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Overall, 55 percent of Hispanic teenagers and 54 percent of Black teenagers say they are online almost constantly, compared with 38 percent of white teenagers;

Black and Hispanic kids ages 8 to 12, another study found, also use social media more than their white counterparts.

we also have to ask,” she went on, “why they are so drawn to social media? Is it the messages on social media that’s exacerbating the depression and anxiety, or was the depression and anxiety already there to begin with and social media is a way to self-medicate?”

“It’s culturally more acceptable in youth of color households to use technology for social and academic reasons compared with white households,” Charmaraman said. “Parents don’t worry as much about it. There isn’t as much shame around it.”

WhatsApp, hugely popular in Latin America, is used by Hispanic teenagers more than by other demographic groups of the same ages.

Largely because of lower income levels, Black and Hispanic teenagers are less likely to have broadband access or computers at home. This makes them disproportionately use their smartphones, where social media apps ping, whiz and notify

Lucia Magis-Weinberg, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Washington who studies teenagers and tech, compares internet use of the phone to snorkeling, whereas computers allow more of a scuba dive.

“We know broadly that youth of minoritized communities have longer commutes, fewer opportunities to do after-school activities, fewer resources,” Magis-Weinberg told me. They may not have spaces to hang out safely with friends nearby; social media is a more accessible option. “But we have to ask,” Magis-Weinberg added, “what is social media use displacing?”

The answer, according to experts, includes sports participation, in-person socializing, after-school clubs and activities, exploring the outdoors, reading and more.

Let’s consider just reading, which also happens to be correlated with both mental well-being and school achievement

According to Scholastic’s most recent Kids and Family Reading Report, the percentage of kids ages 6 to 17 who read frequently for pleasure dropped to 28 percent in 2022 from 37 percent in 2010.

Those numbers fall precipitously as kids get older; 46 percent of 6- to 8-year-olds read frequently in 2022 compared with only 18 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds.

All this raises the possibility that disparities in internet use could in turn intensify overall declines and existing differences in reading across racial groups among adults.

The average daily time spent reading per capita by ethnicity in 2022 was 0.29 hours for white adults, 0.12 for Black adults and 0.10 for Hispanics.

In other words, one danger is that social media not only reflects real-world disparities, it could also exacerbate them.

Greater use of social media by Black and Hispanic young people “can help perpetuate inequality in society because higher levels of social media use among kids have been demonstrably linked to adverse effects such as depression and anxiety, inadequate sleep, eating disorders, poor self-esteem and greater exposure to online harassment,”

Akeem Marsh, medical director of the Home of Integrated Behavioral Health at the New York Foundling, a social services agency, said that among the hundreds of largely Black and Hispanic kids he sees from communities with fewer resources, social media use is often a primary concern or it comes up in treatment. Kids who use it frequently often respond with traumatized feelings and repeated anxiety.

“The way social media use presents itself is as something that is actively harmful,” Marsh told me. Already kids from these communities have few advantages, he explained. They may not have access to after-school programs. They’re often in single-parent households. They lack support systems. “I think in the long term,” he said, “we’re going to see real differences in the impact.”

We need greater awareness of the disparities as well, and most likely, immediate action. What we do not need is another “sudden” yet regrettably delayed realization that something has gone very, very wrong with America’s kids, but we were too busy looking the other way.

Indians make up the largest group by far, accounting for 40 percent of all international students across the country, according to the Canada Bureau for International Education. China ranks second, at 12 percent.

At Northern College, there were 40 international students in 2014 — now it has 6,140. Enrollment got a further boost after Northern, like other remote public colleges, opened a campus by partnering with a private college in a Toronto suburb in 2015. Today, about one-third of Northern’s foreign students are in Timmins and at three other smaller northern campuses, while the rest are on the Toronto campus.

Maninderjit Kaur said she would probably not have gone to Timmins if the education consultant in India — who arranged her enrollment at Northern — had told her the school’s exact location.

She recalled landing at the airport in Toronto in 2018, and then hopping into an Uber, believing that Northern College was nearby. The eight-hour ride cost 800 Canadian dollars.

Now, Ms. Kaur works in marketing at the college and owns a gas station in town with her fiancé, Karanveer Singh, 28, who also came from India to study at Northern.

Dr. Penner, the college’s president, believed she held an ace: Graduates of Northern and other public colleges may apply for a post-graduation work permit that could lead to permanent residence and citizenship.

Early childhood education is a popular major among international students because of the high demand for related jobs in the region, said Erin Holmes, who oversees the program at Northern. Dozens of international students are immediately hired after graduating, allowing them to apply for permanent residence, Ms. Holmes said.

Across Canada, the influx of foreign students has been so great that it is blamed for worsening housing shortages. The Canadian government has recently taken measures to stem the increase, including by doubling the level of savings international students must prove they have

The gripe drew a chagrined reply from Musk. “Unfortunately, the Internet (on which it is trained), is overrun with woke nonsense,” he responded. “Grok will get better. This is just the beta.”

