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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The eerily humanlike chatbot, which went viral last year by generating its own answers to prompts, blindsided E.U. policymakers. The type of A.I. that powered ChatGPT was not mentioned in the draft law and was not a major focus of discussions about the policy. Lawmakers and their aides peppered one another with calls and texts to address the gap, as tech executives warned that overly aggressive regulations could put Europe at an economic disadvantage.

Even now, E.U. lawmakers are arguing over what to do, putting the law at risk. “We will always be lagging behind the speed of technology,” said Svenja Hahn, a member of the European Parliament who was involved in writing the A.I. law.

Lawmakers and regulators in Brussels, in Washington and elsewhere are losing a battle to regulate A.I. and are racing to catch up, as concerns grow that the powerful technology will automate away jobs, turbocharge the spread of disinformation and eventually develop its own kind of intelligence.

Nations have moved swiftly to tackle A.I.’s potential perils, but European officials have been caught off guard by the technology’s evolution, while U.S. lawmakers openly concede that they barely understand how it works.

The absence of rules has left a vacuum. Google, Meta, Microsoft and OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, have been left to police themselves as they race to create and profit from advanced A.I. systems

At the root of the fragmented actions is a fundamental mismatch. A.I. systems are advancing so rapidly and unpredictably that lawmakers and regulators can’t keep pace

That gap has been compounded by an A.I. knowledge deficit in governments, labyrinthine bureaucracies and fears that too many rules may inadvertently limit the technology’s benefits.

Even in Europe, perhaps the world’s most aggressive tech regulator, A.I. has befuddled policymakers.

The European Union has plowed ahead with its new law, the A.I. Act, despite disputes over how to handle the makers of the latest A.I. systems.

The result has been a sprawl of responses. President Biden issued an executive order in October about A.I.’s national security effects as lawmakers debate what, if any, measures to pass. Japan is drafting nonbinding guidelines for the technology, while China has imposed restrictions on certain types of A.I. Britain has said existing laws are adequate for regulating the technology. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are pouring government money into A.I. research.

A final agreement, expected as soon as Wednesday, could restrict certain risky uses of the technology and create transparency requirements about how the underlying systems work. But even if it passes, it is not expected to take effect for at least 18 months — a lifetime in A.I. development — and how it will be enforced is unclear.

Many companies, preferring nonbinding codes of conduct that provide latitude to speed up development, are lobbying to soften proposed regulations and pitting governments against one another.

“No one, not even the creators of these systems, know what they will be able to do,” said Matt Clifford, an adviser to Prime Minister Rishi Sunak of Britain, who presided over an A.I. Safety Summit last month with 28 countries. “The urgency comes from there being a real question of whether governments are equipped to deal with and mitigate the risks.”

Europe takes the lead

In mid-2018, 52 academics, computer scientists and lawyers met at the Crowne Plaza hotel in Brussels to discuss artificial intelligence. E.U. officials had selected them to provide advice about the technology, which was drawing attention for powering driverless cars and facial recognition systems.

as they discussed A.I.’s possible effects — including the threat of facial recognition technology to people’s privacy — they recognized “there were all these legal gaps, and what happens if people don’t follow those guidelines?”

In 2019, the group published a 52-page report with 33 recommendations, including more oversight of A.I. tools that could harm individuals and society.

By October, the governments of France, Germany and Italy, the three largest E.U. economies, had come out against strict regulation of general purpose A.I. models for fear of hindering their domestic tech start-ups. Others in the European Parliament said the law would be toothless without addressing the technology. Divisions over the use of facial recognition technology also persisted.

So when the A.I. Act was unveiled in 2021, it concentrated on “high risk” uses of the technology, including in law enforcement, school admissions and hiring. It largely avoided regulating the A.I. models that powered them unless listed as dangerous

“They sent me a draft, and I sent them back 20 pages of comments,” said Stuart Russell, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who advised the European Commission. “Anything not on their list of high-risk applications would not count, and the list excluded ChatGPT and most A.I. systems.”

E.U. leaders were undeterred.“Europe may not have been the leader in the last wave of digitalization, but it has it all to lead the next one,” Ms. Vestager said when she introduced the policy at a news conference in Brussels.

In 2020, European policymakers decided that the best approach was to focus on how A.I. was used and not the underlying technology. A.I. was not inherently good or bad, they said — it depended on how it was applied.

Nineteen months later, ChatGPT arrived.

The Washington game

Lacking tech expertise, lawmakers are increasingly relying on Anthropic, Microsoft, OpenAI, Google and other A.I. makers to explain how it works and to help create rules.

“We’re not experts,” said Representative Ted Lieu, Democrat of California, who hosted Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, and more than 50 lawmakers at a dinner in Washington in May. “It’s important to be humble.”

Tech companies have seized their advantage. In the first half of the year, many of Microsoft’s and Google’s combined 169 lobbyists met with lawmakers and the White House to discuss A.I. legislation, according to lobbying disclosures. OpenAI registered its first three lobbyists and a tech lobbying group unveiled a $25 million campaign to promote A.I.’s benefits this year.

In that same period, Mr. Altman met with more than 100 members of Congress, including former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, and the Senate leader, Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York. After testifying in Congress in May, Mr. Altman embarked on a 17-city global tour, meeting world leaders including President Emmanuel Macron of France, Mr. Sunak and Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India.

, the White House announced that the four companies had agreed to voluntary commitments on A.I. safety, including testing their systems through third-party overseers — which most of the companies were already doing.

“It was brilliant,” Mr. Smith said. “Instead of people in government coming up with ideas that might have been impractical, they said, ‘Show us what you think you can do and we’ll push you to do more.’”

In a statement, Ms. Raimondo said the federal government would keep working with companies so “America continues to lead the world in responsible A.I. innovation.”

Over the summer, the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into OpenAI and how it handles user data. Lawmakers continued welcoming tech executives.

In September, Mr. Schumer was the host of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg of Meta, Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft and Mr. Altman at a closed-door meeting with lawmakers in Washington to discuss A.I. rules. Mr. Musk warned of A.I.’s “civilizational” risks, while Mr. Altman proclaimed that A.I. could solve global problems such as poverty.

A.I. companies are playing governments off one another. In Europe, industry groups have warned that regulations could put the European Union behind the United States. In Washington, tech companies have cautioned that China might pull ahead.

In May, Ms. Vestager, Ms. Raimondo and Antony J. Blinken, the U.S. secretary of state, met in Lulea, Sweden, to discuss cooperating on digital policy.

“China is way better at this stuff than you imagine,” Mr. Clark of Anthropic told members of Congress in January.

After two days of talks, Ms. Vestager announced that Europe and the United States would release a shared code of conduct for safeguarding A.I. “within weeks.” She messaged colleagues in Brussels asking them to share her social media post about the pact, which she called a “huge step in a race we can’t afford to lose.”

Months later, no shared code of conduct had appeared. The United States instead announced A.I. guidelines of its own.

Little progress has been made internationally on A.I. With countries mired in economic competition and geopolitical distrust, many are setting their own rules for the borderless technology.

Yet “weak regulation in another country will affect you,” said Rajeev Chandrasekhar, India’s technology minister, noting that a lack of rules around American social media companies led to a wave of global disinformation.

“Most of the countries impacted by those technologies were never at the table when policies were set,” he said. “A.I will be several factors more difficult to manage.”

Even among allies, the issue has been divisive. At the meeting in Sweden between E.U. and U.S. officials, Mr. Blinken criticized Europe for moving forward with A.I. regulations that could harm American companies, one attendee said. Thierry Breton, a European commissioner, shot back that the United States could not dictate European policy, the person said.

Some policymakers said they hoped for progress at an A.I. safety summit that Britain held last month at Bletchley Park, where the mathematician Alan Turing helped crack the Enigma code used by the Nazis. The gathering featured Vice President Kamala Harris; Wu Zhaohui, China’s vice minister of science and technology; Mr. Musk; and others.

The upshot was a 12-paragraph statement describing A.I.’s “transformative” potential and “catastrophic” risk of misuse. Attendees agreed to meet again next year.

The talks, in the end, produced a deal to keep talking.

Migrants are in politicians’ cross hairs, threatened with deportation and reduced support.

And the country’s commitment to fighting antisemitism seems not only to be failing but also to have given rise to an outpouring of anti-Muslim sentiment.

