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that a coming storm will sweep elites from power

and that violence might be necessary to save the country.

In October 2021, 17 percent of Americans believed in the conspiracy theory, up from 14 percent in March

the percentage of people who rejected QAnon falsehoods shrank to 34 percent in October from 40 percent in March

After Mr. Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, QAnon was expected to be hobbled without him. But it has persisted despite that and despite efforts by tech platforms to staunch its spread. Forensic linguists have also tried to unmask and defang the anonymous author who signed online messages as Q.

Robert P. Jones, the founder and chief executive of the research group and a social science researcher with decades of experience, said he never expected to be dealing with serious survey questions about whether powerful American institutions were controlled by devil-worshiping, sex-trafficking pedophiles. To have so many Americans agree with such a question, he said, was “stunning.”

Believers are “racially, religiously and politically diverse,”

Among Republicans, 25 percent found QAnon to be valid, compared with 14 percent of independents and 9 percent of Democrats.

Media preferences were a major predictor of QAnon susceptibility, with people who trust far-right news sources such as One America News Network and Newsmax nearly five times more likely to be believers than those who trust mainstream news

Fox News viewers were twice as likely to back QAnon ideas

Most QAnon believers associated Christianity with being American and said that the United States risked losing its culture and identity and must be protected from foreign influence

seven in 10 believers agreed with the lie that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr. Trump.

More than half of QAnon supporters are white, while 20 percent are Hispanic and 13 percent are Black.

They were most likely to have household incomes of less than $50,000 a year, hold at most a high school degree, hail from the South and reside in a suburb.

Analysts have said European countries can quickly reduce gas dependence with energy efficiency measures and ramping up renewable energy investments, which are already in line with Europe’s ambition to stop pumping additional greenhouse gases into the atmosphere by midcentury

The conflict in Ukraine could fast-track some of that. It could also lead to what Lisa Fischer, who follows energy policy at E3G, a research group, called “a tectonic shift” — using renewables, rather than ample gas storage, to achieve energy security.

The President’s centerpiece legislative agenda, which he had called the Build Back Better act, is dead. Democrats still hope to pass approximately $500 billion of clean energy tax incentives that had been part of the package, but opportunities to do so are waning

The United States, for its part, has ramped up exports of L.N.G. to Europe to counter the decline in Russian piped gas. By the end of this year, the United States is poised to have the world’s largest L.N.G. export capacity.

White House officials said Mr. Biden wove climate change and clean energy throughout his speech. He noted that Ford and GM are investing billions of dollars to build electric vehicles, creating millions of manufacturing jobs in the United States. He also noted that funding from the infrastructure package will build a national network of 500,000 electric vehicle charging stations.

“Energy is a key weapon within this fight, and if there were far less dependency on gas there would be a different set of plays.”

If that investment does not come through and the Supreme Court also restricts the administration’s ability to regulate emission, Mr. Biden’s goal of cutting United States emissions roughly in half compared with 2005 levels could be essentially unattainable.

Even if climate wasn’t the stated focus of Mr. Biden’s Tuesday address, administration officials said that Russia’s war against Ukraine has not pushed climate change off the agenda. They noted that Mr. Biden has made climate change an emphasis in virtually every federal agency, and has moved ahead with major clean energy deployments including a record-breaking offshore wind auction last week that brought in more than $4 billion.

Telegram videos and more. Ukrainian entrepreneurs are even hijacking their own apps to let Russians know what’s going on. While such efforts have mixed success, they demonstrate the ingenuity needed to win the information battle that’s as old as war itself.

Meanwhile, an organization called Squad303 built an online tool that lets people automatically send Russians texts, WhatsApp messages and emails. Some of the most effective strategies rely on old-school technologies. The use of virtual private networks, or VPNs, has skyrocketed in Russia since the war began. That may explain why the country’s telecom regulator has forced Google to delist thousands of URLs linked to VPN sites.

For Paulius Senūta, an advertising executive in Lithuania, the weapon of choice is the telephone. He recently launched “CallRussia,” a website that enables Russian speakers to cold-call random Russians based on a directory of 40 million phone numbers. Visitors to the site get a phone number along with a basic script developed by psychologists that advises callers to share their Russian connections and volunteer status before encouraging targets to hear what’s really going on. Suggested lines include “The only thing (Putin) seems to fear is information,” which then lets callers stress the need to put it “in the hands of Russians who know the truth and stand up to stop this war.” In its first eight days, Senūta says users from eastern Europe and elsewhere around the world placed nearly 100,000 calls to strangers in Russia.

“One thing is to call them and the other thing is how to talk with them,” says Senūta. As with any telemarketing call, the response from those on the receiving end has been mixed. While some have been receptive, others are angry at the interruption or suspicious that it’s a trick. “How do you speak to someone who has been in a different media environment?”