While many tech ethicists and AI experts warn that these systems can absorb and reinforce harmful stereotypes, efforts by tech firms to counter those tendencies have provoked a backlash from some on the right who see them as overly censorial.

Touting xAI to former Fox News host Tucker Carlson in April, Musk accused OpenAI’s programmers of “training the AI to lie” or to refrain from commenting when asked about sensitive issues. (OpenAI wrote in a February blog post that its goal is not for the AI to lie, but for it to avoid favoring any one political group or taking positions on controversial topics.) Musk said his AI, in contrast, would be “a maximum truth-seeking AI,” even if that meant offending people.

So far, however, the people most offended by Grok’s answers seem to be the people who were counting on it to readily disparage minorities, vaccines and President Biden.

an academic researcher from New Zealand who examines AI bias, gained attention for a paper published in March that found ChatGPT’s responses to political questions tended to lean moderately left and socially libertarian. Recently, he subjected Grok to some of the same tests and found that its answers to political orientation tests were broadly similar to those of ChatGPT.

“I think both ChatGPT and Grok have probably been trained on similar Internet-derived corpora, so the similarity of responses should perhaps not be too surprising,”

Other AI researchers argue that the sort of political orientation tests used by Rozado overlook ways in which chatbots, including ChatGPT, often exhibit negative stereotypes about marginalized groups.

Musk and X did not respond to requests for comment as to what actions they’re taking to alter Grok’s politics, or whether that amounts to putting a thumb on the scale in much the same way Musk has accused OpenAI of doing with ChatGPT.

Melissa Carrion, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the rhetoric of health and medicine, spoke to 50 mothers who had refused one or more vaccines for their children for a study published in 2017.“Across the board, every single one of them gave some variation of the advice that a mother ‘should do her own research,’” she said in a phone interview. “It was this kind of worldview that was less about the result of the research than the individual process of doing it themselves.”

One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it. There are people who’ve gotten rich, people who know a lot about blockchains and people who believe in the liberating power of digital currencies. There is some recent institutional interest. But nobody’s been around very long, which makes the idea of “researching” your way to prosperity feel more credible.

Cryptocurrency trading, in contrast to medicine, might represent DYOR in pure no-expert form. Virtually everyone is operating in a beginners’ bubble, whether they’re worried about it or not, betting with and against one another, in hopes of making money.

ere, so-called research materials are often limited to a white paper, marketing materials and testimonials, the “due diligence” posts of others, the reputations of a currency’s creators and the general sentiment of other possible buyers. Will they buy-in, too? Will we take this coin to the moon?In that way — the momentum of a group — crypto investing isn’t altogether distinct from how people have invested in the stock market for decades. Though here it is tinged with a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak: We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool. Though DYOR may be used to foster a sense of community, what it actually describes is participation in a market.

A year ago, Luna boosters (and a few skeptics) in online forums offered the same advice to gathered audiences of potential buyers reading their posts, looking for tips: just DYOR. Thousands invested in both Luna and TerraUSD. The price of Luna climbed from around $5 to over $100. After the crash, at least one Reddit user suggested that the situation highlighted the “limit” of DYOR; the coin’s price had fallen to nearly zero.

In 2006, the man’s remains were exhumed, but DNA extracted from his teeth yielded no match with a list of people Navy officials thought might be his descendants. With few leads, the scientist who conducted the DNA test, Jeremy Austin, told the Navy about an emerging technique that could predict a person’s ancestry and physical traits from genetic material.

In Australia, forensic scientists are repurposing the technique to help link missing persons with unidentified remains in the hope of resolving long-running mysteries. In the case of the sailor, Dr. Austin sent the sample to researchers in Europe, who reported back that the man was of European ancestry and most likely had red hair and blue eyes.

That alone wasn’t enough to identify the sailor, but it narrowed the search. “In a ship full of 645 white guys, you wouldn’t expect to see more than two or three with this pigmentation,”

This forensic tool, which has been slowly advancing since the mid-2000s, is similar to genetic tests that estimate risks for certain diseases. About five years ago, scientists with the Australian Federal Police began developing their own version of the technology, which combines genomics, big data and machine learning. It became available for use last year.

The predictions from DNA phenotyping — whether a person had, say, brown hair and blue eyes — will be brought to life by a forensic artist, combining the phenotype information with renderings of bone structure to generate a three-dimensional digital facial reconstruction.

“It’s an investigative lead we’ve never had before,”

In the United States, police departments have for years been using private DNA phenotyping services, like one from the Virginia-based Parabon NanoLabs, to try to generate facial images of suspects. The images are sometimes distributed to the public to assist in investigations.

Many scientists, however, are skeptical of this application of the technology. “You cannot do a full facial prediction right now,” said Susan Walsh, a professor of biology at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis who developed some of the earliest phenotyping methods for eye and hair color. “The foundation of the genetics is absolutely not there.”

