegrounds, we fell back in New York and California, and in Florida and Texas, the four biggest states in the country. And the admonition to us is that we are still not competitive enough in the national daily discourse;

Republicans, because of this incredible noise machine that they built, are still far louder than we are. Democrats have to become obsessive about being more competitive in the daily political discourse in the country.

We have to build more media institutions. Republicans use ideological media to advance their politics in a way that we’ve never done. And we’re going to have to match that to some degree.

The second piece is that average Democratic activists have to recognize that they need to become information warriors daily

My hope is that because Biden won’t be able to legislate very much for the next two years, he’ll spend his time talking to the American people and the West about the necessity of winning this conflict.

The key is to defeat MAGA in such a definitive and declarative way that Republicans move on to a different kind of politics and become something more like a traditional center-right political party.

We must stick together as a party because what will cause far-right political parties to succeed is when the prodemocracy coalition splits, and we can’t allow that to happen. As much as sometimes we want to have interfamily battles, those are self-indulgent at this point.

I don’t think that this emerging criticism is entirely wrong, but it’s only half right. The goal should be to expand, not to reposition. There are four areas that I think we have to bear down on in the next two years for a potential Democratic expansion: young voters, Latinos, Never-MAGA or -Trumpers, and young women, post-Dobbs.

The No. 1 job is we just need more young people voting, period. It’s more registration, more communications, targeting them more in our campaigns. In the Democratic Party, young people are still at the kids’ table; they have to become the center of our politics now.

I think that we’re favored in the presidential election. For us to win next year, the economy has to be good. And we have to look like we’ve been successful in Ukraine. Those two things are going to be paramount in him being able to say, “I’ve been a good president, and I may be a little bit old, but I still got 90 miles an hour on my fastball, and I’m able to get the job done right versus they’re still a little bit too crazy.”

What the Republicans should be worried about is we’ve had three consecutive elections where the battleground states have rejected MAGA. And so, if the Republicans present themselves as MAGA again, which looks almost inevitable, it’s going to be hard for them to win a presidential election in 2024 given that the battleground has muscle memory about MAGA and has voted now three times against it.

Others derive purpose from specific kinds of responsibility.

People who had been working as station agents before their elevation were generally satisfied by their new roles. But supervisors who had previously worked as train drivers were noticeably less content: they felt their roles had less meaning when they no longer had direct responsibility for the well-being of passengers.

Firms need to think more creatively about career progression than promoting people into management jobs. IBM, for example, has a fellowship programme designed to give a handful of its most gifted technical employees their own form of recognition each year.

There is some logic here. Employees with a calling could well be more dedicated. But that doesn’t necessarily make them better at the job. And teams are likelier to perform well if they blend types of employees: visionaries to inspire, specialists to deliver and all those people who want to do a job well but not think about it at weekends. Like mayonnaise, the secret is in the mixture.

A handful of financial institutions produced them when Rio de Janeiro hosted in 2016, using a mixture of macroeconomic indicators and performances at previous Olympics to forecast total medal hauls for each country.

Gracenote’s distinguishing feature is the ability to produce quantitative analysis for each event.

Gracenote still uses the old system to produce its public medal table, which also deals in absolute forecasts, rather than fractional ones. If a French athlete, say, is the most likely to win an event, France gets awarded one gold medal in the table, even though the true probability of the athlete winning gold is less than 100% and his chances of claiming silver and bronze are greater than 0%.

the Elo rating system, which was developed for chess by Arpad Elo, a Hungarian physicist. The formula exchanges ranking points from the loser to the winner, with greater rewards for beating stronger opponents. The difference in ratings points between two rivals can be easily used to calculate the probability that one will beat the other.

Yet only two events on the winter Olympics programme, curling and ice hockey, involve head-to-head contests.

Those that compete in teams have their scores blended with their compatriots. And for those that participate in a number of events, such as Ms Dahlmeier, results in related disciplines affect multiple ratings. A strong performance in the biathlon sprint, a group race, would boost her ranking in the pursuit, a staggered race, for example.

