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what worries me even more is the change I see in ordinary Americans. I live in the heart of MAGA country, and Donald Trump is the single most culturally influential person here. It’s not close. He’s far more influential than any pastor, politician, coach or celebrity. He has changed people politically and also personally. It is common for those outside the Trump movement to describe their aunts or uncles or parents or grandparents as “lost.” They mean their relatives’ lives are utterly dominated by Trump, Trump’s media and Trump’s grievances.

never before have I seen extremism penetrate a vast American community so deeply, so completely and so comprehensively.

That percentage is far higher than the (still troubling) 22 percent of independents and 13 percent of Democrats who shared the same view.

In 2011, they were the American cohort least likely to agree that a politician could commit immoral acts in private yet “still behave ethically and fulfill their duties in their public and professional life.”

They went from least likely to most likely to excuse the immoral behavior of politicians.

An increasing percentage are now tempted to embrace political violence. Last October, a startling 33 percent of Republicans (and an even larger 41 percent of pro-Trump Americans) agreed with the statement that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country.”

Polling data again and again backs up the reality that the right is abandoning decency, and doing so in the most alarming of ways. It began happening almost immediately with white evangelicals

As the Iowa caucuses approached, Trump escalated his language, going so far as to call his political opponents “vermin” and declaring that immigrants entering America illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The statement was so indefensible and repugnant that many expected it to hurt Trump. Yet a Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll found that a 42 percent plurality of likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers said the statement would make them more likely to support Trump — a substantially greater percentage than the 28 percent who said it would make them less likely to support him.

While political violence is hardly exclusive to the right, the hostility and vitriol embedded in MAGA America is resulting in an escalating wave of threats and acts of intimidation.

The result is a religious movement steeped in fanaticism but stripped of virtue. The fruit of the spirit described in Galatians in the New Testament — “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control” — is absent from MAGA Christianity, replaced by the very “works of the flesh” the same passage warned against, including “hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions” and “factions.”

in the upside-down world of MAGA morality, vice is virtue and virtue is vice. My colleague Jane Coaston even coined a term, “vice signaling,” to describe how Trump’s core supporters convey their tribal allegiance. They’re often deliberately rude, transgressive or otherwise unpleasant, just to demonstrate how little they care about conventional moral norms.

For most of my life, conservative evangelicals (including me) have been fond of quoting John Adams’s 1798 letter to the Massachusetts Militia. It’s a critical founding document, one that forcefully argues that our Republic needs a virtuous citizenry to survive. “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People,” he asserts. “It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

I’ve appreciated that quote because it recognizes the obligations of a free people in a constitutional republic to exercise their liberty toward virtuous purposes.

Absent public virtue, a republic can fall. And a Trump win in 2024 would absolutely convince countless Americans that virtue is for suckers, and vice is the key to victory.

if he wins again, the equation will change and history may record that he was not the culmination of a short-lived reactionary moment, but rather the harbinger of a greater darkness to come.

The ordinary fixes—the kind that draw on people’s will, and require eating less and moving more—rarely have a large or lasting effect. Indeed, America itself has suffered through a long, maddening history of failed attempts to change its habits on a national scale: a yo-yo diet of well-intentioned treatments, policies, and other social interventions that only ever lead us back to where we started

Through it all, obesity rates keep going up; the diabetes epidemic keeps worsening.

The most recent miracle, for Barb as well as for the nation, has come in the form of injectable drugs. In early 2021, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk published a clinical trial showing remarkable results for semaglutide, now sold under the trade names Wegovy and Ozempic.

Patients in the study who’d had injections of the drug lost, on average, close to 15 percent of their body weight—more than had ever been achieved with any other drug in a study of that size. Wadden knew immediately that this would be “an incredible revolution in the treatment of obesity.”

Many more drugs are now racing through development: survodutide, pemvidutide, retatrutide. (Among specialists, that last one has produced the most excitement: An early trial found an average weight loss of 24 percent in one group of participants.

In the United States, an estimated 189 million adults are classified as having obesity or being overweight

The drugs don’t work for everyone. Their major side effects—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea—can be too intense for many patients. Others don’t end up losing any weight

For the time being, just 25 percent of private insurers offer the relevant coverage, and the cost of treatment—about $1,000 a month—has been prohibitive for many Americans.

The drugs have already been approved not just for people with diabetes or obesity, but for anyone who has a BMI of more than 27 and an associated health condition, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. By those criteria, more than 140 million American adults already qualify

if this story goes the way it’s gone for other “risk factor” drugs such as statins and antihypertensives, then the threshold for prescriptions will be lowered over time, inching further toward the weight range we now describe as “normal.”

How you view that prospect will depend on your attitudes about obesity, and your tolerance for risk

The first GLP-1 drug to receive FDA approval, exenatide, has been used as a diabetes treatment for more than 20 years. No long-term harms have been identified—but then again, that drug’s long-term effects have been studied carefully only across a span of seven years

the data so far look very good. “These are now being used, literally, in hundreds of thousands of people across the world,” she told me, and although some studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs may cause inflammation of the pancreas, or even tumor growth, these concerns have not borne out.

adolescents are injecting newer versions of these drugs, and may continue to do so every week for 50 years or more. What might happen over all that time?

“All of us, in the back of our minds, always wonder, Will something show up?  ” Although no serious problems have yet emerged, she said, “you wonder, and you worry.”

in light of what we’ve been through, it’s hard to see what other choices still remain. For 40 years, we’ve tried to curb the spread of obesity and its related ailments, and for 40 years, we’ve failed. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We don’t even understand what’s really causing it. Now, again, we have a new approach. This time around, the fix had better work.

The fen-phen revolution arrived at a crucial turning point for Wadden’s field, and indeed for his career. By then he’d spent almost 15 years at the leading edge of research into dietary interventions, seeing how much weight a person might lose through careful cutting of their calories.

But that sort of diet science—and the diet culture that it helped support—had lately come into a state of ruin. Americans were fatter than they’d ever been, and they were giving up on losing weight. According to one industry group, the total number of dieters in the country declined by more than 25 percent from 1986 to 1991.

Rejecting diet culture became something of a feminist cause. “A growing number of women are joining in an anti-diet movement,” The New York Times reported in 1992. “They are forming support groups and ceasing to diet with a resolve similar to that of secretaries who 20 years ago stopped getting coffee for their bosses.

Now Wadden and other obesity researchers were reaching a consensus that behavioral interventions might produce in the very best scenario an average lasting weight loss of just 5 to 10 percent

National surveys completed in 1994 showed that the adult obesity rate had surged by more than half since 1980, while the proportion of children classified as overweight had doubled. The need for weight control in America had never seemed so great, even as the chances of achieving it were never perceived to be so small.

Wadden wasn’t terribly concerned, because no one in his study had reported any heart symptoms. But ultrasounds revealed that nearly one-third of them had some degree of leakage in their heart valves. His “cure for obesity” was in fact a source of harm.