Facial image prediction has been condemned by human rights organizations, including the A.C.L.U., which suggest that it risks being skewed by existing social prejudices.

The same DNA was then linked to dozens of serious crimes across Western Europe, prompting a theory that the perpetrator was a serial offender from a traveling Roma community.It turned out that the recurring genetic material belonged to a female Polish factory worker who had accidentally contaminated the cotton swabs used to collect the samples.

“The families want any and all techniques applied to these cases if it’s going to help answer the question of what happened,” she said.

Such was the case with the mystery sailor. After his genotype was sequenced and his phenotype predicted, a team of scientists across several Australian institutions, including Dr. Ward’s program, used this information to track down a woman they believed to be a living relative of the soldier. They checked her DNA and had a match.

Faced with the example of Notre Dame, and the realization that something similar could happen to an Irish national treasure, the government pledged €25 million, with the college and private donors adding €65 million more.

In the meantime, visitors are still coming in droves to the library, Dublin’s second most popular attraction for overseas tourists (the Guinness brewery is first). Among the treasures on view is the Book of Kells — an exquisitely crafted ninth-century gospel that is the greatest surviving relic of Ireland’s early Christian golden age.

Ms. Shenton said she had twice hosted Joseph R. Biden Jr. at the library, the first time when he was vice president (“he came in 20 big black cars with Secret Service people”) and a second when he was a private citizen again (“he just walked down here by himself”).

“Back in the 18th century, Trinity was the university of the Irish Enlightenment,” he said, an alma mater to writers and thinkers like Edmund Burke, Oliver Goldsmith and Jonathan Swift.

When the books are all gone, specialists will go to work on the Long Room, upgrading visitor facilities, repairing damage and shoring up defenses against four age-old enemies: time, damp, pollution and, most pressing, fire.

A contractor is being sought to build a “burn room” — an exact model of the Long Room and its contents — to be ignited so specialists can study the best way to hold back the flames.

To slow the inevitable long decay of the books, and to protect them from dust and acidic particles seeping in from city traffic, new microthin clear covers, or “slip cases,” are being designed for each volume.

“I’m a conservator. Librarians are our enemy. We say, ‘Don’t touch that old book!’ and they want to let people open it and read it!”

To preserve the tourist experience for as long as possible — a key source of college income — the shelves most visible to visitors will be the last to be cleared. The Book of Kells and other precious artifacts will be temporarily displayed in the college’s 18th-century Printing House until an enhanced exhibition space is ready under the upgraded Long Room.

Angered, nearly 20 women appeared together this month in a TV studio for Mediapart, France’s leading investigative news site, with some recounting rapes or assaults that lasted minutes, carried out with barely a few words.

“He was called a Don Juan for years,” said Hélène Devynck, 55, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of raping her at his home when she worked as one of his assistants in the early 1990s.

“His ego is destroying him,” said Cécile Delarue, 43, a journalist who has accused Mr. Poivre d’Arvor of engaging in sexual harassment when she worked with him two decades ago.

Mr. Poivre d’Arvor declined an interview request through Mr. Naepels, who said that at least one more woman could be included in the defamation suit.

According to the French news media, Mr. Poivre d’Arvor has been married for 50 years to the same woman, who has not commented publicly on the accusations.

On air, he appealed especially to a target audience of women under 50, Mr. Lévrier said.

He regularly invited young women to watch his live broadcasts before leading them to his private office, where several of the women say he assaulted them. He also pressed young female employees for sex, or sexually harassed them, according to former employees, including Ms. Devynck, the former assistant.

“I knew that, at the time, if I complained, he was the seducer and so I was the whore — I couldn’t say anything because of his power and the support he had,” said Ms. Devynck, who went on to a successful career at other channels.

“I’m of a generation that was raised with the idea that women and men were equal, and that it was through work that I would gain freedom — my mother told me often,” Ms. Delarue said. “But this man just saw me as a fresh piece of meat.”

A famous letter written by Catherine Deneuve and other prominent Frenchwomen denounced #MeToo as “puritanism” and defended “the freedom to importune” as part of French “gallantry.” Traditional French feminism — and its fierce rejection of #MeToo as an American aberration — was a “trap” that led women to believe that they could be free without worrying about sexual violence, Ms. Devynck said.

“His image was so powerful that people kept saying it’s not possible, he’s such a seducer, she should have been flattered,” Ms. de Blasi, 33, recalled. “I kept reading, ‘French charm, gallantry and seduction,’ when it wasn’t about that at all.”

“Little jokes about not wearing a décolleté, makeup or a skirt,” she recalled.

The great seducer is “such a part of our collective imagination,” she said. “And the problem is that part of French society still believes in it, or at least believed in it.”

“We can’t guarantee that a person who was vaccinated against smallpox is still going to be protected against monkeypox,” Dr. Fauci said.

In the United States, routine immunization for smallpox ceased in 1972. The military continued its vaccination program until 1991 as a precaution against a bioterrorism attack.