Terms like “war,” “invasion,” or “aggression” have been banned from coverage, punishable by fines of up to five million rubles (now roughly $52,000) or 15 years in prison. Says Kozlovsky: “It’s getting worse and worse.”

Arnold Schwarzenegger uploaded a lengthy video message to Russians via Telegram that included both Russian and English subtitles.) However, that it doesn’t mean it hurts to also try new things.

The question is whether Russians realize they’re being fed on a media diet of state-sponsored lies and criminalization of the truth. Dittmer believes many Russians are eager to know what’s really going on. So far, RSF’s “Truth Wins” campaign has been viewed more than 150,000 times in Russia. (Previous efforts by DDB and RSF in various countries have included embedding censored news in a virtual library within Minecraft and a playlist on Spotify.)

Censorship also cuts both ways. While Russian authorities have banned Facebook and Instagram as “extremist,” Western news outlets have in turn cut ties with state-controlled outlets because of Putin’s disinformation campaign. While pulling products and partnerships out of Russia may send a powerful message to the Kremlin, such isolation also risks leaving a bubble of disinformation intact. Luckily, “it’s pretty much impossible to censor effectively,” says RSF’s Dittmer, pointing to further efforts to use blockchain and gaming technology to spread news. “We can play the cat and mouse game with the internet censors in a slightly more sophisticated way.”

Among the investigators’ other findings, they also highlighted how people had been reportedly detained for expressing “views about the elections, or support for candidate

For climate, we already are seeing a glimpse of what is to come: drought, floods and far more extreme storms than in the recent past. We saw some of the implications over the past year, with supply chains broken because rivers were too dry for shipping and hydroelectric and nuclear power impaired.

As with climate change, demographic shifts determine societal ones, like straining the social contract between the working and the aged.

We are reversing the globalization of the past 40 years, with the links in our geopolitical and economic network fraying. “Friendshoring,” or moving production to friendly countries, is a new term. The geopolitical forces behind deglobalization will amplify the stresses from climate change and demographics to lead to a frenzied competition for resources and consumers.

The problem here, and a problem broadly with complex and dynamic systems, is that the whole doesn’t look like the sum of the parts. If you have a lot of people running around, the overall picture can look different than what any one of those people is doing. Maybe in aggregate their actions jam the doorway; maybe in aggregate they create a stampede

if we can’t get a firm hold on pedestrian economic issues like inflation and recession — the prospects are not bright for getting our forecasts right for these existential forces.

The problem is that the models don’t work when our economy is weird. And that’s precisely when we most need them to work.

The fourth, artificial intelligence, is a wild card. But we already are seeing risks for work and privacy, and for frightening advances in warfare.

A key reason these models fail in times of crisis is that they can’t deal with a world filled with complexity or with surprising twists and turns.

Economics failed with the 2008 crisis because economic theory has established that it cannot predict such crises.

we are not a mechanical system. We are humans who innovate, change with our experiences, and at times game the system

Reflecting on the 1987 market crash, the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman remarked on the difficulty facing economists by noting that subatomic particles don’t act based on what they think other subatomic particles are planning — but people do that.

What if economists can’t turn things around? This is a possibility because we are walking into a world unlike any we have seen. We can’t anticipate all the ways climate change might affect us or where our creativity will take us with A.I. Which brings us to what is called radical uncertainty, where we simply have no clue — where we are caught unaware by things we haven’t even thought of.

This possibility is not much on the minds of economists

How do we deal with risks we cannot even define? A good start is to move away from the economist’s palette of efficiency and rationality and instead look at examples of survival in worlds of radical uncertainty.

In our time savannas are turning to deserts. The alternative to the economist’s model is to take a coarse approach, to be more adaptable — leave some short-term fine tuning and optimization by the wayside

Our long term might look brighter if we act like cockroaches. An insect fine tuned for a jungle may dominate the cockroach in that environment. But once the world changes and the jungle disappears, it will as well.

The Swahili Coast is a narrow strip of land that stretches some 2,000 miles along the Eastern African seaboard — from modern-day Mozambique, Comoros and Madagascar in the south, to Somalia in the north

In its medieval heyday, the region was home to hundreds of port towns, each ruled independently, but with a common religion (Islam), language (Kiswahili) and culture.

Many towns grew immensely wealthy thanks to a vibrant trading network with merchants who sailed across the Indian Ocean on the monsoon winds. Middle Eastern pottery, Asian cloths 0c 0c and other luxury goods came in. African gold, ivory and timber 0c 0c went out — along with a steady flow of enslaved people, who were shipped off and sold across the Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf. (Slave trading later took place between the Swahili coast and Europe as well.)