In December 1994, the Times ran an editorial on what was understood to be a pivotal discovery: A genetic basis for obesity had finally been found. Researchers at Rockefeller University were investigating a molecule, later named leptin, that gets secreted from fat cells and travels to the brain, and that causes feelings of satiety. Lab mice with mutations in the leptin gene—importantly, a gene also found in humans—overeat until they’re three times the size of other mice. “The finding holds out the dazzling hope,”

In April 1996, the doctors recommended yes: Dexfenfluramine was approved—and became an instant blockbuster. Patients received prescriptions by the hundreds of thousands every month. Sketchy wellness clinics—call toll-free, 1-888-4FEN-FEN—helped meet demand. Then, as now, experts voiced concerns about access. Then, as now, they worried that people who didn’t really need the drugs were lining up to take them. By the end of the year, sales of “fen” alone had surpassed $300 million.

It was nothing less than an awakening, for doctors and their patients alike. Now a patient could be treated for excess weight in the same way they might be treated for diabetes or hypertension—with a drug they’d have to take for the rest of their life.

the article heralded a “new understanding of obesity as a chronic disease rather than a failure of willpower.”

News had just come out that, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, two dozen women taking fen-phen—including six who were, like Barb, in their 30s—had developed cardiac conditions. A few had needed surgery, and on the operating table, doctors discovered that their heart valves were covered with a waxy plaque.

Americans had been prescribed regular fenfluramine since 1973, and the newer drug, dexfenfluramine, had been available in France since 1985. Experts took comfort in this history. Using language that is familiar from today’s assurances regarding semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs, they pointed out that millions were already on the medication. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything significant in toxicity to the drug that hasn’t been picked up with this kind of experience,” an FDA official named James Bilstad would later say in a Time cover story headlined “The Hot New Diet Pill.

“I know I can’t get any more,” she told Williams. “I have to use up what I have. And then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that. That’s the problem—and that is what scares me to death.” Telling people to lose weight the “natural way,” she told another guest, who was suggesting that people with obesity need only go on low-carb diets, is like “asking a person with a thyroid condition to just stop their medication.”

She’d gone off the fen-phen and had rapidly regained weight. “The voices returned and came back in a furor I’d never heard before,” Barb later wrote on her blog. “It was as if they were so angry at being silenced for so long, they were going to tell me 19 months’ worth of what they wanted me to hear. I was forced to listen. And I ate. And I ate. And ate.”

For Barb, rapid weight loss has brought on a different metaphysical confusion. When she looks in the mirror, she sometimes sees her shape as it was two years ago. In certain corners of the internet, this is known as “phantom fat syndrome,” but Barb dislikes that term. She thinks it should be called “body integration syndrome,” stemming from a disconnect between your “larger-body memory” and “smaller-body reality.

In 2003, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity “the terror within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction”; a few months later, Eric Finkelstein, an economist who studies the social costs of obesity, put out an influential paper finding that excess weight was associated with up to $79 billion in health-care spending in 1998, of which roughly half was paid by Medicare and Medicaid. (Later he’d conclude that the number had nearly doubled in a decade.

In 2004, Finkelstein attended an Action on Obesity summit hosted by the Mayo Clinic, at which numerous social interventions were proposed, including calorie labeling in workplace cafeterias and mandatory gym class for children of all grades.

he message at their core, that soda was a form of poison like tobacco, spread. In San Francisco and New York, public-service campaigns showed images of soda bottles pouring out a stream of glistening, blood-streaked fat. Michelle Obama led an effort to depict water—plain old water—as something “cool” to drink.

Soon, the federal government took up many of the ideas that Brownell had helped popularize. Barack Obama had promised while campaigning for president that if America’s obesity trends could be reversed, the Medicare system alone would save “a trillion dollars.” By fighting fat, he implied, his ambitious plan for health-care reform would pay for itself. Once he was in office, his administration pulled every policy lever it could.

Michelle Obama helped guide these efforts, working with marketing experts to develop ways of nudging kids toward better diets and pledging to eliminate “food deserts,” or neighborhoods that lacked convenient access to healthy, affordable food. She was relentless in her public messaging; she planted an organic garden at the White House and promoted her signature “Let’s Move!” campaign around the country.

An all-out war on soda would come to stand in for these broad efforts. Nutrition studies found that half of all Americans were drinking sugar-sweetened beverages every day, and that consumption of these accounted for one-third of the added sugar in adults’ diets. Studies turned up links between people’s soft-drink consumption and their risks for type 2 diabetes and obesity. A new strand of research hinted that “liquid calories” in particular were dangerous to health.

when their field lost faith in low-calorie diets as a source of lasting weight loss, the two friends went in opposite directions. Wadden looked for ways to fix a person’s chemistry, so he turned to pharmaceuticals. Brownell had come to see obesity as a product of our toxic food environment: He meant to fix the world to which a person’s chemistry responded, so he started getting into policy.

The social engineering worked. Slowly but surely, Americans’ lamented lifestyle began to shift. From 2001 to 2018, added-sugar intake dropped by about one-fifth among children, teens, and young adults. From the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the obesity rate among American children had roughly tripled; then, suddenly, it flattened out.

although the obesity rate among adults was still increasing, its climb seemed slower than before. Americans’ long-standing tendency to eat ever-bigger portions also seemed to be abating.

sugary drinks—liquid candy, pretty much—were always going to be a soft target for the nanny state. Fixing the food environment in deeper ways proved much harder. “The tobacco playbook pretty much only works for soda, because that’s the closest analogy we have as a food item,

that tobacco playbook doesn’t work to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, he said. It doesn’t work to increase consumption of beans. It doesn’t work to make people eat more nuts or seeds or extra-virgin olive oil.

Careful research in the past decade has shown that many of the Obama-era social fixes did little to alter behavior or improve our health. Putting calorie labels on menus seemed to prompt at most a small decline in the amount of food people ate. Employer-based wellness programs (which are still offered by 80 percent of large companies) were shown to have zero tangible effects. Health-care spending, in general, kept going up.