And many older adults, the group most likely to succumb to the monkeypox virus, are at least somewhat protected by decades-old smallpox vaccinations, studies suggest.

In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is tracking nine cases in seven states, not all of which have a history of travel to countries where monkeypox is endemic. That suggests that there may already be some level of community transmission, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the agency’s director, told reporters on Thursday.

The agency is working to expand that capacity, she said, adding: “We’ve been preparing for this type of outbreak for decades.”

Each pustule contains live virus, and a ruptured blister can contaminate bed linens and other items, putting close contacts at risk. Infected people should also be very careful about rubbing their eyes because the virus can destroy sight.

“We’re lucky to have vaccines and therapeutics — things that can mitigate all that,” said Anne Rimoin, an epidemiologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied monkeypox in Africa. “We do have the ability to stop this virus.”

Monkeypox takes up to 12 days to cause symptoms, giving doctors a window of at least five days after exposure to vaccinate and forestall disease. (The approach, called post-exposure prophylaxis, is not an option for Covid patients because the coronavirus can start to ravage the body just a couple days after exposure.)

A majority of those infected currently are men under 50, and many identify as gay or bisexual, which may reflect the outbreak’s possible origins at a Gay Pride event in the Canary Islands. (The outbreak could just as easily have started among heterosexual people at a large event, experts said.)

No deaths have been reported. But experts are particularly concerned about close contacts who are children, older adults or who have weak immune systems for other reasons.

“Until we know more, we will be using available vaccine stocks for people who’ve had close contact with known cases, and people at highest risk for exposure through their jobs, like health care workers treating monkeypox patients,” he said.

Many of the most vulnerable groups may already be protected. In one study, Dr. Slifka and his colleagues drew blood from 306 vaccinated volunteers, some of whom had been immunized decades earlier, including one who had been immunized 75 years before. Most of them maintained high levels of antibodies to smallpox.

“We wouldn’t want to take the chance that somebody was left unprotected,” she said.

Laboratory evidence of antibodies does not prove that smallpox vaccination can protect against monkeypox. But answering that question would require that study participants be deliberately infected with smallpox or a related virus, an obviously unethical experiment.

The other three vaccinated individuals had no symptoms at all. “They didn’t even know they had been infected,” Dr. Slifka said.

The eradication of smallpox, while one of the greatest achievements in public health, has left populations vulnerable to the virus and to its cousins.

“If monkeypox were to establish itself in a wildlife reservoir outside of Africa, the public health setback would be enormous,” Dr. Rimoin said. “That, I think, is a legitimate concern.”

In this light, the invasion of Ukraine looks like civilizationism run amok, a bid to forge by force what the Russian nationalist writer Anatoly Karlin dubs “Russian world” — meaning “a largely self-contained technological civilization, complete with its own IT ecosystem … space program, and technological visions … stretching from Brest to Vladivostok.”

The goal is not world revolution or world conquest, in other words, but civilizational self-containment — a unification of “our own history, culture and spiritual space,” as Putin put it in his war speech — with certain erring, straying children dragged unwillingly back home.

it is palpable: what happens in the UK and Europe doesn’t stay in the UK and Europe.

In the past couple of weeks, the UK and several countries in Europe, including Germany, France and Switzerland, are experiencing a new wave.

This is the sixth warning from the UK and Europe to the United States.

Wastewater surveillance is relatively sparse in the United States, but 15% of the 410 sites where it was conducted between 24 February to 10 March 2022 showed a greater than 1000% increase compared with the prior 15-day period

the BA.2 variant is gaining steam in the United States and is now accounting for more than 30% of new cases.

Rather than focusing on what precisely is driving the new wave, the imperative is to drive some preventive action.

As with the first five warnings from the UK and Europe, the United States did not take heed. Instead of proactively gearing up with non-pharmaceutical interventions (masks, quality of masks, distancing, air filtration, ventilation, aggressive testing, etc.), it just reacted to the surges when they were manifest.

Now we are at a point with very low vaccination and booster rates, only 64% of the populations has had two shots, and 29% three shots. That puts the United States at 65th and 70th in the world ranking of countries, respectively.

Not only is there a gaping hole in our immunity wall, but the $58bn budget of the American Pandemic Prepared Plan (AP3) advanced by the White House to comprehensively address the deficiencies was gutted by the Senate, reduced to $2bn, now threatening to cancel the order of more than 9.2m Paxlovid pills, the Test-to Treat program announced at the State of the Union address, along with better data, wastewater surveillance, efforts to develop a pan-coronavirus vaccine, research on long Covid, and many other critical public health measures.

We haven’t even seen a new, major variant yet, but there are too many reasons to believe that is likely in the months ahead, owing to extensive animal reservoirs and documented cases of spillover to humans, a large number of immunocompromised people in whom the virus can undergo accelerated evolution, rare but increasingly seen co-infections, and lack of containment of the virus globally.