A unique cosmopolitan society emerged that blended African customs and beliefs with those of the foreign traders, some of whom stuck around and assimilated.

Islam, for example, arrived from the Middle East and became an integral part of the Swahili social fabric, but with coral-stone mosques built and decorated in a local, East African style

Or consider the Kiswahili language, which is Bantu in origin but borrows heavily from Indian and Middle Eastern tongues

The arrival of Europeans, beginning around 1500, followed by Omani sailors some 200 years later, changed the character of the region

over the past 40 years, archaeologists, linguists and historians have come to see Swahili society as predominantly homegrown — with outside elements adopted over time that had only a marginal impact.

That African-centric version of Swahili roots never sat well with the Swahili people themselves, though

They generally preferred their own origin story, one in which princes from present-day Iran (then known as Persia) sailed across the Indian Ocean, married local women and enmeshed themselves into East African society. Depending on the narrative source, that story dates to around 850 or 1000 — the same period during which genetic mixing was underway, according to the DNA analysis.

“It’s remarkably spot on,” said Mark Horton, an archaeologist at the Royal Agricultural University of England

“This oral tradition was always maligned,”

“Now, with this DNA study, we see there was some truth to it.”

The ancient DNA study is the largest of its kind from Africa, involving 135 skeletons dating to late-medieval and early-modern times, 80 of which have yielded analyzable DNA.

To figure out where these people came from, the researchers compared genetic signatures from the dug-up bones with cheek swabs or saliva samples taken from modern-day individuals living in Africa, the Middle East and around the world.

The burial-site DNA traced back to two primary sources: Africans and present-day Iranians. Smaller contributions came from South Asians and Arabs as well, with foreign DNA representing about half of the skeletons’ genealogy

“It’s surprising that the genetic signature is so strong

Gene sequences from tiny power factories inside the cell, known as mitochondria, were overwhelmingly African in origin. Since children inherit these bits of DNA only from their mothers, the researchers inferred that the maternal forbearers of the Swahili people were mostly of African descent.

By comparison, the Y chromosome, passed from father to son, was chock-full of Asian DNA that the researchers found was common in modern-day Iran. So, a large fraction of Swahili ancestry presumably came from Persian men

Dr. Reich initially assumed that conquering men settled the region by force, displacing the local males in the process. “My hypothesis was that this was a genetic signature of inequality and exploitation,”

hat turned out to be a “naïve expectation,” Dr. Reich said, because “it didn’t take into account the cultural context in this particular case.”

In East Africa, Persian customs never came to dominate. Instead, most foreign influences — language, architecture, fashion, arts — were incorporated into a way of life that remained predominantly African in character, with social strictures, kinship systems and agricultural practices that reflected Indigenous traditions.

“Swahili was an absorbing society,” said Adria LaViolette, an archaeologist at the University of Virginia who has worked on the East African coast for over 35 years. Even as the Persians who arrived influenced the culture, “they became Swahili,”

One major caveat to the study: Nearly all the bones and teeth came from ornamental tombs that were located near grand mosques, sites where only the upper class would have been laid to rest.

the results might not be representative of the general populace.

Protocols for disinterring, sampling and reburying human remains were established in consultation with local religious leaders and community stakeholders. Under Islamic law, exhumations are permitted if they serve a public interest, including that of determining ancestry,

he started receiving death threats. People said they wished he and his family had been killed by drug lords, told him that “sooner or later your punishment will arrive” and proposed that he be nailed into a coffin or run over by a cement roller.

Mr. Moreno, who grew up in Colombia, began working as a researcher in a computer science and robotics lab in Paris in 1983; the career that followed involved creating a start-up, meeting the Dalai Lama and being named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur. His work has won several awards and spanned many fields — automotive, medical, nuclear, military, even home goods.

Many of the recent threats have been directed at scientists studying Covid-19. In a survey of 321 such scientists who had given media interviews, the journal Nature found that 22 percent had received threats of physical or sexual violence and 15 percent had received death threats

Last year, an Austrian doctor who was a vocal supporter of vaccines and a repeated target of threats died by suicide.

increasingly, even professors and researchers without much of a public persona have faced intimidation from extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Around 2010, he started thinking about how technology could help create sustainable cities. Eventually, he refined his ideas about “human smart cities” and “living cities” into his 2016 proposal for 15-minute cities.

The idea owes much to its many predecessors: “neighborhood units” and “garden cities” in the early 1900s, the community-focused urban planning pioneered by the activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, even support for “new urbanism” and walkable cities in the 1990s. So-called low-traffic neighborhoods, or LTNs, have been set up in several British cities over the past few decades.