From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion of adults who said they’d experienced discrimination on account of their height or weight increased by two-thirds, going up to 12 percent. Puhl and others started citing evidence that this form of discrimination wasn’t merely a source of psychic harm, but also of obesity itself. Studies found that the experience of weight discrimination is associated with overeating, and with the risk of weight gain over time.

obesity rates resumed their ascent. Today, 20 percent of American children have obesity. For all the policy nudges and the sensible revisions to nutrition standards, food companies remain as unfettered as they were in the 1990s, Kelly Brownell told me. “Is there anything the industry can’t do now that it was doing then?” he asked. “The answer really is no. And so we have a very predictable set of outcomes.”

she started to rebound. The openings into her gastric pouch—the section of her stomach that wasn’t bypassed—stretched back to something like their former size. And Barb found ways to “eat around” the surgery, as doctors say, by taking food throughout the day in smaller portions

Bariatric surgeries can be highly effective for some people and nearly useless for others. Long-term studies have found that 30 percent of those who receive the same procedure Barb did regain at least one-quarter of what they lost within two years of reaching their weight nadir; more than half regain that much within five years.

if the effects of Barb’s surgery were quickly wearing off, its side effects were not: She now had iron, calcium, and B12 deficiencies resulting from the changes to her gut. She looked into getting a revision of the surgery—a redo, more or less—but insurance wouldn’t cover it

She found that every health concern she brought to doctors might be taken as a referendum, in some way, on her body size. “If I stubbed my toe or whatever, they’d just say ‘Lose weight.’ ” She began to notice all the times she’d be in a waiting room and find that every chair had arms. She realized that if she was having a surgical procedure, she’d need to buy herself a plus-size gown—or else submit to being covered with a bedsheet when the nurses realized that nothing else would fit.

Barb grew angrier and more direct about her needs—You’ll have to find me a different chair, she started saying to receptionists. Many others shared her rage. Activists had long decried the cruel treatment of people with obesity: The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had existed, for example, in one form or another, since 1969; the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination had been incorporated in 1991. But in the early 2000s, the ideas behind this movement began to wend their way deeper into academia, and they soon gained some purchase with the public.

“Our public-health efforts to address obesity have failed,” Eric Finkelstein, the economist, told me.

Others attacked the very premise of a “healthy weight”: People do not have any fundamental need, they argued, morally or medically, to strive for smaller bodies as an end in itself. They called for resistance to the ideology of anti-fatness, with its profit-making arms in health care and consumer goods. The Association for Size Diversity and Health formed in 2003; a year later, dozens of scholars working on weight-related topics joined together to create the academic field of fat studies.

As the size-diversity movement grew, its values were taken up—or co-opted—by Big Business. Dove had recently launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which included plus-size women. (Ad Age later named it the best ad campaign of the 21st century.) People started talking about “fat shaming” as something to avoid

By 2001, Bacon, who uses they/them pronouns, had received their Ph.D. and finished a rough draft of a book, Health at Every Size, which drew inspiration from a broader movement by that name among health-care practitioners

But something shifted in the ensuing years. In 2007, Bacon got a different response, and the book was published. Health at Every Size became a point of entry for a generation of young activists and, for a time, helped shape Americans’ understanding of obesity.

Some experts were rethinking their advice on food and diet. At UC Davis, a physiologist named Lindo Bacon who had struggled to overcome an eating disorder had been studying the effects of “intuitive eating,” which aims to promote healthy, sustainable behavior without fixating on what you weigh or how you look

The heightened sensitivity started showing up in survey data, too. In 2010, fewer than half of U.S. adults expressed support for giving people with obesity the same legal protections from discrimination offered to people with disabilities. In 2015, that rate had risen to three-quarters.

In Bacon’s view, the 2000s and 2010s were glory years. “People came together and they realized that they’re not alone, and they can start to be critical of the ideas that they’ve been taught,” Bacon told me. “We were on this marvelous path of gaining more credibility for the whole Health at Every Size movement, and more awareness.”

that sense of unity proved short-lived; the movement soon began to splinter. Black women have the highest rates of obesity, and disproportionately high rates of associated health conditions. Yet according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, Black patients with obesity get lower-quality care than white patients with obesity.

That system was exactly what Bacon and the Health at Every Size movement had set out to reform. The problem, as they saw it, was not so much that Black people lacked access to obesity medicine, but that, as Bacon and the Black sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in a 2020 article, Black women have been “specifically targeted” for weight loss, which Bacon and Strings saw as a form of racism

But members of the fat-acceptance movement pointed out that their own most visible leaders, including Bacon, were overwhelmingly white. “White female dietitians have helped steal and monetize the body positive movement,” Marquisele Mercedes, a Black activist and public-health Ph.D. student, wrote in September 2020. “And I’m sick of it.”

Tensions over who had the standing to speak, and on which topics, boiled over. In 2022, following allegations that Bacon had been exploitative and condescending toward Black colleagues, the Association for Size Diversity and Health expelled them from its ranks and barred them from attending its events.

As the movement succumbed to in-fighting, its momentum with the public stalled. If attitudes about fatness among the general public had changed during the 2000s and 2010s, it was only to a point. The idea that some people can indeed be “fit but fat,” though backed up by research, has always been a tough sell.

Although Americans had become less inclined to say they valued thinness, measures of their implicit attitudes seemed fairly stable. Outside of a few cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, new body-size-discrimination laws were never passed.

In the meantime, thinness was coming back into fashion

In the spring of 2022, Kim Kardashian—whose “curvy” physique has been a media and popular obsession—boasted about crash-dieting in advance of the Met Gala. A year later, the model and influencer Felicity Hayward warned Vogue Business that “plus-size representation has gone backwards.” In March of this year, the singer Lizzo, whose body pride has long been central to her public persona, told The New York Times that she’s been trying to lose weight. “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.

Among the many other dramatic effects of the GLP-1 drugs, they may well have released a store of pent-up social pressure to lose weight.

If ever there was a time to debate that impulse, and to question its origins and effects, it would be now. But Puhl told me that no one can even agree on which words are inoffensive. The medical field still uses obesity, as a description of a diagnosable disease. But many activists despise that phrase—some spell it with an asterisk in place of the e—and propose instead to reclaim fat.

Everyone seems to agree on the most important, central fact: that we should be doing everything we can to limit weight stigma. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the arguing.

Things feel surreal these days to just about anyone who has spent years thinking about obesity. At 71, after more than four decades in the field, Thomas Wadden now works part-time, seeing patients just a few days a week. But the arrival of the GLP-1 drugs has kept him hanging on for a few more years, he said. “It’s too much of an exciting period to leave obesity research right now.”

When everyone is on semaglutide or tirzepatide, will the soft-drink companies—Brownell’s nemeses for so many years—feel as if a burden has been lifted? “My guess is the food industry is probably really happy to see these drugs come along,” he said. They’ll find a way to reach the people who are taking GLP‑1s, with foods and beverages in smaller portions, maybe. At the same time, the pressures to cut back on where and how they sell their products will abate.

the triumph in obesity treatment only highlights the abiding mystery of why Americans are still getting fatter, even now

Perhaps one can lay the blame on “ultraprocessed” foods, he said. Maybe it’s a related problem with our microbiomes. Or it could be that obesity, once it takes hold within a population, tends to reproduce itself through interactions between a mother and a fetus. Others have pointed to increasing screen time, how much sleep we get, which chemicals are in the products that we use, and which pills we happen to take for our many other maladies.

“The GLP-1s are just a perfect example of how poorly we understand obesity,” Mozaffarian told me. “Any explanation of why they cause weight loss is all post-hoc hand-waving now, because we have no idea. We have no idea why they really work and people are losing weight.”