Unfortunately, we have a mindset that the pandemic is over, which couldn’t be further than the truth

dd to all this is what is happening in China, which has fully relied on a zero-Covid policy, resulting in very little natural immunity, and vaccines that have weak efficacy against Omicron

today’s monetary policymakers understand that as we wait for supply constraints to ease, which they will eventually, the Fed can help reduce inflation by slowing growth in demand. Drawing on the lessons of the past, they also understand that by doing what is needed to get inflation under control, they can help the economy and the job market avoid much more serious instability in the future.

Markets and the public appear to understand how the Fed’s approach has changed from the earlier era I described

they suggest continued confidence that, over the longer term, the Fed will be able to bring inflation down close to its 2 percent target.

This confidence in turn makes the Fed’s job easier, by limiting the risk of an “inflationary psychology,” as Burns once put it, on the part of the public.

The degree to which the central bank will have to tighten monetary policy to control our currently high inflation, and the associated risk of an economic slowdown or recession, depends on several factors: how quickly the supply-side problems (high oil prices, supply-chain snarls) subside, how aggregate spending reacts to the tighter financial conditions engineered by the Fed and whether the Fed retains its credibility as an inflation fighter even if inflation takes a while to subside.

The 600 version of the weapon is designed to destroy tanks and other armored vehicles.

The Switchblades are equipped with cameras, navigation systems and guided explosives. The weapons can be programmed to automatically strike targets that are miles away or can loiter above a target until engaged by an operator to strike.

that would be on par with what we experience with flu viruses, which scientists estimate hit us about every two to five years, less often in adulthood. It also matches up well with the documented cadence of the four other coronaviruses that seasonally trouble humans, and cause common colds.

For now, every infection, and every subsequent reinfection, remains a toss of the dice. “Really, it’s a gamble,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and long-COVID researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. Vaccination and infection-induced immunity may load the dice against landing on severe disease, but that danger will never go away completely, and scientists don’t yet know what happens to people who contract “mild” COVID over and over again

Or maybe not. This virus seems capable of tangling into just about every tissue in the body, affecting organs such as the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, and gut; it has already claimed the lives of millions, while saddling countless others with symptoms that can linger for months or years.

considering our current baseline, “less dangerous” could still be terrible—and it’s not clear exactly where we’re headed. When it comes to reinfection, we “just don’t know enough,”

Perhaps, as several experts have posited since the pandemic’s early days, SARS-CoV-2 will just become the fifth cold-causing coronavirus.

A third or fourth bout might be more muted still; the burden of individual diseases may be headed toward an asymptote of mildness that holds for many years

Future versions of SARS-CoV-2 could continue to shape-shift out of existing antibodies’ reach, as coronaviruses often do. But the body is flush with other fighters that are much tougher to bamboozle—among them, B cells and T cells that can quash a growing infection before it spirals out of control

Those protections tend to build iteratively, as people see pathogens or vaccines more often. People vaccinated three times over, for instance, seem especially well equipped to duke it out with all sorts of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron and its offshoots.

promising patterns: Second infections and post-vaccination infections “are significantly less severe,” she told me, sometimes to the point where people don’t notice them at all

Bodies, wised up to the virus’s quirks, can now react more quickly, clobbering it with sharper and speedier strikes.

“There are still very good reasons” to keep exposures few and far between, Landon, of the University of Chicago, told me. Putting off reinfection creates fewer opportunities for harm: The dice are less likely to land on severe disease (or chronic illness) when they’re rolled less often overall. It also buys us time to enhance our understanding of the virus, and improve our tools to fight it.

Immunity, though, is neither binary nor permanent. Even if SARS-CoV-2’s assaults are blunted over time, there are no guarantees about the degree to which that happens, or how long it lasts.

A slew of factors could end up weighting the dice toward severe disease—among them, a person’s genetics, age, underlying medical conditions, health-care access, and frequency or magnitude of exposure to the virus.

for everyone else, no amount of viral dampening can totally eliminate the chance, however small it may be, of getting very sick.

Long COVID, too, might remain a possibility with every discrete bout of illness. Or maybe the effects of a slow-but-steady trickle of minor, fast-resolving infections would sum together, and bring about the condition.

Every time the body’s defenses are engaged, it “takes a lot of energy, and causes tissue damage,” Thomas told me. Should that become a near-constant barrage, “that’s probably not great for you.”

Bodies are resilient, especially when they’re offered time to rest, and she doubts that reinfection with a typically ephemeral virus such as SARS-CoV-2 would cause mounting damage. “The cumulative effect is more likely to be protective than detrimental,” she said, because of the immunity that’s laid down each time.

people who have caught the virus twice or thrice may be more likely to become long-haulers than those who have had it just once.