The truth is that Germany never fully deserved its vaunted reputation. The export-led economy depended on a large low-wage sector and the country’s position in the European Union.

The far right — ensconced in parts of the state — never went away, and the celebrated Willkommenskultur, short lived in any case, couldn’t conceal enduring xenophobia and suspicion about foreigners.

The culture of remembrance and historical reckoning, too, was far from perfect

Even so, the sudden coarsening of public life in the service of a warped sense of national identity is striking. Germany, supposed model of fair-minded moderation, has become mean.

the government’s habit of conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism has had some disturbing effects. Most notably, it has created an atmosphere where advocacy for Palestinian rights or a cease-fire in Gaza is seen as suspect, running afoul of the state-mandated position

The police, for example, have cracked down on pro-Palestinian protests in several cities and outright banned numerous demonstrations.

politicians, seizing on some evidence of antisemitic displays at pro-Palestinian protests to link Muslims and migrants with antisemitism, have taken the opportunity to advance an anti-migrant agenda

When Mr. Scholz was asked about antisemitism among people “with Arab roots” in an October interview, he said Germany needed to sort out more precisely who is allowed to come into the country and who is not. “We are limiting irregular migration,” Mr. Scholz pronounced, before adding a little later, “We must finally deport on a large scale.”

More spending cuts are expected. In an economy on the cusp of recession — Germany is the only country among Group of 7 nations not expected to register growth in 2023 — this is bad news for Germans, who, according to a recent study, are predominantly worried about living expenses, increasing rents, tax hikes and cuts to benefits.

everal other high-ranking politicians have also pushed the need for stricter border controls in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Friedrich Merz, leader of the opposition Christian Democrats, spoke out against taking in refugees from Gaza, claiming that Germany already has “enough antisemitic young men in the country.”

In early November, after months of intense discussions, the federal government and the 16 state governors agreed on stricter measures to curb the number of migrants entering the country. Asylum seekers now receive less cash and have to wait twice as long to get on welfare, taking even more autonomy away from their lives. According to the new plan, Germany will also extend its border checks, speed up asylum procedures and look into the idea of offshoring asylum centers.

Worryingly, antisemitic incidents have been on the rise in recent weeks

it is troubling that Germany, of all places, should frame antisemitism as an imported problem. Crime statistics show that a vast majority of antisemitic crimes are committed by right-wing extremists and not by Islamists, let alone migrants or Muslims.

Germany’s leaders, aided by major media figures, are using the fight against antisemitism as a pretext to encourage racist resentment and anti-migrant sentiment.

Alternative for Germany, which has pulled the political center of gravity to the right since its formation in 2013, has never been stronger. Polling at over 20 percent, the party and its concerns, once fringe, are firmly mainstream. Questions of national identity and immigration dominate political discussion, in keeping with a broader rise of nativism across Europe.

The country’s anti-migrant turn is often justified in terms of economic concerns.

Opponents of immigration point to the underfunding of schools and hospitals, the lack of affordable housing, the miserable public transport and the general decline of the domestic economy.

German infrastructure is indeed in crisis. But this has little to do with immigration and everything to do with austerity policies that have been in place for the past two decades.

Central to those policies is the so-called debt brake. Enshrined in the German Constitution in 2009, it restricts the annual public deficit to 0.35 percent of gross domestic product, ensuring strict limits on spending.

The effects have been immediate: Mr. Lindner announced an early end to a price cap on energy bills, making it likely that German citizens will have to pay more for their heating in the coming year.

Christian Lindner, the finance minister and head of the center-right Free Democratic Party, called for a fundamental change in immigration policy to “reduce the appeal of the German welfare state.”

It’s bad news for the government, too. The coalition, composed of the Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrats, came to office in 2021 with a mandate to modernize the country and lead it in a progressive direction

Instead, with programs of fiscal restriction and stances of social reaction, Germany’s leaders are only serving the far-right party they claim to want to keep at bay.

even after the 7 October massacre had stirred memories of the bleakest chapters of the Jewish past – and prompted a surge in antisemitism across the world – Jews were being told exactly how they can and cannot speak about their pain. We’re not to mention the Holocaust, one scholar advised, because that would be “weaponising” it. Historical context about the Nakba, the 1948 dispossession of the Palestinians, is – rightly – deemed essential. But mention the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews – the event that finally secured near-universal agreement among the Jewish people, and the United Nations in 1947, that Jews needed a state of their own – and you’ve broken the rules. Because it’s impossible that both sides might have suffered historic pain.

Instead, a shift is under way that has been starkly revealed during these past three weeks. It squeezes the Israel-Palestine conflict into a “decolonisation” frame it doesn’t quite fit, with all Israelis – not just those in the occupied West Bank – defined as the footsoldiers of “settler colonialism”, no different from, say, the French in Algeria

They have been framed as the modern world’s ultimate evildoer: the coloniser.

That matters because, in this conception, justice can only be done once the colonisers are gone

What’s more, such a framing brands all Israelis – not just West Bank settlers – as guilty of the sin of colonialism. Perhaps that explains why those letter writers could not full-throatedly condemn the 7 October killing of innocent Israeli civilians. Because they do not see any Israeli, even a child, as wholly innocent.

the late Israeli novelist and peace activist Amos Oz was never wiser than when he described the Israel/Palestine conflict as something infinitely more tragic: a clash of right v right. Two peoples with deep wounds, howling with grief, fated to share the same small piece of land.

Not only have pro-Palestinian rallies been stopped or broken up by police

ermany’s unwavering official support for the Israeli government’s actions leaves scant room for humanity. It is also counter-productive, serving to spread fear, Islamophobia and, yes, antisemitism

In addition to banning Hamas-related symbols schools are now free to also ban “symbols, gestures and expressions of opinion that do not yet reach the limit of criminal liability”, which includes the keffiyeh, the Palestinian flag and “free Palestine” stickers and badges.

German education senator Katharina Günther-Wünsch has also sent out an email to schools saying that “any demonstrative behaviour or expression of opinion that can be understood (italics are mine) as approving the attacks against Israel or supporting the terrorist organisations that carry them out, such as Hamas or Hezbollah, represents a threat to school peace in the current situation and is prohibited

The stifling of opposition to the killing of civilians in Gaza even extends to Jewish people. A Jewish Israeli woman who held up a placard in a Berlin square calling for an end to violence was approached by German police in a matter of seconds and taken away in a police van. She was later released. Anyone showing solidarity with Palestinians is automatically suspected of being a tacit Hamas sympathiser.

Having grown up in the shadow of collective guilt for Nazi war crimes, many German intellectuals seem almost to welcome an opportunity to atone for ancestral sins. The atonement, of course, will fall on the backs of Palestinian children.

It should come under the “stating the obvious” category, but still has to be underlined: historically, Islamophobia has only led to more terrorism. Having grown up in Bosnia, I can tell you with absolute certainty that the vicious circle is never-ending. There is always another dead body to be weaponised.

I am appalled by Hamas’s actions and offer my thoughts for their victims, but I have no say in what they do. None of my taxes go to the funding of Hamas. Some of my taxes, however, do fund the bombing of Gaza. In the period between 2018 and 2022, Israel imported $2.7bn-worth of weapons from the US and Germany.

Living in Germany, I see it as my human responsibility to call it out for its one-sidedness, its hypocrisy and its acquiesence in the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. Walking by Lucie’s stone every day, I am reminded of that responsibility. I am reminded of what silence can do and how long it can haunt a place and a people. I come from a silent place soaked in blood. I never thought I would feel that same silence in Germany.

Either you are against fascism in all its forms, or you’re a hypocrite. You condemn a terrorist organisation as well as the terrorism committed by a government

All the empathy and humility in the world will not mean much against the pressures of intolerance and tribalism without an invaluable quality that Sulzberger did not emphasise: courage.

Sulzberger seems to underestimate the struggle he is in, that all journalism and indeed America itself is in

In describing the essential qualities of independent journalism in his essay, he unspooled a list of admirable traits – empathy, humility, curiosity and so forth. These qualities have for generations been helpful in contending with the Times’s familiar problem, which is liberal bias

on their own, these qualities have no chance against the Times’s new, more dangerous problem, which is in crucial respects the opposite of the old one.