Critics of 15-minute cities have been outspoken, arguing that a concept developed in Europe may not translate well to highly segregated American cities. A Harvard economist wrote in a blog post for the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021 that the concept was a “dead end” that would exacerbate “enormous inequalities in cities” by subdividing without connecting them.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist with four million Twitter followers, suggested that 15-minute cities were “perhaps the worst imaginable perversion” of the idea of walkable neighborhoods. He linked to a post about the “Great Reset,” an economic recovery plan proposed by the World Economic Forum that has spawned hordes of rumors about a pandemic-fueled plot to destroy capitalism.

A member of Britain’s Parliament said that 15-minute cities were “an international socialist concept” that would “cost us our personal freedoms.” QAnon supporters said the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals in Ohio was an intentional move meant to push rural residents into 15-minute cities.

“Conspiracy-mongers have built a complete story: climate denialism, Covid-19, anti-vax, 5G controlling the brains of citizens, and the 15-minute city for introducing a perimeter for day-to-day life,” Mr. Moreno said. “This storytelling is totally insane, totally irrational for us, but it makes sense for them.”

The multipronged conspiracy theory quickly became “turbocharged” after the Oxford protest, said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.

“You have this snowball effect of a policy, which in principle was only going to affect a small urban population, getting extrapolated and becoming this crucible where far-right groups, industry-sponsored lobbying groups, conspiracist movements, anti-lockdown groups and more saw an opportunity to insert their worldview into the mainstream and to piggyback on the news cycle,”

The vitriol currently directed at Mr. Moreno and researchers like him mirrors “the broader erosion of trust in experts and institutions,”

Modern conspiracy theorists and extremists turn the people they disagree with into scapegoats for a vast array of societal ills, blaming them personally for causing the high cost of living or various health crises and creating an “us-versus-them” environment, she said.

“I am not a politician, I am not a candidate for anything — as a researcher, my duty is to explore and deepen my ideas with scientific methodology,” he said. “It is totally unbelievable that we could receive a death threat just for working as scientists.”

People who drank 45 grams of alcohol or more a day—about as much as in three glasses of wine—increased their risk of dying sooner by up to a third. Among women, anything more than 25 grams of alcohol increased their risk of dying sooner. 

The findings suggest that the average man can drink up to about three drinks a day and expect to live as long as nondrinkers. Women might want to stop at about two drinks, the research suggested.

Health officials in Canada this year recommended that people have two drinks or fewer a week to lower health risks. That replaced guidance that 10 drinks a week was a low health risk. 

Crypto takes this abstraction a step further, because there’s nothing linked to it at all. There’s no economic activity in this space. There’s nothing produced by these companies. In fact, it’s a negative-sum game because of the cost of running the blockchains alone—the computational cost is tremendous.

And they produce nothing of value. There’s a reason these massive companies aren’t all using blockchain for their processes: It is incredibly inefficient

And realistically, who actually wants their financial information public and visible to everybody?

The vast majority of people who got involved in this have no interest related to the technology or in the political or ideological aspects of crypto. They just see an opportunity to get rich. And a lot of those people end up absorbing and parroting some of the crypto ideals back to you, but they don’t really care to understand what’s going on. It’s just their excuse for what they’ve already done, which is gamble on something they thought was going to make them wealthy.

I think most crypto companies are, like FTX, just borrowing from customer deposits to keep things afloat. And even the companies that aren’t doing that—I think Coinbase, for example, isn’t doing anything illicit, but their business model is based on this ecosystem where new money comes in. And that’s stopping.

Three years since its start we are still more likely to see the pandemic in partisan rather than world-historical terms. And the grandly tragic story of the pandemic takes on a profoundly different shape and color depending on the nature of its first act.

In a world where a natural origin was confirmed beyond all doubt, we might look back and narrate the pandemic as one particular kind of story: a morality tale showcasing the incomplete triumph of modern civilization and the enduring threats from nature, and highlighting the way that, whatever we might have told ourselves in 2019 or 2009 about the fortress of the wealthy world, pandemic disease remained a humbling civilization-scale challenge no nation had very good answers for.

in a world where a lab-leak origin had been confirmed instead, we would probably find ourselves telling a very different set of stories — primarily about humanity’s Icarian hubris, or perhaps about scientists’ Faustian indifference to the downside risks of new research, or the way in which very human impulses to cover up mistakes and wrongdoing might have compounded those mistakes to disastrous global effect.

It would have been, “We brought this on ourselves.” Or perhaps, if we were feeling xenophobic rather than humbly human, “They brought this on us,”

the pandemic would probably have joined nuclear weapons as a conventional illustration of the dark side of human knowledge, perhaps even surpassed them — 20 million dead is nothing to trifle with, after all, though it remains less than the overall death toll of World War II or even the Great Leap Forward.

the horror would also offer a silver lining: If human action was responsible for this pandemic, then in theory, human action could prevent the next one as well.