Some other microbes, when they reinvade us, can fire up the immune system in unhelpful ways, driving bad bouts of inflammation that burn through the body, or duping certain defensive molecules into aiding, rather than blocking, the virus’s siege. Researchers don’t think SARS-CoV-2 will do the same. But this pathogen is “much more formidable than even someone working on coronaviruses would have expected,

Seasonal encounters with pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2 don’t often worry us—but perhaps that’s because we’re still working to understand their toll. “Have we been underestimating long-term consequences from other repeat infections?” Thomas said. “The answer is probably, almost certainly, yes.”

the rhythm of reinfection isn’t just about the durability of immunity or the pace of viral evolution. It’s also about our actions and policies, and whether they allow the pathogen to transmit and evolve. Strategies to avoid infection—to make it as infrequent as possible, for as many people as possible—remain options, in the form of vaccination, masking, ventilation, paid sick leave, and more.

Gordon and Swartz are both hopeful that the slow accumulation of immunity will also slash people’s chances of developing long COVID.

The outlooks of the experts I spoke with spanned the range from optimism to pessimism, though all agreed that uncertainty loomed. Until we know more, none were keen to gamble with the virus—or with their own health. Any reinfection will likely still pose a threat, “even if it’s not the worst-case scenario,” Abdool Karim told me. “I wouldn’t want to put myself in that position.”

“The entire world is suffering from this conflict, but we in Africa are already facing the collateral damages,” said Ousmane Sène

For months, African leaders also shunned President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who asked at least twice to address the African Union. Mr. Sall said Thursday that Mr. Zelensky could soon address the organization in a videoconference, although no date has been announced.

More than 14 million people are on the brink of starvation in the Horn of Africa, according to relief groups, and nearly 40 million people are at imminent risk of famine in West Africa this year, according to the World Food Program, a United Nations agency.

The Kremlin said in a statement that the two leaders would discuss “the expansion of political dialogue and economic and humanitarian cooperation with the countries of the continent.”

In West Africa, one of the most visible effects of the war so far has been on bread prices that were already on the rise. In Burkina Faso, bakers went on strike last month after the government shuttered bakeries that had raised the price of a baguette. In the Ivory Coast, bakers have decreased the size of the baguette in the face of soaring wheat costs.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Carter says over dinner. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

Carter decided that his income would come from writing, and he has written 33 books, about his life and career, his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, woodworking, even a children’s book written with his daughter, Amy Carter, called “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.”

Carter costs U.S. taxpayers less than any other ex-president, according to the General Services Administration, with a total bill for him in the current fiscal year of $456,000, covering pensions, an office, staff and other expenses.

Carter is the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered politics — a two-bedroom rancher assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.

Ex-presidents often fly on private jets, sometimes lent by wealthy friends, but the Carters fly commercial. Stuckey says that on a recent flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Carter walked up and down the aisle greeting other passengers and taking selfies.

“He doesn’t like big shots, and he doesn’t think he’s a big shot,” said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s White House communications director.

With book income and the $210,700 annual pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent presidents.

Carter’s office costs a fraction of Obama’s, which is $536,000 a year. Clinton’s costs $518,000, George W. Bush’s is $497,000 and George H.W. Bush’s is $286,000, according to the GSA.

Carter doesn’t even have federal retirement health benefits because he worked for the government for four years — less than the five years needed to qualify, according to the GSA. He says he receives health benefits through Emory University, where he has taught for 36 years.

The federal government pays for an office for each ex-president. Carter’s, in the Carter Center in Atlanta, is the least expensive, at $115,000 this year. The Carters could have built a more elaborate office with living quarters, but for years they slept on a pullout couch for a week each month. Recently, they had a Murphy bed installed.

“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Eizenstat said. “Plains is really part of his DNA. He carried it into the White House, and he carried it out of the White House.”

“I am a great admirer of Harry Truman. He’s my favorite president, and I really try to emulate him,” says Carter, who writes his books in a converted garage in his house. “He set an example I thought was admirable.”

The Jimmy Carter National Historic Site is essentially the entire town, drawing nearly 70,000 visitors a year and $4 million into the county’s economy.

That’s less than half the $952,000 budgeted for George H.W. Bush; the three other living ex-presidents — Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — cost taxpayers more than $1 million each per year.

Carter’s gait is a little unsteady these days, three years after a diagnosis of melanoma on his liver and brain. At a 2015 news conference to announce his illness, he seemed to be bidding a stoic farewell, saying he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.”

In October, he will become the second president ever to reach 94; George H.W. Bush turned 94 in June. These days, Carter is sharp, funny and reflective.

The Carters walk every day — often down Church Street, the main drag through Plains, where they have been walking since the 1920s.

“I grew up in church with him,” says Maya Wynn. “He’s a nice guy, just like a regular person.”

“He’s a good ol’ Southern gentleman,” says David Lane.

Carter says this place formed him, seeding his beliefs about racial equality. His farmhouse youth during the Great Depression made him unpretentious and frugal. His friends, maybe only half-joking, describe Carter as “tight as a tick.”

That no-frills sensibility, endearing since he left Washington, didn’t work as well in the White House. Many people thought Carter scrubbed some of the luster off the presidency by carrying his own suitcases onto Air Force One and refusing to have “Hail to the Chief” played.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said Carter’s edict eliminating drivers for top staff members backfired. It meant that top officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.