The Times’s problem has metastasised from liberal bias to illiberal bias, from an inclination to favour one side of the national debate to an impulse to shut debate down altogether

the internet knocked the industry off its foundations. Local newspapers were the proving ground between college campuses and national newsrooms. As they disintegrated, the national news media lost a source of seasoned reporters and many Americans lost a journalism whose truth they could verify with their own eyes.

far more than when I set out to become a journalist, doing the work right today demands a particular kind of courage:

the moral and intellectual courage to take the other side seriously and to report truths and ideas that your own side demonises for fear they will harm its cause.

One of the glories of embracing illiberalism is that, like Trump, you are always right about everything, and so you are justified in shouting disagreement down.

leaders of many workplaces and boardrooms across America find that it is so much easier to compromise than to confront – to give a little ground today in the belief you can ultimately bring people around

This is how reasonable Republican leaders lost control of their party to Trump and how liberal-minded college presidents lost control of their campuses. And it is why the leadership of the New York Times is losing control of its principles.

Over the decades the Times and other mainstream news organisations failed plenty of times to live up to their commitments to integrity and open-mindedness. The relentless struggle against biases and preconceptions, rather than the achievement of a superhuman objective omniscience, is what mattered

. I thought, and still think, that no American institution could have a better chance than the Times, by virtue of its principles, its history, its people and its hold on the attention of influential Americans, to lead the resistance to the corruption of political and intellectual life, to overcome the encroaching dogmatism and intolerance.

As the country became more polarised, the national media followed the money by serving partisan audiences the versions of reality they preferred

This relationship proved self-reinforcing. As Americans became freer to choose among alternative versions of reality, their polarisation intensified.

as the top editors let bias creep into certain areas of coverage, such as culture, lifestyle and business, that made the core harder to defend and undermined the authority of even the best reporters.

here have been signs the Times is trying to recover the courage of its convictions

The paper was slow to display much curiosity about the hard question of the proper medical protocols for trans children; but once it did, the editors defended their coverage against the inevitable criticism.

As Sulzberger told me in the past, returning to the old standards will require agonising change. He saw that as the gradual work of many years, but I think he is mistaken. To overcome the cultural and commercial pressures the Times faces, particularly given the severe test posed by another Trump candidacy and possible presidency, its publisher and senior editors will have to be bolder than that.

As a Democrat from a family of Democrats, a graduate of Yale and a blossom of the imagined meritocracy, I had my first real chance, at Buchanan’s rallies, to see the world through the eyes of stalwart opponents of abortion, immigration and the relentlessly rising tide of modernity.

the Times is failing to face up to one crucial reason: that it has lost faith in Americans, too.

For now, to assert that the Times plays by the same rules it always has is to commit a hypocrisy that is transparent to conservatives, dangerous to liberals and bad for the country as a whole.

It makes the Times too easy for conservatives to dismiss and too easy for progressives to believe.

The reality is that the Times is becoming the publication through which America’s progressive elite talks to itself about an America that does not really exist.

It is hard to imagine a path back to saner American politics that does not traverse a common ground of shared fact.

It is equally hard to imagine how America’s diversity can continue to be a source of strength, rather than become a fatal flaw, if Americans are afraid or unwilling to listen to each other.

I suppose it is also pretty grandiose to think you might help fix all that. But that hope, to me, is what makes journalism worth doing.

Since Adolph Ochs bought the paper in 1896, one of the most inspiring things the Times has said about itself is that it does its work “without fear or favour”. That is not true of the institution today – it cannot be, not when its journalists are afraid to trust readers with a mainstream conservative argument such as Cotton’s, and its leaders are afraid to say otherwise.

Most important, the Times, probably more than any other American institution, could influence the way society approached debate and engagement with opposing views. If Times Opinion demonstrated the same kind of intellectual courage and curiosity that my colleagues at the Atlantic had shown, I hoped, the rest of the media would follow.

You did not have to go along with everything that any tribe said. You did not have to pretend that the good guys, much as you might have respected them, were right about everything, or that the bad guys, much as you might have disdained them, never had a point. You did not, in other words, ever have to lie.

This fundamental honesty was vital for readers, because it equipped them to make better, more informed judgments about the world. Sometimes it might shock or upset them by failing to conform to their picture of reality. But it also granted them the respect of acknowledging that they were able to work things out for themselves.

The Atlantic did not aspire to the same role as the Times. It did not promise to serve up the news of the day without any bias. But it was to opinion journalism what the Times’s reporting was supposed to be to news: honest and open to the world.

Those were the glory days of the blog, and we hit on the idea of creating a living op-ed page, a collective of bloggers with different points of view but a shared intellectual honesty who would argue out the meaning of the news of the day

They were brilliant, gutsy writers, and their disagreements were deep enough that I used to joke that my main work as editor was to prevent fistfights.

Under its owner, David Bradley, my colleagues and I distilled our purpose as publishing big arguments about big ideas

we also began producing some of the most important work in American journalism: Nicholas Carr on whether Google was “making us stupid”; Hanna Rosin on “the end of men”; Taylor Branch on “the shame of college sports”; Ta-Nehisi Coates on “the case for reparations”; Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt on “the coddling of the American mind”.

I was starting to see some effects of the new campus politics within the Atlantic. A promising new editor had created a digital form for aspiring freelancers to fill out, and she wanted to ask them to disclose their racial and sexual identity. Why? Because, she said, if we were to write about the trans community, for example, we would ask a trans person to write the story

There was a good argument for that, I acknowledged, and it sometimes might be the right answer. But as I thought about the old people, auto workers and abortion opponents I had learned from, I told her there was also an argument for correspondents who brought an outsider’s ignorance, along with curiosity and empathy, to the story.

A journalism that starts out assuming it knows the answers, it seemed to me then, and seems even more so to me now, can be far less valuable to the reader than a journalism that starts out with a humbling awareness that it knows nothing.

In the age of the internet it is hard even for a child to sustain an “innocent eye”, but the alternative for journalists remains as dangerous as ever, to become propagandists. America has more than enough of those already.

When I looked around the Opinion department, change was not what I perceived. Excellent writers and editors were doing excellent work. But the department’s journalism was consumed with politics and foreign affairs in an era when readers were also fascinated by changes in technology, business, science and culture.

Fairly quickly, though, I realised two things: first, that if I did my job as I thought it should be done, and as the Sulzbergers said they wanted me to do it, I would be too polarising internally ever to lead the newsroom; second, that I did not want that job, though no one but my wife believed me when I said that.

there was a compensating moral and psychological privilege that came with aspiring to journalistic neutrality and open-mindedness, despised as they might understandably be by partisans. Unlike the duelling politicians and advocates of all kinds, unlike the corporate chieftains and their critics, unlike even the sainted non-profit workers, you did not have to pretend things were simpler than they actually were

On the right and left, America’s elites now talk within their tribes, and get angry or contemptuous on those occasions when they happen to overhear the other conclave. If they could be coaxed to agree what they were arguing about, and the rules by which they would argue about it, opinion journalism could serve a foundational need of the democracy by fostering diverse and inclusive debate. Who could be against that?

The large staff of op-ed editors contained only a couple of women. Although the 11 columnists were individually admirable, only two of them were women and only one was a person of colour

Not only did they all focus on politics and foreign affairs, but during the 2016 campaign, no columnist shared, in broad terms, the worldview of the ascendant progressives of the Democratic Party, incarnated by Bernie Sanders. And only two were conservative.

This last fact was of particular concern to the elder Sulzberger. He told me the Times needed more conservative voices, and that its own editorial line had become predictably left-wing. “Too many liberals,” read my notes about the Opinion line-up from a meeting I had with him and Mark Thompson, then the chief executive, as I was preparing to rejoin the paper. “Even conservatives are liberals’ idea of a conservative.” The last note I took from that meeting was: “Can’t ignore 150m conservative Americans.”

As I knew from my time at the Atlantic, this kind of structural transformation can be frightening and even infuriating for those understandably proud of things as they are. It is hard on everyone

experience at the Atlantic also taught me that pursuing new ways of doing journalism in pursuit of venerable institutional principles created enthusiasm for change. I expected that same dynamic to allay concerns at the Times.

If Opinion published a wider range of views, it would help frame a set of shared arguments that corresponded to, and drew upon, the set of shared facts coming from the newsroom.

New progressive voices were celebrated within the Times. But in contrast to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, conservative voices – even eloquent anti-Trump conservative voices – were despised, regardless of how many leftists might surround them.