The best way to answer that question is to take every previous contest in the sport and analyse how past results correlate with future success.

The bans have benefited Norway most, as the country will likely gain of the five of the 12 foregone medals—enough to nudge it ahead of Germany into first place in terms of total medals won.

Mr Gleave notes that the favourite only wins about 30% of the time, a lower share than in any other winter sport. Ms Dahlmeier’s rating has dwindled a little, but not by enough to suggest that last year’s record breaker has become this year’s flop.

Gracenote’s research into age curves for each sport shows that the best biathletes can maintain their peak performance into their early 30s (see chart). Expect to see more event-by-event forecasting at future Olympics, too.

The COVID vaccines are, without exaggeration, among the safest and most effective therapies in all of modern medicine. An unvaccinated adult is an astonishing 68 times more likely to die from COVID than a boosted one

Yet widespread vaccine hesitancy in the United States has caused more than 163,000 preventable deaths and counting

Even in absolute numbers, America’s unvaccinated and current-smoker populations seem to match up rather well: Right now, the CDC pegs them at 13 percent and 14 percent of all U.S. adults, respectively, and both groups are likely to be poorer and less educated.

Countries such as Denmark and Sweden have already declared themselves broken up with COVID. They are confidently doing so not because the virus is no longer circulating or because they’ve achieved mythical herd immunity from natural infection; they’ve simply inoculated enough people.

data suggest that most of the unvaccinated hold that status voluntarily at this point

The same arguments apply to tobacco: Smokers are 15 to 30 times more likely to develop lung cancer. Quitting the habit is akin to receiving a staggeringly powerful medicine, one that wipes out most of this excess risk.

If everyone who is eligible were triply vaccinated, our health-care system would be functioning normally again.

With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use.

We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort

Long-term actions for COVID might include charging the unvaccinated a premium on their health insurance, just as we do for smokers, or distributing frightening health warnings about the perils of remaining uninoculated

And once the political furor dies down, COVID shots will probably be added to the lists of required vaccinations for many more schools and workplaces.

nother aspect of where we’re headed with COVID. Tobacco is lethal enough that we are willing to restrict smokers’ personal freedoms—but only to a degree. As deadly as COVID is, some people won’t get vaccinated, no matter what, and both the vaccinated and unvaccinated will spread disease to others.

anti-COVID actions, much like anti-smoking policies, will be limited not by their effectiveness but by the degree to which they are politically palatable.

Without greater vaccination, living with COVID could mean enduring a yearly death toll that is an order of magnitude higher than the one from flu.

this, too, might come to feel like its own sort of ending. Endemic tobacco use causes hundreds of thousands of casualties, year after year after year, while fierce public-health efforts to reduce its toll continue in the background. Yet tobacco doesn’t really feel like a catastrophe for the average person.

Losing a year or two from average life expectancy only bumps us back to where we were in … 2000.

We still care for smokers when they get sick, of course, and we reduce harm whenever possible. The health-care system makes $225 billion every year for doing so—paid out of all of our tax dollars and insurance premiums

Hospitals have a well-honed talent for transforming any terrible situation into a marketable “center of excellence.”

But we shouldn’t forget the most important reason that the coronavirus isn’t like the flu: We’ve never had vaccines this effective in the midst of prior influenza outbreaks, which means we didn’t have a simple, clear approach to saving quite so many lives. Compassionate conversations, community outreach, insurance surcharges, even mandates—I’ll take them all. Now is not the time to quit.

Parents need to know that when children go online, they are entering a world of influencers, many of whom are hoping to make money by pushing dangerous products. It’s a world that’s invisible to us

when we log on to our social media, we don’t see what they see. Thanks to algorithms and ad targeting, I see videos about the best lawn fertilizer and wrinkle laser masks, while Ian is being fed reviews of flavored vape pens and beautiful women livestreaming themselves gambling crypto and urging him to gamble, too.

