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it’s not too much of a reach to see Flight 610 as representative of the hinge in history we’ve arrived at — with the bots, the artificial intelligence and the social media algorithms now shaping the fate of humanity at a startling pace.

Like the correction system in the 737, these inventions are designed to make life easier and safer — or at least more profitable for the owners.

The C.E.O. of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, hit a similar cautionary note at the company’s recent annual shareholder meeting. Big Tech, he said, should be asking “not what computers can do, but what they should do.”

For years, Facebook gave some of the world’s largest technology companies more intrusive access to users’ personal data than it has disclosed, effectively exempting those business partners from its usual privacy rules, according to internal records and interviews.

The special arrangements are detailed in hundreds of pages of Facebook documents obtained by The New York Times. The records, generated in 2017 by the company’s internal system for tracking partnerships, provide the most complete picture yet of the social network’s data-sharing practices. They also underscore how personal data has become the most prized commodity of the digital age, traded on a vast scale by some of the most powerful companies in Silicon Valley and beyond.

Facebook allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages.

The teenage nerd enters conservatism through either Atlas Shrugged or Lord of the Rings, and between Tolkienists like myself and the Randians a great gulf is often fixed.

even if libertarianism seems an insufficient philosophy of human flourishing, its defense of individuals and markets can be a crucial practical corrective to all manner of liberal and conservative mistakes

Just a little while ago journalists were talking about a “libertarian moment” in American politics, with Rand Paul as its avatar

The AI revolution will have two engines — China and the United States — pushing its progress swiftly forward. It is unlike any previous technological revolution that emerged from a singular cultural setting. Having two engines will further accelerate the pace of technology.

WorldPost: In your book, you talk about the “data gap” between these two engines. What do you mean by that? Lee: Data is the raw material on which AI runs. It is like the role of oil in powering an industrial economy. As an AI algorithm is fed more examples of the phenomenon you want the algorithm to understand, it gains greater and greater accuracy. The more faces you show a facial recognition algorithm, the fewer mistakes it will make in recognizing your face

All data is not the same, however. China and the United States have different strengths when it comes to data. The gap emerges when you consider the breadth, quality and depth of the data. Breadth means the number of users, the population whose actions are captured in data. Quality means how well-structured and well-labeled the data is. Depth means how many different data points are generated about the activities of each user.

The key result: the 20 most prosperous districts are now held by Democrats, while Republicans represent 16 of the 20 least prosperous, measured by share of G.D.P. The accompanying chart illustrates their analysis.

The authors’ calculation of the contribution to the G.D.P. of every congressional district showed that Democratic districts produce $10.2 trillion of the nation’s goods and services and Republican districts $6.2 trillion.

Candidates on the right do best during hard times and in recent elections, they have gained the most politically in regions experiencing the sharpest downturn. Electorally speaking, in other words, Republicans profit from economic stagnation and decline.

A company in Liechtenstein built the world’s fastest roller coaster, part of a niche industry combining innovation with no economies of scale

ABU DHABI—The world’s fastest roller coaster, which can reach 149 miles an hour in 4.5 seconds, is at an amusement park called—what else?—Ferrari World, in Abu Dhabi.

The tiny alpine principality, sandwiched between Switzerland and Austria, is one of a handful of European countries that dominate the niche business of producing roller coasters.

Without belaboring his points, Snowden pushes the reader to reflect more seriously on what every American should be asking already.

What does it mean to have the data of our lives collected and stored on file, ready to be accessed — not just now, by whatever administration happens to be in office at the moment, but potentially forever?

Should such sensitive work be outsourced to private contractors?

Thirteen years ago, a group of U.S. public health officials came up with a plan to address what they regarded as one of the medical system’s crucial vulnerabilities: a shortage of ventilators.

The plan was to build a large fleet of inexpensive portable devices to deploy in a flu pandemic or another crisis.

Money was budgeted. A federal contract was signed. Work got underway.