The Opinion department mocked the paper’s claim to value diversity. It did not have a single black editor

Eventually, it sank in that my snotty joke was actually on me: I was the one ignorantly fighting a battle that was already lost. The old liberal embrace of inclusive debate that reflected the country’s breadth of views had given way to a new intolerance for the opinions of roughly half of American voters.

Out of naivety or arrogance, I was slow to recognise that at the Times, unlike at the Atlantic, these values were no longer universally accepted, let alone esteemed

After the 9/11 attacks, as the bureau chief in Jerusalem, I spent a lot of time in the Gaza Strip interviewing Hamas leaders, recruiters and foot soldiers, trying to understand and describe their murderous ideology. Some readers complained that I was providing a platform for terrorists, but there was never any objection from within the Times.

Our role, we knew, was to help readers understand such threats, and this required empathetic – not sympathetic – reporting. This is not an easy distinction but good reporters make it: they learn to understand and communicate the sources and nature of a toxic ideology without justifying it, much less advocating it.

Today’s newsroom turns that moral logic on its head, at least when it comes to fellow Americans. Unlike the views of Hamas, the views of many Americans have come to seem dangerous to engage in the absence of explicit condemnation

Focusing on potential perpetrators – “platforming” them by explaining rather than judging their views – is believed to empower them to do more harm.

After the profile of the Ohio man was published, media Twitter lit up with attacks on the article as “normalising” Nazism and white nationalism, and the Times convulsed internally. The Times wound up publishing a cringing editor’s note that hung the writer out to dry and approvingly quoted some of the criticism, including a tweet from a Washington Post opinion editor asking, “Instead of long, glowing profiles of Nazis/White nationalists, why don’t we profile the victims of their ideologies”?

the Times lacked the confidence to defend its own work

The editor’s note paraded the principle of publishing such pieces, saying it was important to “shed more light, not less, on the most extreme corners of American life”. But less light is what the readers got. As a reporter in the newsroom, you’d have to have been an idiot after that explosion to attempt such a profile

Empathetic reporting about Trump supporters became even more rare. It became a cliché among influential left-wing columnists and editors that blinkered political reporters interviewed a few Trump supporters in diners and came away suckered into thinking there was something besides racism that could explain anyone’s support for the man.

After a year spent publishing editorials attacking Trump and his policies, I thought it would be a demonstration of Timesian open-mindedness to give his supporters their say. Also, I thought the letters were interesting, so I turned over the entire editorial page to the Trump letters.

I wasn’t surprised that we got some criticism on Twitter. But I was astonished by the fury of my Times colleagues. I found myself facing an angry internal town hall, trying to justify what to me was an obvious journalistic decision

Didn’t he think other Times readers should understand the sources of Trump’s support? Didn’t he also see it was a wonderful thing that some Trump supporters did not just dismiss the Times as fake news, but still believed in it enough to respond thoughtfully to an invitation to share their views?

And if the Times could not bear to publish the views of Americans who supported Trump, why should it be surprised that those voters would not trust it?

Two years later, in 2020, Baquet acknowledged that in 2016 the Times had failed to take seriously the idea that Trump could become president partly because it failed to send its reporters out into America to listen to voters and understand “the turmoil in the country”. And, he continued, the Times still did not understand the views of many Americans

Speaking four months before we published the Cotton op-ed, he said that to argue that the views of such voters should not appear in the Times was “not journalistic”.

Conservative arguments in the Opinion pages reliably started uproars within the Times. Sometimes I would hear directly from colleagues who had the grace to confront me with their concerns; more often they would take to the company’s Slack channels or Twitter to advertise their distress in front of each other

This environment of enforced group-think, inside and outside the paper, was hard even on liberal opinion writers. One left-of-centre columnist told me that he was reluctant to appear in the New York office for fear of being accosted by colleagues.

An internal survey shortly after I left the paper found that barely half the staff, within an enterprise ostensibly devoted to telling the truth, agreed “there is a free exchange of views in this company” and “people are not afraid to say what they really think”.)

Even columnists with impeccable leftist bona fides recoiled from tackling subjects when their point of view might depart from progressive orthodoxy.

The bias had become so pervasive, even in the senior editing ranks of the newsroom, as to be unconscious

Trying to be helpful, one of the top newsroom editors urged me to start attaching trigger warnings to pieces by conservatives. It had not occurred to him how this would stigmatise certain colleagues, or what it would say to the world about the Times’s own bias

By their nature, information bubbles are powerfully self-reinforcing, and I think many Times staff have little idea how closed their world has become, or how far they are from fulfilling their compact with readers to show the world “without fear or favour”

sometimes the bias was explicit: one newsroom editor told me that, because I was publishing more conservatives, he felt he needed to push his own department further to the left.

The Times’s failure to honour its own stated principles of openness to a range of views was particularly hard on the handful of conservative writers, some of whom would complain about being flyspecked and abused by colleagues. One day when I relayed a conservative’s concern about double standards to Sulzberger, he lost his patience. He told me to inform the complaining conservative that that’s just how it was: there was a double standard and he should get used to it.

A publication that promises its readers to stand apart from politics should not have different standards for different writers based on their politics. But I delivered the message. There are many things I regret about my tenure as editorial-page editor. That is the only act of which I am ashamed.

I began to think of myself not as a benighted veteran on a remote island, but as Rip Van Winkle. I had left one newspaper, had a pleasant dream for ten years, and returned to a place I barely recognised.

The new New York Times was the product of two shocks – sudden collapse, and then sudden success. The paper almost went bankrupt during the financial crisis, and the ensuing panic provoked a crisis of confidence among its leaders. Digital competitors like the HuffPost were gaining readers and winning plaudits within the media industry as innovative. They were the cool kids; Times folk were ink-stained wrinklies.

In its panic, the Times bought out experienced reporters and editors and began hiring journalists from publications like the HuffPost who were considered “digital natives” because they had never worked in print. This hiring quickly became easier, since most digital publications financed by venture capital turned out to be bad businesses

Though they might have lacked deep or varied reporting backgrounds, some of the Times’s new hires brought skills in video and audio; others were practised at marketing themselves – building their brands, as journalists now put it – in social media. Some were brilliant and fiercely honest, in keeping with the old aspirations of the paper.

critically, the Times abandoned its practice of acculturation, including those months-long assignments on Metro covering cops and crime or housing. Many new hires who never spent time in the streets went straight into senior writing and editing roles.

All these recruits arrived with their own notions of the purpose of the Times. To me, publishing conservatives helped fulfil the paper’s mission; to them, I think, it betrayed that mission.

then, to the shock and horror of the newsroom, Trump won the presidency. In his article for Columbia Journalism Review, Sulzberger cites the Times’s failure to take Trump’s chances seriously as an example of how “prematurely shutting down inquiry and debate” can allow “conventional wisdom to ossify in a way that blinds society.

Many Times staff members – scared, angry – assumed the Times was supposed to help lead the resistance. Anxious for growth, the Times’s marketing team implicitly endorsed that idea, too.

As the number of subscribers ballooned, the marketing department tracked their expectations, and came to a nuanced conclusion. More than 95% of Times subscribers described themselves as Democrats or independents, and a vast majority of them believed the Times was also liberal

A similar majority applauded that bias; it had become “a selling point”, reported one internal marketing memo. Yet at the same time, the marketers concluded, subscribers wanted to believe that the Times was independent.

As that memo argued, even if the Times was seen as politically to the left, it was critical to its brand also to be seen as broadening its readers’ horizons, and that required “a perception of independence”.

Readers could cancel their subscriptions if the Times challenged their worldview by reporting the truth without regard to politics. As a result, the Times’s long-term civic value was coming into conflict with the paper’s short-term shareholder value

The Times has every right to pursue the commercial strategy that makes it the most money. But leaning into a partisan audience creates a powerful dynamic. Nobody warned the new subscribers to the Times that it might disappoint them by reporting truths that conflicted with their expectations

When your product is “independent journalism”, that commercial strategy is tricky, because too much independence might alienate your audience, while too little can lead to charges of hypocrisy that strike at the heart of the brand.

It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism

The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.

there has been a sea change over the past ten years in how journalists think about pursuing justice. The reporters’ creed used to have its foundation in liberalism, in the classic philosophical sense. The exercise of a reporter’s curiosity and empathy, given scope by the constitutional protections of free speech, would equip readers with the best information to form their own judgments. The best ideas and arguments would win out

The journalist’s role was to be a sworn witness; the readers’ role was to be judge and jury. In its idealised form, journalism was lonely, prickly, unpopular work, because it was only through unrelenting scepticism and questioning that society could advance. If everyone the reporter knew thought X, the reporter’s role was to ask: why X?