It is as though we’ve decided both that the pandemic was “man-made” and that its emergence was a kind of inevitability we can’t do much about.

if the figures are even mostly reliable, they reflect a remarkable indifference on the part of the country to the source of a once-in-a-century disease disaster

a definitive confirmation of a lab origin probably would not mean that responsibility lay in any simplistic way with China. But that isn’t to say the case wouldn’t have been made, probably in a variety of forms — calls for “reparations,” demands for global provision of free vaccines — that would only have contributed additional antagonism and resentment to the world stage, further polarizing the great-power landscape.

It would be as though following a catastrophic earthquake, we didn’t bother to sort out whether it had been caused by local fracking but instead argued endlessly about the imperfections of disaster response

as we piece together a working history of the past few years, you might hope we’d grow more focused on nailing the story down.

it seems likely to me that in the very earliest days of 2020, with cases exploding in China but not yet elsewhere, knowing that the disease was a result of gain-of-function research and had escaped from a lab probably would have produced an even more significant wave of global fear

it is hard to think “superbug” and not panic.

presumably, many fewer people contemplating the initial news would’ve assumed that the outbreak would be largely limited to Asia, as previous outbreaks had been; public health messengers in places like the United States probably would not have so casually reassuring; and even more dramatic circuit-breaking responses like a monthlong international travel ban might’ve been instituted quite quickly

As the pandemic wore on, I suspect that effect would have lingered beyond the initial panic. At first, it might’ve been harder to decide that the virus was just something to live with if we knew simultaneously that it was something introduced to the world in error.

And later, when the vaccines arrived, I suspect there might have been considerably less resistance to them, particularly on the American right, where anxiety and xenophobia might have trumped public-health skepticism and legacy anti-vaccine sentiment

the opposite counterfactual is just as illuminating

The question and its unresolvability have mattered enormously for geopolitics,

n a world where neither narrative has been confirmed, and where pandemic origins are governed by an epistemological fog, I worry we have begun to collate the two stories in a somewhat paradoxical and self-defeating way

The disease and global response may well have accelerated our “new Cold War,” as Luce writes, but it is hard to imagine an alternate history where a known lab-leak origin didn’t move the world there much faster.

On the other hand, the natural logic of a confirmed zoonotic origin would probably have been to push nations of the world closer together into networks of collaboration and cooperation

the direction of change would have most likely been toward more integration rather than less. After all, this is to some degree what happened in the wake of the initial outbreaks of SARS and MERS and the Ebola outbreaks of the past decade.

Instead, the geopolitics remain unsteady, which is to say, a bit jagged

The United States can weaponize a narrative about lab origin — as China hawks in both the Trump and Biden administrations have repeatedly done — without worrying too much about providing real proof or suffering concrete backlash.

And China can stonewall origin investigations by citing sovereignty rights and a smoke screen story about the disease originating in frozen food shipped in from abroad without paying much of an international price for the intransigence or bad-faith argumentation, either.

each has carried forward a gripe that needn’t be substantiated in order to be deployed.

ambiguity also offers plausible deniability, which means that without considerably more Chinese transparency and cooperation, those pushing both stories will find themselves still making only probabilistic cases. We’re probably going to be living with that uncertainty, in a political and social world shaped by it, for the foreseeable future

Since coming to power in 2019, Bukele has declared a still-to-be-rescinded state of exception, suspended the Salvadorean constitution, and locked up some 70,000 alleged gang members without due process.

This trait also makes him a touchstone for the Right-wing movement that I predict will replace “conservatism” in the 21st century. This outlook owes more to the Italian Futurist Filippo Marinetti than conservatives of the G.K. Chesterton variety

yet, Bukele’s strongman tactics have made him wildly popular with Salvadoreans, who doubtless enjoy a reported 70% reduction in the country’s previously extremely high murder rate. They have also made Bukele a rock star for the online Right. This group, fond of complaining about spineless leaders, fraying Western law and order, and the bleeding-away of political agency into international institutions and NGOs, regards the spectacle of a strongman leader with good social media game as something like a fantasy made flesh.

Arguably, it’s as much his embrace of technology that accords Bukele the mantle of poster-boy for a futuristic Right. Whether in his extremely online presence, his (admittedly not completely successful) embrace of Bitcoin as legal tender, or the high-tech, recently rebuilt National Library, funded by Beijing and serving more as showcase for futuristic technologies than as reading-room

Western critics, though, point to allegations that he has corrupted institutions by packing them with allies, not to mention, according to Amnesty International, “concealed and distorted public information, backed actions to undermine civic space, militarised public security, and used mass arrests and imprisonment as the sole strategies for counteracting violence in the country”.

is perhaps most visibly embodied in American technologists such as Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen or Peter Thiel. As a worldview, it is broadly pro-capitalist, enthusiastically pro-technology and unabashedly hierarchical, as well as sometimes also scornful of Christian-inflected concern for the weak.