. Because of its millions of users and the site’s focus on sharing, Facebook has a news reach that can transcend that of traditional media such as print or television. And that reach comes oddly cheap. One hundred dollars in Facebook ads could deliver a buyer’s message to thousands of viewers, whose further sharing would allow it to ripple out exponentially.

Now, turn that into $100,000 and inject it with malice. And imagine being able to target this message with minute precision: say, telling black voters in swing counties that Hillary Clinton was an incorrigible racist, or enraging white, male gun lovers with her supposed plans to roll back the Second Amendment. Imagine how quickly such misinformation could spread and metastasize.

And imagine no one knowing it was happening.

In many books and films, the prewar years appear as an age of prosperity and contentment in Europe, with the summer of 1913 featuring as the last golden summer.

But today, as racism and xenophobia return to the centre of western politics, it is time to remember that the background to the first world war was decades of racist imperialism whose consequences still endure. It is something that is not remembered much, if at all, on Remembrance Day.

In the early 20th century, the popularity of social Darwinism had created a consensus that nations should be seen similarly to biological organisms, which risked extinction or decay if they failed to expel alien bodies and achieve “living space” for their own citizens. Pseudo-scientific theories of biological difference between races posited a world in which all races were engaged in an international struggle for wealth and power

There Is a Generational Divide Among RepublicansIt shows up most clearly in the debate over whether parents should get federal money for their children.

hese questions are being hashed out on social media, on chat shows, in magazines, journals and other public spaces. But in my experience the most interesting and honest conversations are happening in private, with people trying to answer the question, “Who are we and what comes next?”So far these questions have been mostly theoretical. But the debate about the nature and direction of the American right became much more concrete when the Biden administration included a child allowance as part of the Covid relief bill that just passed. While most of the attention was focused on the terms of the $1,400 stimulus payments and the proposed increase in the minimum wage, the child allowance is a major initiative that received comparatively little attention.The Biden plan will pay families a cash benefit of up to $3,600 per year for each child under 6 years old and $3,000 per year for those aged 6 to 17. A version of this plan was proposed in 2017 by Senators Michael Bennet and Sherrod Brown as a stand-alone bill that never went anywhere. In the relief bill that passed the Senate over the weekend (and must now be passed again by the House), it is available only this year, but the authors of the proposal surely hope that once in place it will be made permanent.

Somewhere along the line, American conservatism came to define itself — at least in its actions — as primarily about money. Taxes and G.D.P. got policy support; families and communities got lip service. That’s changing, at least with the Republican rank-and-file. A recent poll shows 68 percent of Americans, including 60 percent of Republicans, support a child allowance like the ones put forward by Mr. Biden and Mr. Romney.

Where do Republicans go from here? Is it more populism? Trumpism without Trump? Trumpism with Trump? Warmed-over Reaganism? Will the party embrace a middle-class agenda?

But in my experience the most interesting and honest conversations are happening in private, with people trying to answer the question, “Who are we and what comes next?”

But the debate about the nature and direction of the American right became much more concrete when the Biden administration included a child allowance as part of the Covid relief bill that just passed. While most of the attention was focused on the terms of the $1,400 stimulus payments and the proposed increase in the minimum wage, the child allowance is a major initiative that received comparatively little attention.

The calls for racial parity in the wake of George Floyd’s murder demanded a response from institutions that market their enlightenment even as they persist in advancing the privileges of largely rich, white populations.

Nearly every private school in the country thus spent the summer scrambling to intensify curriculums and training around race and racial sensitivity, often with the help of diversity consultants whose approach can feel dependent on jargon and contrived simplicities.

In December, a group of Dalton parents and alumni wrote an anonymous letter to the school community titled “Loving Concern @ Dalton.” They worried about “an obsessive focus on race and identity,” filling their children’s days at school. With remote learning giving parents an opportunity to spy on what their children were getting taught all day, these parents did not like what they were hearing — “a pessimistic and age-inappropriate litany of grievances in EVERY class.”