Illiberal journalists have a different philosophy, and they have their reasons for it. They are more concerned with group rights than individual rights, which they regard as a bulwark for the privileges of white men. They have seen the principle of  free speech used to protect right-wing outfits like Project Veritas and Breitbart News and are uneasy with it.

They had their suspicions of their fellow citizens’ judgment confirmed by Trump’s election, and do not believe readers can be trusted with potentially dangerous ideas or facts. They are not out to achieve social justice as the knock-on effect of pursuing truth; they want to pursue it head-on

The term “objectivity” to them is code for ignoring the poor and weak and cosying up to power, as journalists often have done.

And they do not just want to be part of the cool crowd. They need to be

To be more valued by their peers and their contacts – and hold sway over their bosses – they need a lot of followers in social media. That means they must be seen to applaud the right sentiments of the right people in social media

The journalist from central casting used to be a loner, contrarian or a misfit. Now journalism is becoming another job for joiners, or, to borrow Twitter’s own parlance, “followers”, a term that mocks the essence of a journalist’s role.

The new newsroom ideology seems idealistic, yet it has grown from cynical roots in academia: from the idea that there is no such thing as objective truth; that there is only narrative, and that therefore whoever controls the narrative – whoever gets to tell the version of the story that the public hears – has the whip hand

What matters, in other words, is not truth and ideas in themselves, but the power to determine both in the public mind.

By contrast, the old newsroom ideology seems cynical on its surface. It used to bug me that my editors at the Times assumed every word out of the mouth of any person in power was a lie.

And the pursuit of objectivity can seem reptilian, even nihilistic, in its abjuration of a fixed position in moral contests. But the basis of that old newsroom approach was idealistic: the notion that power ultimately lies in truth and ideas, and that the citizens of a pluralistic democracy, not leaders of any sort, must be trusted to judge both.

Our role in Times Opinion, I used to urge my colleagues, was not to tell people what to think, but to help them fulfil their desire to think for themselves.

It seems to me that putting the pursuit of truth, rather than of justice, at the top of a publication’s hierarchy of values also better serves not just truth but justice, too

over the long term journalism that is not also sceptical of the advocates of any form of justice and the programmes they put forward, and that does not struggle honestly to understand and explain the sources of resistance,

will not assure that those programmes will work, and it also has no legitimate claim to the trust of reasonable people who see the world very differently. Rather than advance understanding and durable change, it provokes backlash.

The impatience within the newsroom with such old ways was intensified by the generational failure of the Times to hire and promote women and non-white people

Pay attention if you are white at the Times and you will hear black editors speak of hiring consultants at their own expense to figure out how to get white staff to respect them

As wave after wave of pain and outrage swept through the Times, over a headline that was not damning enough of Trump or someone’s obnoxious tweets, I came to think of the people who were fragile, the ones who were caught up in Slack or Twitter storms, as people who had only recently discovered that they were white and were still getting over the shock.

Having concluded they had got ahead by working hard, it has been a revelation to them that their skin colour was not just part of the wallpaper of American life, but a source of power, protection and advancement.

I share the bewilderment that so many people could back Trump, given the things he says and does, and that makes me want to understand why they do: the breadth and diversity of his support suggests not just racism is at work. Yet these elite, well-meaning Times staff cannot seem to stretch the empathy they are learning to extend to people with a different skin colour to include those, of whatever race, who have different politics.

The digital natives were nevertheless valuable, not only for their skills but also because they were excited for the Times to embrace its future. That made them important allies of the editorial and business leaders as they sought to shift the Times to digital journalism and to replace staff steeped in the ways of print. Partly for that reason, and partly out of fear, the leadership indulged internal attacks on Times journalism, despite pleas from me and others, to them and the company as a whole, that Times folk should treat each other with more respect

My colleagues and I in Opinion came in for a lot of the scorn, but we were not alone. Correspondents in the Washington bureau and political reporters would take a beating, too, when they were seen as committing sins like “false balance” because of the nuance in their stories.

My fellow editorial and commercial leaders were well aware of how the culture of the institution had changed. As delighted as they were by the Times’s digital transformation they were not blind to the ideological change that came with it. They were unhappy with the bullying and group-think; we often discussed such cultural problems in the weekly meetings of the executive committee, composed of the top editorial and business leaders, including the publisher. Inevitably, these bitch sessions would end with someone saying a version of: “Well, at some point we have to tell them this is what we believe in as a newspaper, and if they don’t like it they should work somewhere else.” It took me a couple of years to realise that this moment was never going to come.

There is a lot not to miss about the days when editors like Boyd could strike terror in young reporters like me and Purdum. But the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that editors now tremble before their reporters and even their interns. “I miss the old climate of fear,” Baquet used to say with a smile, in another of his barbed jokes.

I wish I’d pursued my point and talked myself out of the job. This contest over control of opinion journalism within the Times was not just a bureaucratic turf battle (though it was that, too)

The newsroom’s embrace of opinion journalism has compromised the Times’s independence, misled its readers and fostered a culture of intolerance and conformity.

The Opinion department is a relic of the era when the Times enforced a line between news and opinion journalism.

Editors in the newsroom did not touch opinionated copy, lest they be contaminated by it, and opinion journalists and editors kept largely to their own, distant floor within the Times building. Such fastidiousness could seem excessive, but it enforced an ethos that Times reporters owed their readers an unceasing struggle against bias in the news

But by the time I returned as editorial-page editor, more opinion columnists and critics were writing for the newsroom than for Opinion. As at the cable news networks, the boundaries between commentary and news were disappearing, and readers had little reason to trust that Times journalists were resisting rather than indulging their biases

The Times newsroom had added more cultural critics, and, as Baquet noted, they were free to opine about politics.

Departments across the Times newsroom had also begun appointing their own “columnists”, without stipulating any rules that might distinguish them from columnists in Opinion

I checked to see if, since I left the Times, it had developed guidelines explaining the difference, if any, between a news columnist and opinion columnist. The paper’s spokeswoman, Danielle Rhoades Ha, did not respond to the question.)

The internet rewards opinionated work and, as news editors felt increasing pressure to generate page views, they began not just hiring more opinion writers but also running their own versions of opinionated essays by outside voices – historically, the province of Opinion’s op-ed department.

Yet because the paper continued to honour the letter of its old principles, none of this work could be labelled “opinion” (it still isn’t). After all, it did not come from the Opinion department.

And so a newsroom technology columnist might call for, say, unionisation of the Silicon Valley workforce, as one did, or an outside writer might argue in the business section for reparations for slavery, as one did, and to the average reader their work would appear indistinguishable from Times news articles.

By similarly circular logic, the newsroom’s opinion journalism breaks another of the Times’s commitments to its readers. Because the newsroom officially does not do opinion – even though it openly hires and publishes opinion journalists – it feels free to ignore Opinion’s mandate to provide a diversity of views

When I was editorial-page editor, there were a couple of newsroom columnists whose politics were not obvious. But the other newsroom columnists, and the critics, read as passionate progressives.

I urged Baquet several times to add a conservative to the newsroom roster of cultural critics. That would serve the readers by diversifying the Times’s analysis of culture, where the paper’s left-wing bias had become most blatant, and it would show that the newsroom also believed in restoring the Times’s commitment to taking conservatives seriously. He said this was a good idea, but he never acted on it

I couldn’t help trying the idea out on one of the paper’s top cultural editors, too: he told me he did not think Times readers would be interested in that point of view.

opinion was spreading through the newsroom in other ways. News desks were urging reporters to write in the first person and to use more “voice”, but few newsroom editors had experience in handling that kind of journalism, and no one seemed certain where “voice” stopped and “opinion” began

The Times magazine, meanwhile, became a crusading progressive publication

Baquet liked to say the magazine was Switzerland, by which he meant that it sat between the newsroom and Opinion. But it reported only to the news side. Its work was not labelled as opinion and it was free to omit conservative viewpoints.

his creep of politics into the newsroom’s journalism helped the Times beat back some of its new challengers, at least those on the left

Competitors like Vox and the HuffPost were blending leftish politics with reporting and writing it up conversationally in the first person. Imitating their approach, along with hiring some of their staff, helped the Times repel them. But it came at a cost. The rise of opinion journalism over the past 15 years changed the newsroom’s coverage and its culture

The tiny redoubt of never-Trump conservatives in Opinion is swamped daily not only by the many progressives in that department but their reinforcements among the critics, columnists and magazine writers in the newsroom

They are generally excellent, but their homogeneity means Times readers are being served a very restricted range of views, some of them presented as straight news by a publication that still holds itself out as independent of any politics.

