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Though on one level it was about (of course) the next iteration of pinup culture as defined by, and catering to, men, the success of Victoria’s Secret, once a mere catalog company, was also the product of a host of cultural phenomena as fashion, entertainment, branding, sex and kitsch all began to merge at the turn of the millennium.

the Victoria’s Secret Angels were part of the commercialization of the high/low moment that defined the cultural tenor of the late 20th century and is still going strong in collaborations everywhere.

First captured by Kirk Varnedoe and Adam Gopnik in an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1990 (and an accompanying book), it was later appropriated by fashion designers including Tom Ford, whose 1996 breakthrough Gucci show married the irony of kitsch to luxury materials (remember the GG clogs?) and an unabashed embrace of Studio 54 decadence

The Serum Institute of India is the world’s largest manufacturer of vaccines by volume, founded over 50 years ago by now-multibillionaire Cyrus Poonawalla. It will likely provide not only almost all the vaccines administered in India, but many elsewhere in the world too, once exports are permitted later in the year.

Research by Fitch Solutions outlines three groups of Asian economies this year: Those that can plausibly vaccinate most of the people in priority groups such as health-care workers and the elderly by June, those that can do so by September and those that will take longer. India is by some distance the lowest-income country in the first group of economies, which includes Hong Kong, China, Singapore and Malaysia.

Wealthier South Korea and Thailand will take longer.

But after Donald Trump’s surprising victory in 2016 seemed to defy those models, there have been many questions about how much attention we should pay to electoral forecasting.

Why do we have models? Why can’t we just consider polling averages? Well, presidents are not elected by a national vote total but by the electoral votes of each state, so national polls do not give us the information we need. As two of the last five elections showed — in 2000 and 2016 — it’s possible to win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College.

While we have some theories on what influences voters, we have no fine-grained understanding of why people vote the way they do, and what polling data we have is relatively sparse.

Trump Says ‘Unsolicited Ballots’ Will Be the Cause of Election Night Delays. They Won’t.

But two tweets from President Trump Thursday morning erroneously sought to blame states that are automatically mailing out ballots to registered voters for the likely delays and baselessly stated that the results “may NEVER BE ACCURATELY DETERMINED,” an assertion dismissed by elections experts.

There is absolutely no evidence that states that automatically send out mail-in ballots to all voters have had issues with accuracy, and some such as Colorado, Washington and Oregon have been conducting their elections mostly by mail for years.

FEW THINGS about Donald Trump’s rise are harder to explain than the fact that some of the most religious Americans were behind it.

In 2016, 81% of white evangelicals voted for him.

The popular explanation for this strange nexus is that white Christians overlooked the president’s failings because of his willingness to fight their corner, by nominating conservative judges and opposing abortion

This has since been expanded to provide equal coverage to all citizens from birth, regardless of age, financial status or employment status. Furthermore, all foreigners who legally work or reside in Taiwan are also afforded the same coverage.

single-payer model

The United States accurately predicted the start of the war in Ukraine, sounding the alarm that an invasion was imminent despite Moscow’s denials and Europe’s skepticism. Predicting how it might end is proving far more difficult.

At the Pentagon, there are models of a slogging conflict that brings more needless death and destruction to a nascent European democracy, and others in which Mr. Putin settles for what some believe was his original objective: seizing a broad swath of the south and east, connecting Russia by land to Crimea, which he annexed in 2014.

And there is a more terrifying endgame, in which NATO nations get sucked more directly into the conflict, by accident or design.

As inflation has plummeted while unemployment remains low, the president’s allies see not just a strong run of economic data but a new model for policymakers — proof of what is possible if the government is willing to be aggressive in fighting downturns.

Summers is the most prominent expert who disagrees. He blasted the administration’s $1.9 trillion 2021 stimulus law, the American Rescue Plan, for exacerbating inflation, arguing through 2022 that the U.S. economy would probably need a spike in unemployment for price hikes to fully abate and accusing President Biden’s team of the “least responsible” macroeconomic policy in 40 years. Biden’s economic policies had overstimulated the economy, Summers said on cable TV, in op-eds and in interviews, as well as in private talks. And he maintained it would almost certainly take a major slowdown — and millions of lost jobs — for inflation to return to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target.