Smartphones are taking our kids to a different world

We worry about bad actors bullying, luring or indoctrinating them online

all of this is, unfortunately, only part of what makes social media dangerous.

The tobacco conglomerate Philip Morris International acquired the Zyn maker Swedish Match in 2022 as part of a strategic push into smokeless products, a category it projects could help drive an expected $2 billion in U.S. revenue in 2024.

P.M.I. is also a company that has long denied it markets tobacco products to minors despite decades of research accusing it of just that. One 2022 study alone found its brands advertising near schools and playgrounds around the globe.

the ’90s, when magazines ran full-page Absolut Vodka ads in different colors, which my friends and I collected and taped up on our walls next to pictures of a young Leonardo DiCaprio — until our parents tore them down. This was advertising that appealed to me as a teenager but was also visible to my parents, and — crucially — to regulators, who could point to billboards near schools or flavored vodka ads in fashion magazines and say, this is wrong.

Even the most committed parent today doesn’t have the same visibility into what her children are seeing online, so it is worth explaining how products like Zyn end up in social feeds

influencers. They aren’t traditional pitch people. Think of them more like the coolest kids on the block. They establish a following thanks to their personality, experience or expertise. They share how they’re feeling, they share what they’re thinking about, they share stuff they l

With ruthless efficiency, social media can deliver unlimited amounts of the content that influencers create or inspire. That makes the combination of influencers and social-media algorithms perhaps the most powerful form of advertising ever invented.

Videos like his operate like a meme: It’s unintelligible to the uninitiated, it’s a hilarious inside joke to those who know, and it encourages the audience to spread the message

Enter Tucker Carlson. Mr. Carlson, the former Fox News megastar who recently started his own subscription streaming service, has become a big Zyn influencer. He’s mentioned his love of Zyn in enough podcasts and interviews to earn the nickname Tucker CarlZyn.

was Max VanderAarde. You can glimpse him in a video from the event wearing a Santa hat and toasting Mr. Carlson as they each pop Zyns in their mouths. “You can call me king of Zynbabwe, or Tucker CarlZyn’s cousin,” he says in a recent TikTok. “Probably, what, moved 30 mil cans last year?”

Freezer Tarps, Mr. VanderAarde’s TikTok account, appears to have been removed after I asked the company about it. Left up are the large number of TikToks by the likes of @lifeofaZyn, @Zynfluencer1 and @Zyntakeover; those hashtagged to #Zynbabwe, one of Freezer Tarps’s favorite terms, have amassed more than 67 million views. So it’s worth breaking down Mr. VanderAarde’s videos.

All of these videos would just be jokes (in poor taste) if they were seen by adults only. They aren’t. But we can’t know for sure how many children follow the Nelk Boys or Freezer Tarps — social-media companies generally don’t release granular age-related data to the public. Mr. VanderAarde, who responded to a few of my questions via LinkedIn, said that nearly 95 percent of his followers are over the age of 18.

I turned to Influencity, a software program that estimates the ages of social media users by analyzing profile photos and selfies in recent posts. Influencity estimated that roughly 10 percent of the Nelk Boys’ followers on YouTube are ages 13 to 17. That’s more than 800,000 children.

The helicopter video has already been viewed more than one million times on YouTube, and iterations of it have circulated widely on TikTok.

YouTube said it eventually determined that four versions of the Carlson Zyn videos were not appropriate for viewers under age 18 under its community guidelines and restricted access to them by age

Mr. Carlson declined to comment on the record beyond his two-word statement. The Nelk Boys didn’t respond to requests for comment. Meta declined to comment on the record. TikTok said it does not allow content that promotes tobacco or its alternatives. The company said that it has over 40,000 trust and safety experts who work to keep the platform safe and that it prevented teenagers’ accounts from viewing over two million videos globally that show the consumption of tobacco products by adults. TikTok added that in the third quarter of 2023 it proactively removed 97 percent of videos that violated its alcohol, tobacco and drugs policy.