And because the critics, newsroom columnists and magazine writers are the newsroom’s most celebrated journalists, they have disproportionate influence over the paper’s culture.

By saying that it still holds itself to the old standard of strictly separating its news and opinion journalists, the paper leads its readers further into the trap of thinking that what they are reading is independent and impartial – and this misleads them about their country’s centre of political and cultural gravity.

And yet the Times insists to the public that nothing has changed.

“Even though each day’s opinion pieces are typically among our most popular journalism and our columnists are among our most trusted voices, we believe opinion is secondary to our primary mission of reporting and should represent only a portion of a healthy news diet,” Sulzberger wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review. “For that reason, we’ve long kept the Opinion department intentionally small – it represents well under a tenth of our journalistic staff – and ensured that its editorial decision-making is walled off from the newsroom.”

When I was editorial-page editor, Sulzberger, who declined to be interviewed on the record for this article, worried a great deal about the breakdown in the boundaries between news and opinion

He told me once that he would like to restructure the paper to have one editor oversee all its news reporters, another all its opinion journalists and a third all its service journalists, the ones who supply guidance on buying gizmos or travelling abroad. Each of these editors would report to him

That is the kind of action the Times needs to take now to confront its hypocrisy and begin restoring its independence.

The Times could learn something from the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its journalistic poise

It has maintained a stricter separation between its news and opinion journalism, including its cultural criticism, and that has protected the integrity of its work.

After I was chased out of the Times, Journal reporters and other staff attempted a similar assault on their opinion department. Some 280 of them signed a letter listing pieces they found offensive and demanding changes in how their opinion colleagues approached their work. “Their anxieties aren’t our responsibility,” shrugged the Journal’s editorial board in a note to readers after the letter was leaked. “The signers report to the news editors or other parts of the business.” The editorial added, in case anyone missed the point, “We are not the New York Times.” That was the end of it.

Unlike the publishers of the Journal, however, Sulzberger is in a bind, or at least perceives himself to be

The confusion within the Times over its role, and the rising tide of intolerance among the reporters, the engineers, the business staff, even the subscribers – these are all problems he inherited, in more ways than one. He seems to feel constrained in confronting the paper’s illiberalism by the very source of his authority

The paradox is that in previous generations the Sulzbergers’ control was the bulwark of the paper’s independence.

if he is going to instil the principles he believes in, he needs to stop worrying so much about his powers of persuasion, and start using the power he is so lucky to have.

Shortly after we published the op-ed that Wednesday afternoon, some reporters tweeted their opposition to Cotton’s argument. But the real action was in the Times’s Slack channels, where reporters and other staff began not just venting but organising. They turned to the union to draw up a workplace complaint about the op-ed.

The next day, this reporter shared the byline on the Times story about the op-ed. That article did not mention that Cotton had distinguished between “peaceful, law-abiding protesters” and “rioters and looters”. In fact, the first sentence reported that Cotton had called for “the military to suppress protests against police violence”.

This was – and is – wrong. You don’t have to take my word for that. You can take the Times’s

Three days later in its article on my resignation it also initially reported that Cotton had called “for military force against protesters in American cities”. This time, after the article was published on the Times website, the editors scrambled to rewrite it, replacing “military force” with “military response” and “protesters” with “civic unrest”

That was a weaselly adjustment – Cotton wrote about criminality, not “unrest” – but the article at least no longer unambiguously misrepresented Cotton’s argument to make it seem he was in favour of crushing democratic protest. The Times did not publish a correction or any note acknowledging the story had been changed.

Seeking to influence the outcome of a story you cover, particularly without disclosing that to the reader, violates basic principles I was raised on at the Times

s Rhoades Ha disputes my characterisation of the after-the-fact editing of the story about my resignation. She said the editors changed the story after it was published on the website in order to “refine” it and “add context”, and so the story did not merit a correction disclosing to the reader that changes had been made.

In retrospect what seems almost comical is that as the conflict over Cotton’s op-ed unfolded within the Times I acted as though it was on the level, as though the staff of the Times would have a good-faith debate about Cotton’s piece and the decision to publish it

Instead, people wanted to vent and achieve what they considered to be justice, whether through Twitter, Slack, the union or the news pages themselves

My colleagues in Opinion, together with the PR team, put together a series of connected tweets describing the purpose behind publishing Cotton’s op-ed. Rather than publish these tweets from the generic Times Opinion Twitter account, Sulzberger encouraged me to do it from my personal one, on the theory that this would humanise our defence. I doubted that would make any difference, but it was certainly my job to take responsibility. So I sent out the tweets, sticking my head in a Twitter bucket that clangs, occasionally, to this day

What is worth recalling now from the bedlam of the next two days? I suppose there might be lessons for someone interested in how not to manage a corporate crisis. I began making my own mistakes that Thursday. The union condemned our publication of Cotton, for supposedly putting journalists in danger, claiming that he had called on the military “to ‘detain’ and ‘subdue’ Americans protesting racism and police brutality” – again, a misrepresentation of his argument. The publisher called to tell me the company was experiencing its largest sick day in history; people were turning down job offers because of the op-ed, and, he said, some people were quitting. He had been expecting for some time that the union would seek a voice in editorial decision-making; he said he thought this was the moment the union was making its move. He had clearly changed his own mind about the value of publishing the Cotton op-ed.

I asked Dao to have our fact-checkers review the union’s claims. But then I went a step further: at the publisher’s request, I urged him to review the editing of the piece itself and come back to me with a list of steps we could have taken to make it better. Dao’s reflex – the correct one – was to defend the piece as published. He and three other editors of varying ages, genders and races had helped edit it; it had been fact-checked, as is all our work

This was my last failed attempt to have the debate within the Times that I had been seeking for four years, about why it was important to present Times readers with arguments like Cotton’s. The staff at the paper never wanted to have that debate. The Cotton uproar was the most extreme version of the internal reaction we faced whenever we published conservative arguments that were not simply anti-Trump. Yes, yes, of course we believe in the principle of publishing diverse views, my Times colleagues would say, but why this conservative? Why this argument?

I doubt these changes would have mattered, and to extract this list from Dao was to engage in precisely the hypocrisy I claimed to despise – that, in fact, I do despise. If Cotton needed to be held to such standards of politesse, so did everyone else. Headlines such as “Tom Cotton’s Fascist Op-ed”, the headline of a subsequent piece, should also have been tranquillised.

As that miserable Thursday wore on, Sulzberger, Baquet and I held a series of Zoom meetings with reporters and editors from the newsroom who wanted to discuss the op-ed. Though a handful of the participants were there to posture, these were generally constructive conversations. A couple of people, including Baquet, even had the guts to speak up in favour of publishing the op-ed

Two moments stick out. At one point, in answer to a question, Sulzberger and Baquet both said they thought the op-ed – as the Times union and many journalists were saying – had in fact put journalists in danger. That was the first time I realised I might be coming to the end of the road.

The other was when a pop-culture reporter asked if I had read the op-ed before it was published. I said I had not. He immediately put his head down and started typing, and I should have paid attention rather than moving on to the next question. He was evidently sharing the news with the company over Slack.

Every job review I had at the Times urged me to step back from the daily coverage to focus on the long term. (Hilariously, one review, urging me to move faster in upending the Opinion department, instructed me to take risks and “ask for forgiveness not permission”.)

I learned when these meetings were over that there had been a new eruption in Slack. Times staff were saying that Rubenstein had been the sole editor of the op-ed. In response, Dao had gone into Slack to clarify to the entire company that he had also edited it himself. But when the Times posted the news article that evening, it reported, “The Op-Ed was edited by Adam Rubenstein” and made no mention of Dao’s statement

Early that morning, I got an email from Sam Dolnick, a Sulzberger cousin and a top editor at the paper, who said he felt “we” – he could have only meant me – owed the whole staff “an apology for appearing to place an abstract idea like open debate over the value of our colleagues’ lives, and their safety”. He was worried that I and my colleagues had unintentionally sent a message to other people at the Times that: “We don’t care about their full humanity and their security as much as we care about our ideas.”