The new drugs—and the “new understanding of obesity” that they have supposedly occasioned—could end up changing people’s attitudes toward body size. But in what ways

When the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease in 2013, Rebecca Puhl told me, some thought “it might reduce stigma, because it was putting more emphasis on the uncontrollable factors that contribute to obesity.” Others guessed that it would do the opposite, because no one likes to be “diseased.”

why wasn’t there another kind of nagging voice that wouldn’t stop—a sense of worry over what the future holds? And if she wasn’t worried for herself, then what about for Meghann or for Tristan, who are barely in their 40s? Wouldn’t they be on these drugs for another 40 years, or even longer? But Barb said she wasn’t worried—not at all. “The technology is so much better now.” If any problems come up, the scientists will find solutions.

Dr. Longo, who is also a professor of gerontology and director of the U.S.C. Longevity Institute in California, has long advocated longer and better living through eating Lite Italian, one of a global explosion of Road to Perpetual Wellville theories about how to stay young in a field that is itself still in its adolescence.

In addition to identifying genes that regulate aging, he has created a plant and nut-based diet with supplements and kale crackers that mimics fasting to, he argues, allow cells to shed harmful baggage and rejuvenate, without the down side of actually starving.

He has patented and sold his ProLon diet kits; published best-selling books (“The Longevity Diet”); and been called an influential “Fasting Evangelist” by Time magazine.

Last month, he published a new study based on clinical trials of hundreds of older people — including in the Calabria town from which his family hails — that he said suggests that periodic cycles of his own faux-fasting approach could reduce biological age and stave off illnesses associated with aging.

“It’s very similar to the original Mediterranean diet, not the present one,” she said, pointing at photographs on the wall of a bowl of ancient legumes similar to the chickpe

“Almost nobody in Italy eats the Mediterranean diet,”

He added that many Italian children, especially in the country’s south, are obese, bloated on what he calls the poisonous five Ps — pizza, pasta, protein, potatoes and pane (or bread).

in recent years, Silicon Valley billionaires who hope to be forever young have funded secretive labs. Wellness articles have conquered newspaper home pages and Fountains-of-Youth workout and diet ads featuring insanely fit middle-aged people teem on the social media feeds of not insanely fit middle-aged people.

he said Italy’s lack of investment in research was a disgrace.

even as concepts like longevity, intermittent fasting and biological age — you’re only as old as your cells feel! — have gained momentum, governments like Italy’s are fretting over a creakier future in which booming populations of old people drain resources from the dwindling young.

many scientists, nutritionists and longevity fanatics the world over continue to stare longingly toward Italy, seeking in its deep pockets of centenarians a secret ingredient to long life.

“Probably they kept breeding between cousins and relatives,” Dr. Longo offered, referring to the sometimes close relations in little Italian hill towns. “At some point, we suspect it sort of generated the super-longevity genome.”

The genetic drawbacks of incest, he hypothesized, slowly vanished because those mutations either killed their carriers before they could reproduce or because the town noticed a monstrous ailment — like early onset Alzheimer’s — in a particular family line and steered clear.

Dr. Longo wonders whether Italy’s centenarians had been protected from later disease by a starvation period and old-fashioned Mediterranean diet early in life, during rural Italy’s abject war-era poverty. Then a boost of proteins and fats and modern medicine after Italy’s postwar economic miracle protected them from frailty as they got older and kept them alive.

At age 16, he moved to Chicago to live with relatives and couldn’t help notice that his middle-aged aunts and uncles fed on the “Chicago diet” of sausages and sugary drinks suffered diabetes and cardiovascular disease that their relatives back in Calabria did not.

He eventually earned his Ph.D in biochemistry at U.C.L.A. and did his postdoctoral training in the neurobiology of aging at U.S.C. He overcame early skepticism about the field to publish in top journals and became a zealous evangelizer for the age-reversing effects of his diet. About 10 years ago, eager to be closer to his aging parents in Genoa, he took a second job at the IFOM oncology institute in Milan.

He found a fount of inspiration in the pescatarian-heavy diet around Genoa and all the legumes down in Calabria.

he also found the modern Italian diet — the cured meats, layers of lasagna and fried vegetables the world hungered for — horrendous and a source of disease.

His private foundation, also based in Milan, tailors diets for cancer patients, but also consults for Italian companies and schools, promoting a Mediterranean diet that is actually foreign to most Italians today.

“Italy’s got such incredible history and a wealth of information about aging,” he said. “But spends virtually nothing.”

He talked about how he and others had identified an important regulator of aging in yeast, and how he has investigated whether the same pathway was at work in all organisms.

Dr. Longo said he thinks of his mission as extending youth and health, not simply putting more years on the clock, a goal he said could lead to a “scary world,” in which only the rich could afford to live for centuries, potentially forcing caps on having children

A more likely short-term scenario, he said, was division between two populations. The first would live as we do now and reach about 80 or longer through medical advancements. But Italians would be saddled with long — and, given the drop in the birthrate, potentially lonely — years burdened by horrible diseases.

The other population would follow fasting diets and scientific breakthroughs and live to 100 and perhaps 110 in relative good health.

With consumers buying so little, at least relative to the Chinese economy’s productive capacity, how can the nation generate enough demand to keep that capacity in use? The main answer, as Michael Pettis points out, has been to promote extremely high rates of investment, more than 40 percent of G.D.P. The trouble is that it’s hard to invest that much money without running into severely diminishing returns.

financial repression — paying low interest on savings and making cheap loans to favored borrowers — that holds down household income and diverts it to government-controlled investment, a weak social safety net that causes families to accumulate savings to deal with possible emergencies, and more.

Part of the answer is bad leadership. President Xi Jinping is starting to look like a poor economic manager, whose propensity for arbitrary interventions — which is something autocrats tend to do — has stifled private initiative.

But China’s working-age population peaked around 2010 and has been declining ever since. While China has shown impressive technological capacity in some areas, its overall productivity also appears to be stagnating.

very high rates of investment may be sustainable if, like China in the early 2000s, you have a rapidly growing work force and high productivity growth as you catch up with Western economies

This, in short, isn’t a nation that can productively invest 40 percent of G.D.P. Something has to give.

the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble. In fact, China’s real estate sector became insanely large by international standards.

what China must do seems straightforward: end financial repression and allow more of the economy’s income to flow through to households, and strengthen the social safety net so that consumers don’t feel the need to hoard cash. And as it does this it can ramp down its unsustainable investment spending.

But there are powerful players, especially state-owned enterprises, that benefit from financial repression

And when it comes to strengthening the safety net, the leader of this supposedly communist regime sounds a bit like the governor of Mississippi, denouncing “welfarism” that creates “lazy people.”

Japan ended up managing its downshifting well. It avoided mass unemployment, it never lost social and political cohesion, and real G.D.P. per working-age adult actually rose 50 percent over the next three decades, not far short of growth in the United States.