We might call it, rudely, “space fascism”, though N.S. Lyons’s formulation “Right-wing progressivism” is probably more accurate. Among its adherents, high-tech authoritarianism is a feature, not a bug, and egalitarianism is for fools. Thinkers such as Curtis Yarvin propose an explicitly neo-monarchical model for governance; Thiel has declared that: “I no longer believe freedom and democracy are compatible.”

El Salvador is thus the most legible real-world instance of something like a Right-wing progressive programme in practice. And along with the tech enthusiasm and public-order toughness, the third distinctive feature of this programme can be gleaned: a desire not to end international migration, but to restrict it to elites.

For Right-wing progressives, polities are not necessarily premised on ethnic or cultural homogeneity — at least not for elites. Rather, this is a vision of statehood less based on affinity, history or even ethnicity, and more on a kind of opt-in, utility-maximisation model

As a worldview, it’s jarring to cultural conservatives, who generally value thick ties of shared history and affinity

Right-wing progressives generally accord greater political value to gifted, high-productivity foreigners than any slow-witted, unproductive coethnic: those within Right-wing progressive circles propose, and in some cases are already working on, opt-in startup cities and “network states” that would be, by definition, highly selective about membership.

As for those still wedded to the 20th-century idea that being Right-wing necessarily means ethnicity-based nationalism, they are likely to find this outlook bewildering.

Yet it’s still more heretical to egalitarian progressives, for whom making migration and belonging an elite privilege offends every premise of inclusion and social justice.

Right-wing progressives, by contrast, propose to learn from the immigration policies of polities such as Singapore and the Gulf states, and avert the political challenges posed by ethnic voting blocs by imposing tiered citizenship for low-skilled migrants, while courting the wealth and productivity of international elites

Bukele’s proposal suggests a pragmatic two-tier Right-wing progressive migration policy that courts rich, productive, geographically rootless international “Anywheres” of the kind long understood to have more affinity with one another than with less wealthy and more rooted “Somewheres” — but to do so while explicitly protecting cultural homogeneity on behalf of the less-mobile masses.

There are larger structural reasons for such pragmatism, not least that population growth is slowing or going into reverse across most of the planet.

At the same time, impelled by easier transportation, climate change, social-media promises of better lives elsewhere, and countless other reasons, people everywhere are on the move. As such, like a global game of musical chairs, a battle is now on for who ends up where, once the music stops — and on what terms.

How do you choose who is invited? And how do you keep unwanted demographics out? Within an egalitarian progressive framework, these are simply not questions that one may ask

Within the older, cultural conservative framework, meanwhile, all or most migration is viewed with suspicion.

The Right-wing progressive framework, by contrast, is upbeat about migration — provided it’s as discerning as possible, ideally granting rights only to elite incomers and filtering others aggressively by demographics, for example an assessment of the statistical likeliho

od of committing crime or making a net economic contribution.

In Britain, meanwhile, whatever happens to the Tories, I suspect we’ll see more of the Right-wing progressives. I find many of their policies unnerving, especially on the biotech side; but theirs is a political subculture with optimism and a story about the future, two traits that go a long way in politics.

He is concerned that masters of the A.I. universes are developing systems that will expand chasms of inequality. He fears the transition to A.I. will be so abrupt that entire professional fields will be left doing menial jobs, or nothing, stripping people of dignity and unleashing floods of “despair.”

Father Benanti, who does not believe in the industry’s ability to self-regulate and thinks some rules of the road are required in a world where deep fakes and disinformation can erode democracy.

He shares his insights with Pope Francis, who in his annual World Day of Peace message on Jan. 1 called for a global treaty to ensure the ethical development and use of AI to prevent a world devoid of human mercy, where inscrutable algorithms decide who is granted asylum, who gets a mortgage, or who, on the battlefield, lives or dies.

all the time he applies his perspective about what it means to be alive, and to be human, when machines seem more alive and human. “This is a spiritual question,” he said.

raises enormous questions about redistributing wealth in an A.I. dominant universe.

he pursued an engineering degree at Sapienza University in Rome. It wasn’t enough.“I started to feel that something was missing,” he said, explaining that his advancement as an engineering student erased the mystique machines held for him. “I simply broke the magic.”

He left Rome to study in Assisi, the home of St. Francis, and over the next decade, took his final vows as a friar, was ordained as a priest and defended his dissertation on human enhancement and cyborgs. He got his job at the Gregorian, and eventually as the Vatican’s IT ethics guy.