“I know you don’t like it when I talk about principles at a moment like this,” I began. But I viewed the journalism I had been doing, at the Times and before that at the Atlantic, in very different terms from the ones Dolnick presumed. “I don’t think of our work as an abstraction without meaning for people’s lives – quite the opposite,” I continued. “The whole point – the reason I do this – is to have an impact on their lives to the good. I have always believed that putting ideas, including potentially dangerous one[s], out in the public is vital to ensuring they are debated and, if dangerous, discarded.” It was, I argued, in “edge cases like this that principles are tested”, and if my position was judged wrong then “I am out of step with the times.” But, I concluded, “I don’t think of us as some kind of debating society without implications for the real world and I’ve never been unmindful of my colleagues’ humanity.”

in the end, one thing he and I surely agree on is that I was, in fact, out of step with the Times. It may have raised me as a journalist – and invested so much in educating me to what were once its standards – but I did not belong there any more.

Finally, I came up with something that felt true. I told the meeting that I was sorry for the pain that my leadership of Opinion had caused. What a pathetic thing to say. I did not think to add, because I’d lost track of this truth myself by then, that opinion journalism that never causes pain is not journalism. It can’t hope to move society forward

As I look back at my notes of that awful day, I don’t regret what I said. Even during that meeting, I was still hoping the blow-up might at last give me the chance either to win support for what I had been asked to do, or to clarify once and for all that the rules for journalism had changed at the Times.

But no one wanted to talk about that. Nor did they want to hear about all the voices of vulnerable or underprivileged people we had been showcasing in Opinion, or the ambitious new journalism we were doing. Instead, my Times colleagues demanded to know things such as the names of every editor who had had a role in the Cotton piece. Having seen what happened to Rubenstein I refused to tell them. A Slack channel had been set up to solicit feedback in real time during the meeting, and it was filling with hate. The meeting ran long, and finally came to a close after 90 minutes.

I tried to insist, as did Dao, that the note make clear the Cotton piece was within our editorial bounds. Sulzberger said he felt the Times could afford to be “silent” on that question. In the end the note went far further in repudiating the piece than I anticipated, saying it should never have been published at all. The next morning I was told to resign.

It was a terrible moment for the country. By the traditional – and perverse – logic of journalism, that should also have made it an inspiring time to be a reporter, writer or editor. Journalists are supposed to run towards scenes that others are fleeing, towards hard truths others need to know, towards consequential ideas they would prefer to ignore.

But fear got all mixed up with anger inside the Times, too, along with a desire to act locally in solidarity with the national movement. That energy found a focus in the Cotton op-ed

the Times is not good at acknowledging mistakes. Indeed, one of my own, within the Times culture, was to take responsibility for any mistakes my department made, and even some it didn’t

To Sulzberger, the meltdown over Cotton’s op-ed and my departure in disgrace are explained and justified by a failure of editorial “process”. As he put it in an interview with the New Yorker this summer, after publishing his piece in the Columbia Journalism Review, Cotton’s piece was not “perfectly fact-checked” and the editors had not “thought about the headline and presentation”. He contrasted the execution of Cotton’s opinion piece with that of a months-long investigation the newsroom did of Donald Trump’s taxes (which was not “perfectly fact-checked”, as it happens – it required a correction). He did not explain why, if the Times was an independent publication, an op-ed making a mainstream conservative argument should have to meet such different standards from an op-ed making any other kind of argument, such as for the abolition of the police

“It’s not enough just to have the principle and wave it around,” he said. “You also have to execute on it.”

To me, extolling the virtue of independent journalism in the pages of the Columbia Journalism Review is how you wave a principle around. Publishing a piece like Cotton’s is how you execute on it.

As Sulzberger also wrote in the Review, “Independent journalism, especially in a pluralistic democracy, should err on the side of treating areas of serious political contest as open, unsettled, and in need of further inquiry.

If Sulzberger must insist on comparing the execution of the Cotton op-ed with that of the most ambitious of newsroom projects, let him compare it with something really important, the 1619 Project, which commemorated the 400th anniversary of the arrival of enslaved Africans in Virginia.

Like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was fact-checked and copy-edited (most of the Times newsroom does not fact-check or copy-edit articles, but the magazine does). But it nevertheless contained mistakes, as journalism often does. Some of these mistakes ignited a firestorm among historians and other readers.

And, like Cotton’s piece, the 1619 Project was presented in a way the Times later judged to be too provocative.

The Times declared that the 1619 Project “aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding”. That bold statement – a declaration of Times fact, not opinion, since it came from the newsroom – outraged many Americans who venerated 1776 as the founding. The Times later stealthily erased it from the digital version of the project, but was caught doing so by a writer for the publication Quillette. Sulzberger told me during the initial uproar that the top editors in the newsroom – not just Baquet but his deputy – had not reviewed the audacious statement of purpose, one of the biggest editorial claims the paper has ever made. They also, of course, did not edit all the pieces themselves, trusting the magazine’s editors to do that work.

If the 1619 Project and the Cotton op-ed shared the same supposed flaws and excited similar outrage, how come that one is lauded as a landmark success and the other is a sackable offence?

I am comparing them only to meet Sulzberger on his terms, in order to illuminate what he is trying to elide. What distinguished the Cotton piece was not an error, or strong language, or that I didn’t edit it personally. What distinguished that op-ed was not process. It was politics.

It is one thing for the Times to aggravate historians, or conservatives, or even old-school liberals who believe in open debate. It has become quite another for the Times to challenge some members of its own staff with ideas that might contradict their view of the world.

The lessons of the incident are not about how to write a headline but about how much the Times has changed – how digital technology, the paper’s new business model and the rise of new ideals among its staff have altered its understanding of the boundary between news and opinion, and of the relationship between truth and justice

Ejecting me was one way to avoid confronting the question of which values the Times is committed to. Waving around the word “process” is another.

As he asserts the independence of Times journalism, Sulzberger is finding it necessary to reach back several years to another piece I chose to run, for proof that the Times remains willing to publish views that might offend its staff. “We’ve published a column by the head of the part of the Taliban that kidnapped one of our own journalists,” he told the New Yorker. He is missing the real lesson of that piece, as well.

The case against that piece is that Haqqani, who remains on the FBI’s most-wanted terrorist list, may have killed Americans. It’s puzzling: in what moral universe can it be a point of pride to publish a piece by an enemy who may have American blood on his hands, and a matter of shame to publish a piece by an American senator arguing for American troops to protect Americans?

As Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, said on the Senate floor about the Times’s panic over the Cotton op-ed, listing some other debatable op-ed choices, “Vladimir Putin? No problem. Iranian propaganda? Sure. But nothing, nothing could have prepared them for 800 words from the junior senator from Arkansas.”

The Times’s staff members are not often troubled by obnoxious views when they are held by foreigners. This is an important reason the paper’s foreign coverage, at least of some regions, remains exceptional.

What seems most important and least understood about that episode is that it demonstrated in real time the value of the ideals that I poorly defended in the moment, ideals that not just the Times’s staff but many other college-educated Americans are abandoning.

After all, we ran the experiment; we published the piece. Was any Times journalist hurt? No. Nobody in the country was. In fact, though it is impossible to know the op-ed’s precise effect, polling showed that support for a military option dropped after the Times published the essay, as the Washington Post’s media critic, Erik Wemple, has written

If anything, in other words, publishing the piece stimulated debate that made it less likely Cotton’s position would prevail. The liberal, journalistic principle of open debate was vindicated in the very moment the Times was fleeing from it.

Moscow, which in 2016 banned the Mejlis, a body representing Crimean Tatars, rejected the report's findings. It says a March 2014 referendum legitimised its "incorporation" of Crimea.The Crimea battalion performed reconnaissance against Russian forces around Yasnohorodka, a village 25km west of Kyiv, and later in nearby Motyzhyn, Akayev said."The residents here were initially very scared when they saw us because they didn't know who we were. We had to shout 'we are Ukrainian'... then people started slowly coming out of their homes and they gave us tea."

"We wanted to buy this place, to build a Crimean Tatar school and a mosque here... It didn’t come to anything, and then this happened," Akayev said, gesturing at the building’s charred remains which he said was the result of Russian shelling."I (still) dream about this project, but really I just want to return home to Crimea."