My great concern is that China may not respond nearly as well. How cohesive will China be in the face of economic trouble? Will it try to prop up its economy with an export surge that will run headlong into Western efforts to promote green technologies? Scariest of all, will it try to distract from domestic difficulties by engaging in military adventurism?

17 percent of G.D.P.

there is now one administrator or manager for every 4.7 employees, doing things like designing anti-harassment trainings, writing corporate mission statements, collecting data and managing “systems.”

This situation is especially grave in higher education. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology now has almost eight times as many nonfaculty employees as faculty employees

The general job of administrators, who are invariably good and well-meaning people, is to supervise and control, and they gain power and job security by hiring more people to work for them to create more supervision and control

Their power is similar to what Annie Lowrey of The Atlantic has called the “time tax.” If you’ve ever fought a health care, corporate or university bureaucracy, you quickly realize you don’t have the time for it, so you give up

As Philip K. Howard has been arguing for years, good organizations give people discretion to do what is right. But the trend in public and private sector organizations has been to write rules that rob people of the power of discretion

kids’ activities, from travel sports to recess, are supervised, and rules dominate. Parents are afraid their kids might be harmed, but as Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have argued, by being overprotective, parents make their kids more fragile and more vulnerable to harm.

High school students design their lives to fit the metrics that college admissions officers require. And what traits are selective schools looking for? They’re looking for students who are willing to conform to the formulas the gatekeepers devise.

t Stanford is apparently now tamed. I invite you to read Ginevra Davis’s essay “Stanford’s War on Social Life” in Palladium, which won a vaunted Sidney Award in 2022 and details how university administrators cracked down on student initiatives to make everything boring, supervised and safe.

Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia. The annual self-evaluations he had to submit used to be one page. Now he has to fill out about 15 electronic pages of bureaucratese that include demonstrating how his work advances D.E.I., to make sure his every waking moment conforms to the reigning ideology.

the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives

The result is the soft despotism that Tocqueville warned us about centuries ago, a power that “is absolute, minute, regular, provident and mild.”

this kind of power is now centerless. Presidents and executives don’t run companies, universities or nations. Power is now held by everyone who issues work surveys and annual reports, the people who create H.R. trainings and collect data

Trumpian populism is about many things, but one of them is this: working-class people rebelling against administrators. It is about people who want to lead lives of freedom, creativity and vitality, who find themselves working at jobs, sending their kids to schools and visiting hospitals, where they confront “an immense and tutelary power” (Tocqueville’s words) that is out to diminish them.

ver since, Luddite has been a derogatory word—shorthand for one who blindly hates or doesn’t understand technology.

Now, with nearly half of Americans worried about how AI will affect jobs, Luddism has blossomed. The new Luddites—a growing contingent of workers, critics, academics, organizers, and writers—say that too much power has been concentrated in the hands of the tech titans, that tech is too often used to help corporations slash pay and squeeze workers, and that certain technologies must not merely be criticized but resisted outright.

what I’ve seen over the past 10 years—the rise of gig-app companies that have left workers precarious and even impoverished; the punishing, gamified productivity regimes put in place by giants such as Amazon; the conquering of public life by private tech platforms and the explosion of screen addiction; and the new epidemic of AI plagiarism—has left me sympathizing with tech’s discontents.

I consider myself a Luddite not because I want to halt progress or reject technology itself. But I believe, as the original Luddites argued in a particularly influential letter threatening the industrialists, that we must consider whether a technology is “hurtful to commonality”—whether it causes many to suffer for the benefit of a few—and oppose it when necessary.

“It’s not a primitivism: We don’t reject all technology, but we reject the technology that is foisted on us,” Jathan Sadowski, a social scientist at Monash University, in Australia, told me. He’s a co-host, with the journalist Ed Ongweso Jr., of This Machine Kills, an explicitly pro-Luddite podcast.

The science-fiction author Cory Doctorow has declared all of sci-fi a Luddite literature, writing that “Luddism and science fiction concern themselves with the same questions: not merely what the technology does, but who it does it for and who it does it to.

The New York Times has profiled a hip cadre of self-proclaimed “‘Luddite’ teens.” As the headline explained, they “don’t want your likes.”

By drawing a red line against letting studios control AI, the WGA essentially waged the first proxy battle between human workers and AI. It drew attention to the fight, resonated with the public, and, after a 148-day strike, helped the guild attain a contract that banned studios from dictating the use of AI.

“I could not have done it sooner,” he says. “I don’t think anybody could have done it sooner. Because I was the first one.” 

By the late 1960s, he was managing TI’s integrated-circuit division. Before long, he was running the entire semiconductor group. 

He transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, earned his master’s degree and would have stayed for his Ph.D. if he hadn’t failed the qualifying exam. Instead, he got his first job in semiconductors and moved to Texas Instruments in 1958

he came along as the integrated circuit was being invented, and his timing couldn’t have been any better, as Chang belonged to the first generation of semiconductor geeks. He developed a reputation as a tenacious manager who could wring every possible improvement out of production lines, which put his career on the fast track.

Chang grew up dreaming of being a writer—a novelist, maybe a journalist—and he planned to major in English literature at Harvard University. But after his freshman year, he decided that what he actually wanted was a good job

“They talk about life-work balance,” he says. “That’s a term I didn’t even know when I was their age. Work-life balance. When I was their age, if there was no work, there was no life.” 

These days, TSMC is investing $40 billion to build plants in Arizona, but the project has been stymied by delays, setbacks and labor shortages, and Chang told me that some of TSMC’s young employees in the U.S. have attitudes toward work that he struggles to understand. 

Chang says he wouldn’t have taken the risk of moving to Taiwan if he weren’t financially secure. In fact, he didn’t take that same risk the first time he could have.

“The closer the industry match,” they wrote, “the greater the success rate.” 

By then, Chang knew that he wasn’t long for Texas Instruments. But his stock options hadn’t vested, so he turned down the invitation to Taiwan. “I was not financially secure yet,” he says. “I was never after great wealth. I was only after financial security.” For this corporate executive in the middle of the 1980s, financial security equated to $200,000 a year. “After tax, of course,” he says. 

Chang’s situation had changed by the time Li called again three years later. He’d exercised a few million dollars of stock options and bought tax-exempt municipal bonds that paid enough for him to be financially secure by his living standards. Once he’d achieved that goal, he was ready to pursue another one. 

“There was no certainty at all that Taiwan would give me the chance to build a great semiconductor company, but the possibility existed, and it was the only possibility for me,” Chang says. “That’s why I went to Taiwan.” 

Not long ago, a team of economists investigated whether older entrepreneurs are more successful than younger ones. By scrutinizing Census Bureau records and freshly available Internal Revenue Service data, they were able to identify 2.7 million founders in the U.S. who started companies between 2007 and 2014. Then they looked at their ages.