In 2017, Cardinal Ravasi organized an event at the Italian embassy to the Holy See where Father Benanti gave a talk on the ethics of A.I. Microsoft officials in attendance were impressed and asked to stay in touch. That same year, the Italian government asked him to contribute to A.I. policy documents and the next year he successfully applied to sit on its commission for developing a national A.I. strategy.

Francis, he said, didn’t at first realize what Microsoft really did, but liked that Mr. Smith took out of his pocket one of the pope’s speeches on social media and showed the pontiff the concerns the business executive had highlighted and shared.

e said, arguing that as ancient Roman augurs turned to the flight of birds for direction, A.I., with its enormous grasp of our physical, emotional and preferential data, could be the new oracles, determining decisions, and replacing God with false idols.

“It’s something old that probably we think that we left behind,” the friar said, “but that is coming back.”

The latest study looked at data from 126,972 people over the study period. It found that in 2015, 4.2 percent of Medicaid enrollees under the age of 17 in Maryland had overlapping prescriptions of three or more different classes of psychiatric medications. That figure rose to 4.6 percent in 2020.

after Mr. Trump won the election that year, the world seemed to blame tech companies for his victory. The resulting “techlash” against Facebook and others caused some industry leaders to reassess their political views, a trend that continued through the social and political turmoil of the pandemic.

The start-up industry has also been in a downturn since 2022, with higher interest rates sending capital fleeing from risky bets and a dismal market for initial public offerings crimping opportunities for investors to cash in on their valuable investments.

Some investors said they were frustrated that his pick for chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan, has aggressively moved to block acquisitions, one of the main ways venture capitalists make money. They said they were also unhappy that Mr. Biden’s pick for head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Gary Gensler, had been hostile to cryptocurrency companies.

Last month, Mr. Sacks, Mr. Thiel, Elon Musk and other prominent investors attended an “anti-Biden” dinner in Hollywood, where attendees discussed fund-raising and ways to oppose Democrats,

Some also said they disliked Mr. Biden’s proposal in March to raise taxes, including a 25 percent “billionaire tax” on certain holdings that could include start-up stock, as well as a higher tax rate on profits from successful investments.

“If you keep telling someone over and over that they’re evil, they’re eventually not going to like that,” he said. “I see that in venture capital.”

Some tech investors are also fuming over how Mr. Biden has handled foreign affairs and other issues.

Mr. Andreessen, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, a prominent Silicon Valley venture firm, said in a recent podcast that “there are real issues with the Biden administration.” Under Mr. Trump, he said, the S.E.C. and F.T.C. would be headed by “very different kinds of people.” But a Trump presidency would not necessarily be a “clean win” either, he added.

Mr. Sacks said at the tech conference last week that he thought such taxes could kill the start-up industry’s system of offering stock options to founders and employees. “It’s a good reason for Silicon Valley to think really hard about who it wants to vote for,” he said.

“Tech, venture capital and Silicon Valley are looking at the current state of affairs and saying, ‘I’m not happy with either of those options,’” he said. “‘I can no longer count on Democrats to support tech issues, and I can no longer count on Republicans to support business issues.’”

Ben Horowitz, a founder of Andreessen Horowitz, wrote in a blog post last year that the firm would back any politician who supported “an optimistic technology-enabled future” and oppose any who did not. Andreessen Horowitz has donated $22 million to Fairshake, a political action group focused on supporting crypto-friendly lawmakers.

Venture investors are also networking with lawmakers in Washington at events like the Hill & Valley conference in March, organized by Jacob Helberg, an adviser to Palantir, a tech company co-founded by Mr. Thiel. At that event, tech executives and investors lobbied lawmakers against A.I. regulations and asked for more government spending to support the technology’s development in the United States.

This month, Mr. Helberg, who is married to Mr. Rabois, donated $1 million to the Trump campaign

One man, speaking about one of his favorite young influencers in a Telegram exchange captured by a child-safety activist, said that her mother knew “damn well” that many of her daughter’s followers were “pervy adult men.”

Meta looms over everything young influencers do on Instagram. It connects their accounts with strangers, and it can upend their star turns when it chooses. The company periodically shuts down accounts if it determines they have violated policies against child sexual exploitation or abuse. Some parents say their accounts have been shut down without such violations. 

Over the course of reporting this story, during which time the Journal inquired about the account the mom managed for her daughter, Meta shut down the account twice. The mom said she believed she hadn’t violated Meta’s policies. 

Meta’s guidance for content creators stresses the importance of engaging with followers to keep them and attract new ones. The hundreds of comments on any given post included some from other young fashion influencers, but also a large number of men leaving comments like “Gorgeous!” The mom generally liked or thanked them all, save for any that were expressly inappropriate. 

Meta spokesman Andy Stone said the company enables parents who run accounts for their children to control who is able to message them on Instagram or comment on their accounts. Meta’s guidance for creators also offers tips for building a safe online community, and the company has publicized a range of tools to help teens and parents achieve this.