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.

The system is designed to help students get along with one another, said Dee Mostofi, a Stanford spokeswoman. “The process aims to promote a climate of respect, helping build understanding that much speech is protected while also offering resources and support to students who believe they have experienced harm based on a protected identity,” she said.

The Stanford faculty’s effort is part of broader pushback against bias-reporting systems around the country. About half of college campuses have one—more than twice as many as five years ago—according to a 2022 survey by Speech First, a conservative nonprofit.

Prof. Santiago said he is wary that anonymous complaints could be exaggerated or used to attack someone. He helped collect 77 faculty signatures to petition the school to investigate free speech and academic freedom on campus, the first step to getting rid of the anonymous-reporting system. 

The system defaults to anonymous reporting and most students file that way. They use an online form to describe how the bias was demonstrated, which triggers an inquiry within 48 hours. Both parties are contacted.

Participation in the inquiry is voluntary. But it may not feel that way to accused students, said Juan Santiago, a professor of mechanical engineering who favors getting rid of the system.

“If you’re an 18-year-old freshman and you get contacted by an administrator and told you’ve been accused of some transgression, what are you going to do?” Prof. Santiago said. “They may not call that punitive but that can be very stressful.”

At Stanford, students can report a “Protected Identity Harm Incident,” which is defined as conduct targeting an individual or group on the basis of characteristics including race or sexual orientation. The system is meant to “build and maintain a better, safer, and more respectful campus community,” according to the school’s website.

Senior Christian Sanchez, executive vice president of the Associated Students of Stanford University, the student-government group, said the system is necessary and important. Mr. Sanchez, who describes himself as Chicano, said he has bristled in the past when another student has addressed him as “G,” short for gangster.

He has let it roll off his back, he said, but less thick-skinned students should have a path for redress.

he reports are stored in a platform operated by a third party called Maxient, a Charlottesville, Va.-based company that has contracts with 1,300 schools—mostly colleges and universities in the U.S

Only Maxient and a small number of people within the student affairs office have access to the records, said Ms. Mostofi. She declined to say how long they are stored.

A dashboard maintained by the school lists a few incidents students have reported using the anonymous system, including the removal of an Israeli flag and a racial slur written on a whiteboard hanging on a dorm-room door.

At the University of California, which includes 10 campuses, the reporting system collected 457 acts of “intolerance or hate” during the 2021-22 school year. Of those, 296 were defined as offensive speech. The UC said those incidents include “gestures, taunts, mockery, unwanted jokes or teasing, and derogatory or disparaging comments of a biased nature.”

Free-speech advocacy organizations including the Goldwater Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and Alumni Free Speech Alliance have advocated against bias-reporting mechanisms.

After Speech First challenged bias-response systems at the University of Texas, the University of Michigan and the University of Central Florida, all three schools changed or disbanded their systems.

Stanford Business School professor Ivan Marinovic said the bias-reporting system reminded him of the way citizens were encouraged to inform on one another by governments in the Soviet Union, East Germany and China. 

“It ignores the whole history,” he said. “You’re basically going to be reporting people who you find offensive, right? According to your own ideology.”

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, who started his career as a K.G.B. agent in Communist East Germany, took the opposite tack: He made Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, a priority target.

The only hints of potential motives are his apparent far-right sympathies. A search of his home and offices, two people familiar with the investigation said, found fliers from the far-right AfD party. At work, Mr. Linke had openly told colleagues he felt the country was deteriorating, and he was particularly disdainful of its new center-left government, one of those following the inquiry said.

Over the years, far-right groups have grown increasingly sympathetic to Russia, enamored of Mr. Putin’s nationalistic rhetoric. Germany has struggled to root out far-right sympathizers in its security services, including in the military, even dismantling part of its special forces.

A Google account of his, using the alias “Steen von Ottendorf,” first found by Germany’s Der Spiegel newsmagazine, has one YouTube subscription: a channel that collects nationalist tunes. The channel’s icon bears an eagle — and the red, white and black of Germany’s old imperial colors, often used by the far right.

“It’s a kind of conviction, wanting to cooperate with Russia — it’s a romantic belief,” the official said. “I worry there are many others who hold that conviction in our security services.”

Since the days of the Cold War, Germany’s intelligence agency suffered from Russian infiltration, said Erich Schmidt-Eenboom, a historian who has written several books on the agency and keeps a list of all of the B.N.D. agents who were “turned,” exposing hundreds of operatives.

Among them was the 1961 case of Heinz Felfe, a K.G.B. mole who revealed B.N.D. operations across Europe. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Germany learned that a top director, Gabriele Gast, who worked closely with the chancellery, spied for the Stasi, the East German secret police, for 17 years.

According to Mr. Schmidt-Eenboom, the information available to Mr. Linke was vast: internet espionage, German surveillance stations, mobile listening devices in southern Ukraine, and the German Navy’s reconnaissance ships observing the war from the Baltic Sea.

On top of that, Mr. Linke would have had access to reports from allied American services like the C.I.A. and the National Security Agency, as well as from Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters.

The whistleblower added that no one in the government knew the true figure of the dead because “we have lost contact with major divisions”.

FSB officers had been ordered to assess the effects of western sanctions, they said, but were told that it was a hypothetical box-ticking exercise. “You have to write the analysis in a way that makes Russia the victor . . . otherwise you get questioned for not doing good work,” they wrote. “Suddenly it happens and everything comes down to your completely groundless analysis.

“[We are] acting intuitively, on emotion . . . our stakes will have to be raised ever higher with the hope that suddenly something might come through for us.

“By and large, though, Russia has no way out. There are no options for a possible victory, only defeat.”

The letter said that Ramzan Kadyrov, the Chechen leader and an ally of Putin, was on the verge of outright conflict with the Russians after his “hit squad”, sent to kill President Zelensky, was destroyed by Ukrainian forces.

Even if Zelensky were killed, the report said, Russia would have no hope of occupying Ukraine. “Even with minimum resistance from the Ukrainians we’d need over 500,000 people, not including supply and logistics workers.”

The analyst said that the SVR, Russia’s foreign intelligence service, was trying to “dig up dirt” to claim that Ukraine had built nuclear weapons, a pretext for a pre-emptive strike.

The 2,000-word document was published by Vladimir Osechkin, a Russian human rights activist who runs the anti-corruption website Gulagu.net.

Christo Grozev, an expert on the Russian security services, said he had shown the letter to two FSB officers, both of whom had had “no doubt it was written by a colleague”.

The war, the writer said, had been given a “provisional deadline” of June because by then the Russian economy will have collapsed. “I have hardly slept at all recently, working all hours, in a brain-fog,” they wrote. “Maybe it’s from overwork, but I feel like I am in a surreal world. Pandora’s Box has been opened.”

The author said they could not rule out international conflict and that they were expecting “some f***ing adviser to convince the leadership” to send an ultimatum to the West threatening war if sanctions were not lifted.

“What if the West refuses?” they wrote. “In that instance I won’t exclude that we will be pulled into a real international conflict, just like Hitler in 1939.” Elsewhere in the letter they said: “Our position is like Germany in 1943-44 — but that’s our starting position.”

Anecdotally, it seems like everybody knows someone who has dropped out of the mainstream, vowing to vote for the AfD or talking about emigrating

What has started to dawn on us in recent months, and what the meeting in Potsdam laid bare, is that the far right is not about having horrific ideas — it is about enacting horrific ideas.

Germany’s far-right adherents really mean it. With funding, support and a very real chance of winning federal states this year, they are closer to power than they have ever been in the nearly 75-year history of post-Nazi Germany.

In his recent book “Triggerpunkte,” or “Trigger Points,” Steffen Mau, a sociologist at Humboldt University in Berlin, rejects the notion that German society is polarized neatly in two. In Germany, he argues, divisions instead run through several areas such as climate, migration and social justice. You can be moved by some issues, indifferent to others

In recent months, those motivated by their opposition to migration or climate policies were the most vocal and visible. Now those who care about democracy, minority rights and the rule of law have reached their trigger point, too.

there is a world of content out there that has not been watermarked, which is done by adding imperceptible information to a digital file so that its provenance can be traced. Once watermarking at creation becomes widespread, and people adapt to distrust content that is not watermarked, then everything produced before that point in time can be much more easily called into question.

countering them is much harder when the cost of creating near-perfect fakes has been radically reduced.