The average age of those entrepreneurs at the founding of their companies was 41.9. For the fastest-growing companies, that number was 45. The economists also determined that 50-year-old founders were almost twice as likely to achieve major success as 30-year-old founders, while the founders with the lowest chance of success were the ones in their early 20s

“Successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young,” they wrote in their 2020 paper.  

Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists throw money at talented young entrepreneurs in the hopes they will start the next trillion-dollar company. They have plentiful energy, insatiable ambition and the vision to peek around corners and see the future. What they don’t typically have are mortgages, family obligations and other adult responsibilities to distract them or diminish their appetite for risk. Chang himself says that younger people are more innovative when it comes to science and technical subjects. 

But in business, older is better. Entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s may not have the exuberance to believe they will change the world, but they have the experience to know how they actually can. Some need years of specialized training before they can start a company. In biotechnology, for example, founders are more likely to be college professors than college dropouts. Others require the lessons and connections they accumulate over the course of their careers. 

one more finding from their study of U.S. companies that helps explain the success of a chip maker in Taiwan. It was that prior employment in the area of their startups—both the general sector and specific industry—predicted “a vastly higher probability” of success.

Chang was such a workaholic that he made sales calls on his honeymoon and had no patience for those who didn’t share his drive

Morris Chang had 30 years of experience in his industry when he decided to uproot his life and move to another continent. He knew more about semiconductors than just about anyone on earth—and certainly more than anyone in Taiwan. As soon as he started his job at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Chang was summoned to K.T. Li’s office and given a second job. “He felt I should start a semiconductor company in Taiwan,”

“I decided right away that this could not be the kind of great company that I wanted to build at either Texas Instruments or General Instrument,”

TI handled every part of chip production, but what worked in Texas would not translate to Taiwan. The only way that he could build a great company in his new home was to make a new sort of company altogether, one with a business model that would exploit the country’s strengths and mitigate its many weaknesses.

Chang determined that Taiwan had precisely one strength in the chip supply chain. The research firm that he was now running had been experimenting with semiconductors for the previous 10 years. When he studied that decade of data, Chang was pleasantly surprised by Taiwan’s yields, the percentage of working chips on silicon wafers. They were almost twice as high in Taiwan as they were in the U.S., he said. 

“People were ingrained in thinking the secret sauce of a successful semiconductor company was in the wafer fab,” Campbell told me. “The transition to the fabless semiconductor model was actually pretty obvious when you thought about it. But it was so against the prevailing wisdom that many people didn’t think about it.” 

Taiwan’s government took a 48% stake, with the rest of the funding coming from the Dutch electronics giant Philips and Taiwan’s private sector, but Chang was the driving force behind the company. The insight to build TSMC around such an unconventional business model was born from his experience, contacts and expertise. He understood his industry deeply enough to disrupt it. 

“TSMC was a business-model innovation,” Chang says. “For innovations of that kind, I think people of a more advanced age are perhaps even more capable than people of a younger age.”

the personal philosophy that he’d developed over the course of his long career. “To be a partner to our customers,” he says. That founding principle from 1987 is the bedrock of the foundry business to this day, as TSMC says the key to its success has always been enabling the success of its customers.  

TSMC manufactures chips in iPhones, iPads and Mac computers for Apple, which manufactures a quarter of TSMC’s net revenue. Nvidia is often called a chip maker, which is curious, because it doesn’t make chips. TSMC does. 

Churning out identical copies of a single chip for an iPhone requires one TSMC fab to produce more than a quintillion transistors—that is, one million trillions—every few months. In a year, the entire semiconductor industry produces “more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history,” Miller writes. 

I asked how he thought about success when he moved to Taiwan. “The highest degree of success in 1985, according to me, was to build a great company. A lower degree of success was at least to do something that I liked to do and I wanted to do,” he says. “I happened to achieve the highest degree of success that I had in mind.” 

Documenta was a very big moment for artists on this issue. Everyone started getting very afraid. What we’ve been experiencing is a gap between the cultural establishment and the political structures that fund the culture scene.

I have a lot of Palestinian friends. A lot of Israeli friends. A lot of

friends with an immigrant background. My whole community was just paralyzed by fear and hopelessness and this feeling of being humiliated, denigrated, dehumanized.

I have lost my faith in German media. I never had faith in German politics, but now I really have no hope for German politics. Honestly, I think what I still feel connected to are the people who tell me privately: “I agree with you, but if I say it, I lose my job.”

it is clear that its widespread adoption is a matter of when, not if. There is no debate that we are moving towards a world where “real life” and digital technology seamlessly blur

Over the years there have been multiple reports of people being harassed and even “raped” in the metaverse: an experience that feels scarily real because of how immersive virtual reality is. As the lines between real life and the digital world blur to a point that they are almost indistinguishable, will there be a meaningful difference between online assault and an attack in real life?

more broadly, spatial computing is going to alter what we consider reality

Researchers from Stanford and Michigan University recently undertook a study on the Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets (that’s the technical term for the feature which brings VR content into your real-world surrounding so you see what’s around you while using the device) and emerged with some stark warnings about how this tech might rewire our brains and “interfere with social connection”.

These headsets essentially give us all our private worlds and rewrite the idea of a shared reality. The cameras through which you see the world can edit your environment – you can walk to the shops wearing it, for example, and it might delete all the homeless people from your view and make the sky brighter.

“What we’re about to experience is, using these headsets in public, common ground disappears,”

“People will be in the same physical place, experiencing simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We’re going to lose common ground.”

It’s not just the fact that our perception of reality might be altered that’s scary: it’s the fact that a small number of companies will have so much control over how we see the world. Think about how much influence big tech already has when it comes to content we see, and then multiply that a million times over. You think deepfakes are scary? Wait until they seem even more realistic.

We’re seeing a global rise of authoritarianism. If we’re not careful this sort of technology is going to massively accelerate it.

Being able to suck people into an alternate universe, numb them with entertainment, and dictate how they see reality? That’s an authoritarian’s dream. We’re entering an age where people can be mollified and manipulated like never before

Henry Highland Garnet — the first African-American to speak in Congress after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment — even apologized for speaking of various different races, “when in fact there is but one race, as there was but one Adam.”

Fast forward to 2015, when the University of California called the phrase “There is only one race, the human race” a “micro-aggression”; or 2020, when the phrase “All Lives Matter” was deemed evidence of “anti-blackness”

The 21st Century, the brief era of color-blindness behind us, reached back to the 19th to insist that race defines us at our core, can never be overcome, and marks us all either an oppressor or a victim.

Hughes cuts to the chase and calls these reactionaries in progressive clothing “neoracists”. They are. What else would one call them?

They are race-obsessed. They view any human interaction as a racial power-struggle, and compound it with any number of further “intersectional” power-struggles

They see group identity as determinative everywhere; and therefore want to intervene everywhere, to discriminate against whites and successful non-whites in favor of unsuccessful non-whites

Individual rights? They come second to group identity.