Like many young girls, the daughter envied fashion influencers who made a living posting glamour content. When the mother agreed to help her daughter build her following and become an influencer, she set some rules. Her daughter wouldn’t be allowed to access the account or interact with anyone who sent messages. And they couldn’t post anything indicating exactly where they live. 

The mom stopped blocking so many users. Within a year of launching, the account had more than 100,000 followers. The daughter’s popularity earned her invitations to modeling events in big coastal cities where she met other young influencers. 

Social-media platforms have helped level the playing field for parents seeking an audience for their children’s talents. Instagram, in particular, is visually driven and easily navigable, which also makes it appealing for child-focused brands.

While Meta bans children under the age of 13 from independently opening social-media accounts, the company allows what it calls adult-run minor accounts, managed by parents. Often those accounts are pursuing influencer status, part of a burgeoning global influencer industry expected to be worth $480 billion by 2027, according to a recent Goldman Sachs report. 

Young influencers, reachable through direct messages, routinely solicit their followers for patronage, posting links to payment accounts and Amazon gift registries in their bios.

The Midwestern mom debated whether to charge for access to extra photos and videos via Instagram’s subscription feature. She said she has always rejected private offers to buy photos of her daughter, but she decided that offering subscriptions was different because it didn’t involve a one-on-one transaction.

The Journal asked Meta why it had at some points removed photos from the account. Weeks later, Meta disabled the account’s subscription feature, and then shut down the account without saying why. 

“There’s no personal connection,” she said. “You’re just finding a way to monetize from this fame that’s impersonal.”

The mom allowed the men to purchase subscriptions so long as they kept their distance and weren’t overtly inappropriate in messages and comments. “In hindsight, they’re probably the scariest ones of all,” she said. 

Stone, the Meta spokesman, said that the company will no longer allow accounts that primarily post child-focused content to offer subscriptions or receive gifts, and that the company is developing tools to enforce that.

he mom saw her daughter, though young, as capable of choosing to make money as an influencer and deciding when she felt uncomfortable. The mom saw her own role as providing the support needed for her daughter to do that.

The mom also discussed safety concerns with her now ex-husband, who has generally supported the influencer pursuit. In an interview, he characterized the untoward interest in his daughter as “the seedy underbelly” of the industry, and said he felt comfortable with her online presence so long as her mom posted appropriate content and remained vigilant about protecting her physical safety.

an anonymous person professing to be a child-safety activist sent her an email that contained screenshots and videos showing her daughter’s photos being traded on Telegram. Some of the users were painfully explicit about their sexual interest. Many of the photos were bikini or leotard photos from when the account first started.

Still, the mom realized she couldn’t stop men from trading the photos, which will likely continue to circulate even after her daughter becomes an adult. “Every little influencer with a thousand or more followers is on Telegram,” she said. “They just don’t know it.”

Early last year, Meta safety staffers began investigating the risks associated with adult-run accounts for children offering subscriptions, according to internal documents. The staffers reviewed a sample of subscribers to such accounts and determined that nearly all the subscribers demonstrated malicious behavior toward children.

The staffers found that the subscribers mostly liked or saved photos of children, child-sexualizing material and, in some cases, illicit underage-sex content. The users searched the platform using hashtags such as #sexualizegirls and #tweenmodel. 

The staffers found that some accounts with large numbers of followers sold additional content to subscribers who offered extra money on Instagram or other platforms, and that some engaged with subscribers in sexual discussions about their children. In every case, they concluded that the parents running those accounts knew that their subscribers were motivated by sexual gratification.

In the following months, the Journal began its own review of parent-run modeling accounts and found numerous instances where Meta wasn’t enforcing its own child-safety policies and community guidelines. 

The Journal asked Meta about several accounts that appeared to have violated platform rules in how they promoted photos of their children. The company deleted some of those accounts, as well as others, as it worked to address safety issues.

In 2022, Instagram started letting certain content creators offer paid-subscription services. At the time, the company allowed accounts featuring children to offer subscriptions if they were run or co-managed by parents.

The removal of the account made for a despondent week for the mom and daughter. The mother was incensed at Meta’s lack of explanation and the prospect that users had falsely reported inappropriate activity on the account. She was torn about what to do. When it was shut down, the account had roughly 80% male followers.

The account soon had more than 100,000 followers, about 92% of whom were male, according to the dashboard. Within months, Meta shut down that account as well. The company said the account had violated its policies related to child exploitation, but it didn’t specify how. 

Meta’s Stone said it doesn’t allow accounts it has previously shut down to resume the same activity on backup accounts. 

The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.

The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.

Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.

Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.

Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election

Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.

In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.

This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.

What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security.

Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences.

The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.