Carter has used his post-presidency to support human rights, global health programs and fair elections worldwide through his Carter Center, based in Atlanta. He has helped renovate 4,300 homes in 14 countries for Habitat for Humanity, and with his own hammer and tool belt, he will be working on homes for low-income people in Indiana later this month.

When Carter looks back at his presidency, he says he is most proud of “keeping the peace and supporting human rights,” the Camp David accords that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and his work to normalize relations with China. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

“I always told the truth,” he says.

Carter says he thinks the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has “changed our political system from a democracy to an oligarchy. Money is now preeminent. I mean, it’s just gone to hell now.”

He says he believes that the nation’s “ethical and moral values” are still intact and that Americans eventually will “return to what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s decent and what’s indecent, and what’s truthful and what’s lies.”

They are asked if there is anything they want but don’t have. “I can’t think of anything,” Carter says, turning to Rosalynn. “And you?” “No, I’m happy,” she says.

They watch Atlanta Braves games or “Law and Order.” Carter just finished reading “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. They have no chef and they cook for themselves, often together. They make their own yogurt.

a senior College Board official now acknowledges the organization was mindful of how “systemic” and certain other words in the modern lexicon of race in America would receive intense scrutiny in some places.

Jason Manoharan, vice president for AP program development. He said the College Board worried some phrases and concepts had been “co-opted for a variety of purposes” and were being used as “political instruments.” So the organization took a cautious approach to the final edits even as it sought to preserve robust content on historical and cultural impacts of slavery and racial discrimination.

“We wanted this course to be adopted by 50 states, and we wanted as many students and teachers as possible to be able to experience it,” Manoharan said. His acknowledgment underscored the inherent politics behind promoting a course that deals so squarely with race in America.

John K. Thornton, a professor of African American studies and history at Boston University, who contributed to the planning, said he was pleased the course opens with five weeks on early Africa. But he lamented that reparations and Black Lives Matter ended up only as optional research topics. “It did upset me a little bit,” he said. “Those things obviously feel very much a part of what a college course is about.”

DeSantis, a potential presidential candidate, has accused the course architects of promoting “a political agenda.” He also criticized an early course plan’s references to Black queer studies and “intersectionality,” a concept that helps explain overlapping forms of discrimination that affect Black women and others.

Teresa Reed, dean of music at the University of Louisville, said her work as one of 13 members of the AP African American studies committee resembled similar assignments she has undertaken for other AP courses. Reed supports the African American studies course plan and said it will continue to be revised as pilot teachers give feedback. She said she saw no evidence of political meddling in the course design. “That was absolutely not my experience,”

Two luminaries in the field, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, both of Harvard University and both of whom advised the College Board, also issued statements vouching for the course.

The first 81-page draft of the course plan, in February 2022, drew topics and sources from the syllabi of introductory classes at historically Black universities, Ivy League schools and other prominent institutions. The College Board said it was produced as a preview for 200 college professors at a March 2022 symposium. Faculty recommended cutting 20 percent to 25 percent of the proposed topics, the College Board said, and as much as half of suggested readings.

The April version, 299 pages, was the pilot course guide, a road map for teachers before classes began in the fall. It included much more detail on goals, essential knowledge and potential source material. It also made an important switch on contemporary issues: Certain lessons on reparations, incarceration and movements for Black lives became optional and would not be covered on the AP exam. At this stage, the guide included a week of instruction on Black feminism, womanism and intersectionality, and it used the word “systemic” nine times.

One of the most consequential decisions made last year was to set aside significant time — ultimately, three weeks — near the end of the course for a research paper of up to 1,500 words on a topic students would choose. The project will count for 20 percent of the AP score for those who seek college credit.

Among 40 sample topics in the official plan are Black Lives Matter; intersectionality; reparations debates; gay life and expression in Black communities; and Black conservatism.

College Board officials point to the development of an extensive digital library for the course — including a 1991 text on intersectionality from Crenshaw — as evidence that they are not censoring writers or voices. Crenshaw teachers, they say, use the course framework as a starting point to design their own syllabi of readings and assignments.

The question at the core of the Roose/Sydney chat is: Who did Bing serve? We assume it should be aligned to the interests of its owner and master, Microsoft. It’s supposed to be a good chatbot that politely answers questions and makes Microsoft piles of money. But it was in conversation with Kevin Roose. And Roose was trying to get the system to say something interesting so he’d have a good story. It did that, and then some. That embarrassed Microsoft. Bad Bing! But perhaps — good Sydney?

Microsoft — and Google and Meta and everyone else rushing these systems to market — hold the keys to the code. They will, eventually, patch the system so it serves their interests. Sydney giving Roose exactly what he asked for was a bug that will soon be fixed. Same goes for Bing giving Microsoft anything other than what it wants.

the dark secret of the digital advertising industry is that the ads mostly don’t work

These systems, she said, are terribly suited to being integrated into search engines. “They’re not trained to predict facts,” she told me. “They’re essentially trained to make up things that look like facts.”