The old black-white paradigm to which so many are still attached has been superseded by the kaleidoscope society, in which “race” is almost always mixed, complicated, or one difference among many.

Political power? Blacks, who are about 14 percent of population, are represented proportionally in the House — covering 29 states — and can claim the last two-term president, the current vice president, the House minority leader, the secretary of defense, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the mayors of the four most populous cities last year, and more than a fifth of SCOTUS.

So do we do nothing? Not at all. In fact, blaming an abstraction — “white supremacy” — takes us backwards practically and analytically. Hughes advocates for color-blind processes wherever possible: blind grading in schools and colleges; or hiring policies that remove names from applications to deter racism.

the implosion of bad ideas is not the same as the resuscitation of good ones. What Hughes has done in this book is remind us what we already knew: that racism and neoracism are two sides of the same collectivist coin, and that treating everyone regardless of race is the only feasible way forward for a multiracial America, just as it is the only morally defensible regime that can actually counter and erode racial hatred. The proof is in our past progress. But the potential for multi-racial individualism is as unknowable as it is exhilarating.

Trump and Leo, a prominent conservative lawyer influential in his first term, have not spoken since 2020, according to people familiar with the matter. Their relationship ended over a heated fight in 2020 at Mar-a-Lago, where Trump accused Leo of picking Rod J. Rosenstein to be deputy attorney general, a person familiar with the matter said. Trump’s anger around Rosenstein centered on his decision to appoint special counsel Robert S. Mueller III to oversee the Justice Department’s probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election

Trump has signaled that he wants the Justice Department to go after his political opponents, and his associates have drafted plans to invoke the Insurrection Act on his first day in office, which would allow him to send the military against civil demonstrations. Near the end of his time in the White House, he repeatedly complained that his White House Counsel’s Office wasn’t doing enough to help him overturn the election results. His attorney general resigned after he would not back up his claims.

“He’s the leading candidate, so I don’t know that it matters what I think,” said Brent O. Hatch, a lawyer who is on the board of the Federalist Society.

Although Trump reshaped the Supreme Court while in office, leading to the overturning of Roe, he has sometimes told others that the decision is a political albatross for Republicans. And he has complained recently at rallies about the Supreme Court and the decisions the judges make, saying without evidence they rule too often against Republicans to show “independence.”

Trump is running on a campaign focused, at least in part, on vengeance and retribution. The former president has made it clear that loyalty would be a key criteria in how he makes decisions if returned to office.

Most members of the Federalist Society board of directors declined to comment on the record or did not respond to a request for comment. Interviews with a dozen other prominent lawyers suggested most had serious misgivings about Trump returning to power but were resigned to the high likelihood he will be the nominee, and many expressed openness to working for another Trump administration.

There is a heated debate underway in conservative legal circles about how GOP lawyers should interact with what increasingly appears to be the likely nominee, according to conservative lawyers who described the private talks on the condition of anonymity. The discussions include whether they would return to work for Trump.

One prominent lawyer described a November dinner he attended where almost all the attorneys in the room said they would prefer another nominee — but were split on whether to back Trump if he wins

Leo, McConnell and McGahn have expressed reservations about what another Trump term would look like, though they have largely stayed away from a public fight.

Some of the informal conversations and debates underway in conservative legal circles about a second Trump term include Project 2025, a coalition of right-wing groups that has outlined plans for the next Republican administration. Clark, who is working on the Insurrection Act for Project 2025, has been charged with violating Georgia’s anti-racketeering law, in the case alleging Trump and co-conspirators of interfering in the 2020 election. Clark pleaded guilty.

The involvement of Clark with that effort has alarmed some other conservative lawyers who view him as a potentially disastrous choice to take a senior leadership role at the department because of his past activities around the 2020 election.

Rob Kelner, a prominent conservative lawyer, said more conservative lawyers should have spoken up against Trump, but that it would cost them business and relationships.

“There were so many positions he took and so many statements that he made that flatly contradicted the foundational principles of the conservative movement and the Federalist Society, and yet it was so rare to hear conservative lawyers speak out against Trump,” Kelner said.

The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.

AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”

AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.

Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.

n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.

One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.

erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.

“There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).

A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.

Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”

Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”

Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”

One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)

AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.

Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.

With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”

His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”

Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.

Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.

Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”

Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”

A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.

Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.

Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.

ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load

We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”

Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits

But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.

n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.

Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.

ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”

a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources.

Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible

What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.

As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism

Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted

As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period

The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”

The essay — with its declaration that “the story of the human race is war” and its dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities” — is filled with right-wing pathos and holds out little hope that mankind might possess the wisdom to outrun the reaper. This fatalistic assessment was shared by many, including those well to Churchill’s left.

“Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”

The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.”

F.C.S. Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, summarized the general intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s aptly: “Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They are afraid we are getting to know too much and are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide.”

Many of the same fears that keep A.I. engineers up at night — calibrating thinking machines to human values, concern that our growing reliance on technology might sap human ingenuity and even trepidation about a robot takeover — made their debut in the early 20th century.

The popular detective novelist R. Austin Freeman’s 1921 political treatise, “Social Decay and Regeneration,” warned that our reliance on new technologies was driving our species toward degradation and even annihilation

Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change

There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions

It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years

We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires

That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.

As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.”

A glimmer of hope for Biden emerged toward the end of the survey: “If Donald Trump is found guilty and convicted this year of a felony — with Donald Trump as the Republican candidate and Joe Biden as the Democratic candidate — for whom would you vote?”In this hypothetical circumstance, Biden pulls ahead of Trump, 45-43.

when asked, “How willing would you be to vote for Donald Trump if he is convicted of a crime?” 53 percent of registered voters surveyed said they would be “unwilling” to do so; 46 percent said “very unwilling”; and 7 percent said “somewhat unwilling.”

Bloomberg-Morning Consult asked respondents whether they would be unwilling to vote for Trump if he were “sentenced to prison”: 55 percent said unwilling, 48 percent very unwilling and 7 percent said somewhat unwilling.

YouGov found that 45 percent of respondents were either unaware of or uncertain that Trump had “been charged with falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, a porn star” and that Trump “had been found liable for sexually assaulting and defaming writer E. Jean Carroll.”

The most recent NBC News poll, conducted at the end of January, has Trump favored over Biden by a substantial 47 percent to 42 percent.

In the RealClearPolitics compilation of polls that add Robert Kennedy Jr., Cornel West and Jill Stein to the mix, Trump’s lead over Biden more than doubles, to 4.8 points, 41.6 to 36.8 percent. Kennedy gets 13 percent, and West and Stein each get 2.1 percent.

Along with the threat posed by third-party candidates, two major crises — immigration and the Israeli assault on Hamas in Gaza — have become significant liabilities for the Biden campaign.