Greyson Imm, the high school student in Prairie Village, Kan., points to Mr. VanderAarde as having brought Zyn “more into the mainstream.” Mr. Imm believes his interest in independent comedy on TikTok perhaps made him a target for Mr. VanderAarde’s videos. “He would create all these funny phrases or things that would make it funny and joke about it and make it relevant to us.”

It wasn’t long before Mr. Imm noticed Zyn blowing up among his classmates — so much so that the student, now a senior at Shawnee Mission East High School, decided to write a piece in his school newspaper about it. He conducted an Instagram poll from the newspaper’s account and found that 23 percent of the students who responded used oral nicotine pouches during school.

“Upper-decky lip cushions, ferda!” Mr. VanderAarde coos in what was one of his popular TikTok videos, which had been liked more than 40,000 times. The singsong audio sounds like gibberish to most people, but it’s actually a call to action. “Lip cushion” is a nickname for a nicotine pouch, and “ferda” is slang for “the guys.”

“I have fun posting silly content that makes fun of pop culture,” Mr. VanderAarde said to me in our LinkedIn exchange.

They’re incentivized to increase their following and, in turn, often their bank accounts. Young people are particularly susceptible to this kind of promotion because their relationship with influencers is akin to the intimacy of a close friend.

I’ve spent the past three years studying media manipulation and memes, and what I see in Freezer Tarps’s silly content is strategy. The use of Zyn slang seems like a way to turn interest in Zyn into a meme that can be monetized through merchandise and other business opportunities.

Such as? Freezer Tarps sells his own pouch product, Upperdeckys, which delivers caffeine instead of nicotine and is available in flavors including cotton candy and orange creamsicle. In addition to jockeying for sponsorship, Mr. Carlson may also be trying to establish himself with a younger, more male, more online audience as his new media company begins building its subscriber base

This is the kind of viral word-of-mouth marketing that looks like entertainment, functions like culture and can increase sales

What’s particularly galling about all of this is that we as a society already agreed that peddling nicotine to kids is not OK. It is illegal to sell nicotine products to anyone under the age of 21 in all 50 states

numerous studies have shown that the younger people are when they try nicotine for the first time, the more likely they will become addicted to it. Nearly 90 percent of adults who smoke daily started smoking before they turned 18.

Decades later — even after Juul showed the power of influencers to help addict yet another generation of children — the courts, tech companies and regulators still haven’t adequately grappled with the complexities of the influencer economy.

Facebook, Instagram and TikTok all have guidelines that prohibit tobacco ads and sponsored, endorsed or partnership-based content that promotes tobacco products. Holding them accountable for maintaining those standards is a bigger question.

We need a new definition of advertising that takes into account how the internet actually works. I’d go so far as to propose that the courts broaden the definition of advertising to include all influencer promotion. For a product as dangerous as nicotine, I’d put the bar to be considered an influencer as low as 1,000 followers on a social-media account, and maybe if a video from someone with less of a following goes viral under certain legal definitions, it would become influencer promotion.

Laws should require tech companies to share data on what young people are seeing on social media and to prevent any content promoting age-gated products from reaching children’s feeds

hose efforts must go hand in hand with social media companies putting real teeth behind their efforts to verify the ages of their users. Government agencies should enforce the rules already on the books to protect children from exposure to addictive products,

I refuse to believe there aren’t ways to write laws and regulations that can address these difficult questions over tech company liability and free speech, that there aren’t ways to hold platforms more accountable for advertising that might endanger kids. Let’s stop treating the internet like a monster we can’t control. We built it. We foisted it upon our children. We had better try to protect them from its potential harms as best we can.

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.

there’s little reason to enserf or enslave a worker (not quite the same thing, but let’s leave that aside) if labor is abundant and land is scarce, so that the amount that worker could earn if he ran away barely exceeds the cost of subsistence.