Biden last year instinctively rejected the notion pushed by Summers that taming inflation would require policies that would throw millions of people out of work, according to five people familiar with the president’s private remarks

it’s not clear to me that economists who had predicted that getting inflation under control — it’s down a lot, although not all the way — would require years of very high unemployment are engaging in a similar reckoning. They should. In particular, they should ask themselves whether inflation pessimism was in part caused by a form of bias that has had negative effects on a lot of economic policymaking — not partisan bias, but the urge to sound serious by calling for hard choices and sacrifice.

let me talk about what went wrong with so many recent economic predictions.

mainstream predictions about inflation and unemployment made late last year — economic projections by the Federal Reserve and by professional forecasters surveyed by the Philadelphia Fed. Perhaps surprisingly, both more or less correctly predicted the inflation decline we’re actually seeing.

connection that U.S. men increasingly say is missing from their lives, leaving them lonely, disconnected and, often, angry. Earlier this year, Surgeon General Vivek H. Murthy declared the country to be in an “epidemic of loneliness and isolation.” National suicide rates have risen in recent decades, and men in 2021 died by suicide at a rate nearly four times higher than women, according to the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention.

American men’s isolation stems in large part from a pervasive cultural belief, experts say: that men should be self-reliant and hide their emotions, especially from other men.

Today, a battle over the face of American masculinity is underway. Popular music, action movies and leaders like former president Donald Trump and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), author of the recent book “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs,” push for a more aggressive model.

For years, I saw myself not as a global-warming denier (a loaded term with its tendentious echo of Holocaust denial) but rather as an agnostic on the causes of climate change and a scoffer at the idea that it was a catastrophic threat to the future of humanity.

It’s not that I was unalterably opposed to the idea that, by pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, modern civilization was contributing to the warming by 1 degree Celsius and the inches of sea-level rise the planet had experienced since the dawn of the industrial age. It’s that the severity of the threat seemed to me wildly exaggerated and that the proposed cures all smacked of old-fashioned statism mixed with new-age religion.

Hadn’t we repeatedly lived through previous alarms about other, allegedly imminent, environmental catastrophes that didn’t come to pass, like the belief, widespread in the 1970s, that overpopulation would inevitably lead to mass starvation? And if the Green Revolution had spared us from that Malthusian nightmare, why should we not have confidence that human ingenuity wouldn’t also prevent the parade of horribles that climate change was supposed to bring about?

We are in the throes of a reading crisis.

While right and left are hardly equivalent in their stated motivations, they share the assumption that it’s important to protect vulnerable readers from reading the wrong things.

But maybe the real problem is that children aren’t being taught to read at all.

The last time we found ourselves facing such widespread social change wrought by technology was the onset of the Web 2.0 era in the mid-2000s.

Those innovative services, however, came at a steep cost. What we initially conceived of as free services were monetized through extensive surveillance of the people and businesses that used them. The result has been an online economy where access to increasingly essential services is conditioned on the widespread hoarding and sale of our personal data.

These business models drove companies to develop endlessly invasive ways to track us, and the Federal Trade Commission would later find reason to believe that several of these companies had broken the law

In 2020, many Americans told themselves that all it would take to halt the pandemic was replacing the president and hitting the “science button.”

In 2023, it looks like we’re telling ourselves the opposite: that if we were given the chance to run the pandemic again, it would have been better just to hit “abort” and give up.

you can see it in Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera’s book “The Big Fail: What the Pandemic Revealed About Who America Protects and Who It Leaves Behind,” excerpted last month in New York magazine under the headline “Covid Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure.”

When European Union leaders introduced a 125-page draft law to regulate artificial intelligence in April 2021, they hailed it as a global model for handling the technology.

E.U. lawmakers had gotten input from thousands of experts for three years about A.I., when the topic was not even on the table in other countries. The result was a “landmark” policy that was “future proof,” declared Margrethe Vestager, the head of digital policy for the 27-nation bloc.

Then came ChatGPT.