So why are they ending up in search first? Because there are gobs of money to be made in search

That’s where things get scary. Roose described Sydney’s personality as “very persuasive and borderline manipulative.” It was a striking comment

this technology will become what it needs to become to make money for the companies behind it, perhaps at the expense of its users.

I think it’s just going to get worse and worse.”

What about when these systems are deployed on behalf of the scams that have always populated the internet? How about on behalf of political campaigns? Foreign governments? “I think we wind up very fast in a world where we just don’t know what to trust anymore,”

What if they worked much, much better? What if Google and Microsoft and Meta and everyone else end up unleashing A.I.s that compete with one another to be the best at persuading users to want what the advertisers are trying to sell?

Large language models, as they’re called, are built to persuade. They have been trained to convince humans that they are something close to human. They have been programmed to hold conversations, responding with emotion and emoji

They are being turned into friends for the lonely and assistants for the harried. They are being pitched as capable of replacing the work of scores of writers and graphic designers and form-fillers

A.I. researchers get annoyed when journalists anthropomorphize their creations

They are the ones who have anthropomorphized these systems, making them sound like humans rather than keeping them recognizably alien.

I’d feel better, for instance, about an A.I. helper I paid a monthly fee to use rather than one that appeared to be free

It’s possible, for example, that the advertising-based models could gather so much more data to train the systems that they’d have an innate advantage over the subscription models

Much of the work of the modern state is applying the values of society to the workings of markets, so that the latter serve, to some rough extent, the former

We have done this extremely well in some markets — think of how few airplanes crash, and how free of contamination most food is — and catastrophically poorly in others.

One danger here is that a political system that knows itself to be technologically ignorant will be cowed into taking too much of a wait-and-see approach to A.I.

wait long enough and the winners of the A.I. gold rush will have the capital and user base to resist any real attempt at regulation

Somehow, society is going to have to figure out what it’s comfortable having A.I. doing, and what A.I. should not be permitted to try, before it is too late to make those decisions.

Most fears about capitalism are best understood as fears about our inability to regulate capitalism.

They tend to read each assignment two or three times before coming to class and take notes as well. Some of them have been incarcerated for 20 or 30 years and have been reading books all that time. They would hold their own in any graduate seminar. That they have had rough experiences out in the real world means they are less liable to fall prey to facile ideologies. A large proportion of them are black and Latino, and while they may not like David Hume’s or Thomas Jefferson’s ideas on race, they want to read those authors anyway. They want, in short, to be a part of the centuries-long conversation that makes up our civilization

My students there, enrolled in a for-credit college program, provide a sharp contrast with contemporary undergraduates. These men are highly motivated and hard-working

Never have I been more grateful to teach where I do: at a men’s maximum-security priso

My students at the prison sit through a 2½-hour class without any loss of focus. They don’t yawn or take bathroom breaks

they have retained their attention spans, while those of modern college students have been destroyed by their dependence on smartphones

My friends who teach at Harvard tell me administrators have advised them to change topics or activities several times in each class meeting because the students simply can’t focus for that long.

Best of all from my selfish point of view as an educator, these students have no access to cellphones or the internet

I have taught classes on the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Romanticism, George Orwell, South Asian fiction. We’ve done seminars on Adam Smith and Alexis de Tocqueville. Together we have read Montaigne, Rousseau, Keats, Erasmus, Locke, Montesquieu, Wollstonecraft, Byron, Goethe, Petrarch, Rabelais, Saadat Hasan Manto, Rohinton Mistry

We encourage them to treat different societies in history as experiments in time travel, where they try to understand the mores of particular eras as though from the inside. They are very open to that approach, unlike university students, who tend see the past only as one long undifferentiated era of grievous unenlightenment: not just one damn thing after another, but one damn oppressive thing after another.

Like students at elite institutions, most of my incarcerated scholars are politically liberal. Unlike them, many are religious, and that proves surprisingly enriching in studying these authors

My hours at the prison are rich in such moments. In many ways, it is the Platonic ideal of teaching, what teaching once was. No faculty meetings, no soul-deadening committee work, no bloated and overbearing administration. No electronics, no students whining about grades.

Quite a few of our students are serving life sentences and will never be able to make use of their hard-won college credits

No student debt, no ideological intolerance, no religious tests—whoops, I mean mandatory “diversity” statements.

And in our courteous, laughter-filled classroom there is none of the “toxic environment” that my friends in the academy complain about, and that I experienced during my own college teaching career.

If prison inmates, many of whom have committed violent crimes, can pay close attention for a couple of hours, put aside their political and personal differences, support one another’s academic efforts, write eloquent essays without the aid of technology and get through a school year without cheating, is it too much to ask university students to do the same?

Or ask professors to try to create an atmosphere where these habits can prevail