But if land becomes abundant and labor scarce, the ruling class will want to pin workers in place, so they can forcibly extract the difference between the value of what workers can produce — strictly speaking, their marginal product — and the cost of keeping them alive.

Yet serfdom wasn’t reimposed, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear. One thought, however, is that holding people captive in order to steal the fruits of their labor isn’t easy.

In fact, the real historical puzzle is why high wages didn’t always lead to widespread slavery or serfdom

serfdom in the West had more or less withered away by around 1300, because Western Europe was overpopulated given the technologies of the time, which in turn meant that landowners didn’t need to worry that their tenants and workers would leave in search of lower rents or higher wages.

But the Black Death caused populations to crash and wages to soar. In fact, for a while, real wages in Britain reached a level they wouldn’t regain until around 1870:

Labor was scarce in pre-Civil War America, so free workers earned high wages by European standards. Here are some estimates of real wages in several countries as a percentage of U.S. levels on the eve of the Civil War:

Indeed, slaveholders and their defenders lashed out at anyone who even suggested that slavery was a bad thing. As Abraham Lincoln said in his Cooper Union address, the slave interest in effect demanded that Northerners “cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right.”

Notice that Australia — another land-abundant, labor-scarce nation — more or less matched America; elsewhere, workers earned much less.

Landowners, of course, didn’t want to pay high wages. In the early days of colonial settlement, many Europeans came as indentured servants — in effect, temporary serfs

landowners quickly turned to African slaves, who offered two advantages to their exploiters: Because they looked different from white settlers, they found it hard to escape, and they received less sympathy from poor whites who might otherwise have realized that they had many interests in common. Of course, white southerners also saw slaves as property, not people, and so the value of slaves factored into the balance sheet of this greed-driven system.

again, the dynamic was one in which greedy slaveholders used and perpetuated racism to sustain their reign of exploitation and terror.

Because U.S. slavery was race-based, however, there was a limited supply of slaves, and it turned out that slaves made more for their masters in Southern agriculture than in other occupations or places

Black people in the North were sold down the river to Southern planters who were willing to pay more for them, so slavery became an institution peculiar to one part of the country.

As such, slaves became a hugely important financial asset to their owners. Estimates of the market value of slaves before the Civil War vary widely, but they were clearly worth much more than the land they cultivated, and may well have accounted for the majority of Southern wealth.

Inevitably, slaveholders became staunch defenders of the system underlying their wealth

Hence the rise of serfdom as Russia expanded east, and the rise of slavery as Europe colonized the New World.

But Northerners wouldn’t do that. There were relatively few Americans pushing for national abolition, but Northern states, one by one, abolished slavery in their own territories

This wasn’t as noble an act as it might have been if they had been confiscating slaveholders’ property, rather than in effect waiting until the slaves had been sold. Still, it’s to voters’ credit that they did find slavery repugnant.

And this posed a problem for the South

Anyone who believes or pretends to believe that the Civil War was about states’ rights should read Ulysses S. Grant’s memoirs, which point out that the truth was almost the opposite. In his conclusion, Grant noted that maintaining slavery was difficult when much of the nation consisted of free states, so the slave states in effect demanded control over free-state policies.

This should sound familiar. Since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, states that have banned abortion have grown increasingly frantic over the ability of women to travel to states where abortion rights remain; it’s obvious that the right will eventually impose a national abortion ban if it can.

For a long time, the South actually did manage to exercise that kind of national control. But industrialization gradually shifted the balance of power within the United States away from the South to the North:

So did immigration, with very few immigrants moving to slave states.And the war happened because the increasingly empowered people of the North, as Grant wrote, “were not willing to play the role of police for the South” in protecting slavery.

So yes, the Civil War was about slavery — an institution that existed solely to enrich some men by depriving others of their freedom

And there’s no excuse for anyone who pretends that there was anything noble or even defensible about the South’s cause: The Civil War was fought to defend an utterly vile institution.