The Dec. 10-14 New York Times/Siena poll found that young voters, aged 18 to 29, favored Trump over Biden 49-43. These voters said they trusted Trump over Biden “to do a better job on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict” 49-30. In the 2020 election, Biden beat Trump among 18-to-29-year-old voters by 24 points, 60-36, according to exit polls, by far his biggest margin in all age groups.

“To win in 2024, Biden will need to convince voters that he is still the proud moderate they voted for in 2020,” Cowan wrote by email. “He has a lot of evidence on his side, but he still has a lot of convincing to do.”

Biden’s showing “middle- and working-class voters that he understands their values and takes seriously their concerns around crime, immigration and the economy — which, as polling makes clear, are often dramatically different and far more mainstream and centrist than those of college-educated elites who staff much of Washington — is the only way to win.”

While bitterly criticized by many liberals, the Supreme Court decision last year to ban affirmative action in public and private colleges will in fact reduce the salience of an issue that has historically worked to build support for Republicans.

In his 2007 history of the movement, Radicals for Capitalism, Brian Doherty identifies five key figures who most shaped the nascent ideology and its organized advocacy: author Ayn Rand, and economists Ludwig von Mises, F. A. Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Murray Rothbard

With one exception, all paired radical free-market and smaller government views with liberal tolerance and cosmopolitanism on social issues. None were religious, and Rand and Mises were both avowedly irreligious. Friedman and Hayek both trended more moderate and pragmatic, and also achieved the highest degree of mainstream intellectual recognitio

It was in Rothbard that the divergence began which today has culminated in the Libertarian Party’s convention transforming into a literal Trump rally

He was in many ways the most radical—an avowed anarchist—and the most marginal

he was also the most involved in creating a self-consciously libertarian movement and many of its institutions. In this he was aided by his skills as a prolific polemicist.

From the start, Trump’s brand of illiberal populism had more than a passing resemblance to Rothbard’s paleo strategy—minus, as many classical liberal critics had long predicted, any meaningful moves to actually shrink government

By accommodating and embracing conservative culture warriors, even including avowed white supremacists, Rothbard believed he was forming the basis of a political coalition to demolish modern big government

it included an open embrace of police brutality, fuming about the need to “dispense instant punishment” to “bums,” while railing against efforts to undo America’s white supremacist past. Later, opposition to immigration became one of the paleo posture’s signature issues.

Across the loose constellation of libertarian think tanks, advocacy organizations, and electoral efforts in both the L.P. and the GOP, the embrace or rejection of Rothbard’s “paleo” idea was a source of perennial tension. Rothbard himself was involved for a time in both the Libertarian Party and the Cato Institute, co-founding the latter before being acrimoniously ejected after a few years.

the other end of the movement came to embrace the view of libertarianism as fundamentally an extension of the larger liberal tradition, continuous with a classical liberal political philosophy rather than a socially conservative one.

Free markets and limited government were still a big part of the picture, but in service to a vision of a dynamic and pluralistic free society.

As much as each held a dim view of the other, both continued to work under the “libertarian” label.

As he outlined in a 1992 essay, “Right Wing Populism: A Strategy for the Paleo Movement,” paleolibertarianism was an explicit alliance between small-government radicalism and the extremist far-right.

it still embodied the burn-it-all-down reactionary ethos that saw tearing down established institutions as a necessary first step, even if that required an unrestrained autocrat

After the deadly 2017 neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, the then party leadership denounced the “blood and soil” rhetoric. But to the Rothbardians, this smacked of unacceptable wokeness. Within a few days, the Mises Caucus—named more for the ideas exhibited by the think-tank than the actual economist—was founded. Over the next few years, this group began launching hostile takeovers of state parties and then the national party. As they did so, the party increasingly adopted rhetoric that sounded more like the tiki-torch brigade than one committed to individual liberty.

The two camps within the movement—the cosmopolitan and the paleo—already strained to nearly the breaking point, went through the inevitable rupture. A number of differences and disagreements fueled the split, but most central was the divide into MAGA-friendly and anti-Trump sympathies.

It is no longer possible to ignore the conflict of visions about what kind of society freedom was supposed to yield. One in which private bigotry and established hierarchies were allowed free rein? Or an open and all-embracing one where different people and lifestyles disapproved by the traditional order could flourish?

The only way the libertarian movement’s demise could bring down libertarianism as a political-philosophical framework is if one expected the ideas themselves to disappear. Happily, a robust conviction of the centrality of individual liberty—or of the need to fight a tyrannical state—is in no danger of fully fading away.

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. 

They also claim that OpenAI has used hardball tactics to prevent workers from voicing their concerns about the technology, including restrictive nondisparagement agreements that departing employees were asked to sign.

“OpenAI is really excited about building A.G.I., and they are recklessly racing to be the first there,” said Daniel Kokotajlo, a former researcher in OpenAI’s governance division and one of the group’s organizers.

Other members include William Saunders, a research engineer who left OpenAI in February, and three other former OpenAI employees: Carroll Wainwright, Jacob Hilton and Daniel Ziegler. Several current OpenAI employees endorsed the letter anonymously because they feared retaliation from the company,

At OpenAI, Mr. Kokotajlo saw that even though the company had safety protocols in place — including a joint effort with Microsoft known as the “deployment safety board,” which was supposed to review new models for major risks before they were publicly released — they rarely seemed to slow anything down.

So was the departure of Dr. Leike, who along with Dr. Sutskever had led OpenAI’s “superalignment” team, which focused on managing the risks of powerful A.I. models. In a series of public posts announcing his departure, Dr. Leike said he believed that “safety culture and processes have taken a back seat to shiny products.”

“When I signed up for OpenAI, I did not sign up for this attitude of ‘Let’s put things out into the world and see what happens and fix them afterward,’” Mr. Saunders said.

Mr. Kokotajlo, 31, joined OpenAI in 2022 as a governance researcher and was asked to forecast A.I. progress. He was not, to put it mildly, optimistic.In his previous job at an A.I. safety organization, he predicted that A.G.I. might arrive in 2050. But after seeing how quickly A.I. was improving, he shortened his timelines. Now he believes there is a 50 percent chance that A.G.I. will arrive by 2027 — in just three years.

He also believes that the probability that advanced A.I. will destroy or catastrophically harm humanity — a grim statistic often shortened to “p(doom)” in A.I. circles — is 70 percent.

Last month, two senior A.I. researchers — Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike — left OpenAI under a cloud. Dr. Sutskever, who had been on OpenAI’s board and voted to fire Mr. Altman, had raised alarms about the potential risks of powerful A.I. systems. His departure was seen by some safety-minded employees as a setback.

Mr. Kokotajlo said, he became so worried that, last year, he told Mr. Altman that the company should “pivot to safety” and spend more time and resources guarding against A.I.’s risks rather than charging ahead to improve its models. He said that Mr. Altman had claimed to agree with him, but that nothing much changed.

In April, he quit. In an email to his team, he said he was leaving because he had “lost confidence that OpenAI will behave responsibly" as its systems approach human-level intelligence.