In a now-deleted tweet from May 22, 2020, Nikole Hannah-Jones, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for The New York Times, opined, “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.”

Growing out of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement, a culture of censorship has taken root in many of our institutions.

The implication of Hannah-Jones’s tweet and candidate Biden’s quip seems to be that you can have African ancestry, dark skin, textured hair, and perhaps even some “culturally black” traits regarding tastes in food, music, and ways of moving through the world. But unless you hold the “correct” political beliefs and values, you are not authentically black.

Growing out of the Critical Race Theory (CRT) movement, a culture of censorship has taken root in many of our institutions.

CRT makes two basic observations: First, that bias and prejudice exist not just in the hearts and minds of individuals, but also in society’s social structures and systems.

second, that bias embedded in systems is frequently invisible to the dominant class but perfectly perceptible to its victims

At a pivotal moment on January 6, the veteran United States Capitol Police officer single-handedly prevented untold bloodshed. Staring down an angry, advancing mob, he retreated up a marble staircase, calmly wielding his baton to delay his pursuers while calling out their position to his fellow officers. At the top of the steps, still alone and standing just a few yards from the chamber where senators and Vice President Mike Pence had been certifying the Electoral College’s vote,

f the GOP is to have a future outside the fever dreams of internet trolls, we have to call out falsehoods and conspiracy theories unequivocally. We have to repudiate people who peddle those lies.

The anger being directed today at major internet platforms—Twitter, Facebook, and Google, especially—is, in part, a consequence of the fading of traditional political authority. Sometimes intentionally, sometimes inadvertently, Americans have outsourced key parts of political life to Silicon Valley behemoths that were not designed to, and are not competent to, execute functions traditionally in the province of the government. The failure of our traditional political institutions and our traditional media to function as spaces for genuine political conversation has created a vacuum now filled by the social-media giants—who are even worse at the job.

First lady Melania Trump did not write her own "thank you" notes to the White House residence staff who have cared for her and her family for the last four years, according to two sources with knowledge of the notes and Trump's handling of them.

The 80 or so staff who received the type written notes were under the assumption the first lady had written them herself.

Trump tasked a lower-level East Wing staffer with writing them "in her voice," and she signed her name

By withdrawing US troops from Syria, President Donald Trump is playing a kind of Russian roulette, entrusting dangerous players with key US national security objectives.

His move also means that a lot of our previously held core priorities, such as fighting ISIS and defending Israel, are now in the hands of some very suspect leaders.

Counterterrorism is a key focus for any president, and Trump has consistently (and inaccurately) championed his own administration's success fighting ISIS. With the support of the Syrian Democratic Forces and our other partners in Syrian counterterrorism, the Global Coalition to Defeat ISIS has made major gains in destroying the terrorist group's territorial footholds in Syria.

Trump did, in fact, withhold aid to Ukraine because he wanted the government there to investigate Democrats.

White House acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney turned the press briefing room into a sort of confession chamber, openly admitting to several acts that could deepen the legal predicament for the president. Trump is facing an impeachment inquiry into whether he has abused his office for personal and political gain.

In admitting that Trump had personally intervened to award a multimillion-dollar summit to his own company, and that the president had also used taxpayer money as leverage to push a Ukrainian investigation into Democrats, Mulvaney embraced a classic Trumpian tactic: saying the quiet — and potentially illegal — part out loud.

The “shock therapy” reforms that speedily pushed Poland and other countries in the region into capitalism have come in for criticism, but Leszek Balcerowicz, the architect of Poland’s reforms, still believes they were the best option for the country in the circumstances. “If you move fast from a bad system to a better one, you release new forces for growth,

While communism left the region an economic basket case, it did also provide some of the seeds for growth: well-educated societies with low levels of inequality

Particularly in Poland, the transition led to a class of entrepreneurs like Grabski, rather than a small group of oligarchs. “We had the Solidarity movement in the factories and they were like a watchdog. So directors couldn’t go into shabby deals like in Russia,”