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Trump’s policy proposals — the details of which Trump himself seems unconcerned and uninformed about — are symbolic expressions of a certain approach to politics.

The stated purpose of Trump’s border wall is to keep out a contagion of Mexican rapists and murderers. His argument is not taken from Heritage Foundation policy papers. He makes it by quoting the racist poem “The Snake,” which compares migrants to dangerous vermin. Trump proposes to ban migration from some Muslim-majority countries because Muslim refugees, as he sees it, are a Trojan-horse threat of terrorism. Trump’s policy ideas are incidental to his message of dehumanization.

So how do we split the political difference on this one? Shall we talk about Mexican migrants as rapists on every other day? Shall we provide rhetorical cover for alt-right bigots only on special occasions, such as after a racist rally and murder?

The point applies in other areas.

We have seen similar damage in the realm of values and norms. In the cultivation of anger and tribalism. In the use of language to inflame and demean. In the destruction of a common factual basis for politics, making policy compromise of the kind Olsen favors impossible.

What would fusion with this type of politics look like? Trump defines loyalty to conservatism as contempt for many of our neighbors

One might as well have proposed a fusion between popular sovereignty and Abraham Lincoln’s conception of inherent human rights. They were not a dialectic requiring a synthesis. They were alternatives demanding a choice.

“In the early decades of the 20th century,” author Isabel Wilkerson noted in the New York Times, “a caste system ruled the South with such repression that every four days an African-American was lynched for some perceived breach or mundane accusation — having stolen 75 cents or made off with a mule.” Indeed, between 1877 and 1950, almost 4,000 black people died this way, mostly in Southern states.

Johnson proposes a legal remedy. “You can get arrested for pulling a fire alarm, making fake bomb threats and making false claims of an alien invasion — why not a false police report that results in death?” he wrote. “We should be pushing for prosecution against these callers just as much as the cops who pull the trigger.”

how can we up the social and legal costs for people who make life-threatening decisions by calling the police on peaceful black people?

To echo pop singer Solange Knowles, the fundamental question I am asking white America is: “Where can we be free? Where can we be safe? Where can we be black?

Formed in 2012, all band members are reportedly hand-picked by North Korean leader Kim Jong-un himself. Their music is a synthesiser-heavy mix of Western classics and Pyongyang propaganda songs including "We Call Him Father" - an ode to Mr Kim. The changing line-up is made up of singers and multi-instrumentalists, playing anything from electric guitars to synthesiser, violin and saxophone. In 2015, the band was rumoured to have been purged, even executed, when it briefly vanished from public view for several weeks.

North and South Korea are set to hold talks with the International Olympics Committee in Switzerland next Saturday to discuss the participation of North Korean athletes at the Games.

The politician had initially claimed Mr Jacobs had grabbed his wrist, pulling them both to the ground. His spokesperson called it "aggressive behaviour from a liberal journalist".

The multimillionaire technology executive and Christian conservative beat Democrat Rob Quist, a banjo-playing folk singer, to fill an empty seat in the House of Representatives

re would have been no monarchy and no empire, no usurpation of the lives and property of the people, no oppression and plunder, no encroachment on the public treasury, no vice and abomination. Most forms of corruption originate with the ruling class, the tyrannical ruling family and the libertines that associate with them. It is these rulers who establish centers of vice and corruption, who build centers of vice and wine-drinking, and spend the income of the religious endowments constructing cinemas.5            

In addition, superfluous bureaucracies and the system of file-keeping and paper-shuffling that is enforced in them, all of which are totally alien to Islam, impose further expenditures on our national budget not less in quantity than the illicit expenditures of the first category.

dicating disputes, and executing judgments is at once simple, practical, and swift. When the juridical methods of Islam were applied, the sharī‘ah judge in each town, assisted only by two bailiffs and with only a pen and inkpot at his disposal, would swiftly resolve disputes among people and send them about their business.

She Was a Star of New Palestinian Music. Then She Played Beside the Mosque.

Yet as the Board of Education is set to vote on the new curriculum this month, it is likelier than before to enthrone ethnic studies, an older relative to critical race theory, into the largest public school system in the United States. This is a big deal in America’s ongoing culture wars. And it’s a bad deal for California’s students, at least for those whose school districts decide to make the curriculum their own.

Ethnic studies is less an academic discipline than it is the recruiting arm of a radical ideological movement masquerading as mainstream pedagogy. From the opening pages of the model curriculum, students are expected not just to “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs,” but to “critique empire-building in history” and “connect ourselves to past and contemporary social movements that struggle for social justice.”

The former is education. The latter is indoctrination. The ethnic studies curriculum conceals the difference.

When the main thing left-wing progressives see about America is its allegedly oppressive systems of ethnicity or color, they aren’t seeing America at all. Nor should they be surprised when right-wing reactionaries adopt a perverse version of their views. To treat “whiteness” — conditional or otherwise — not as an accident of pigmentation but as an ethnicity unto itself is what the David Dukes of the world have always wanted.

This is a curriculum that magnifies differences, encourages tribal loyalties and advances ideological groupthink.

n many countries, there’s a perception that Facebook bases its actions on its business interests more than on human rights. In India, home to Facebook’s most users, the company has been accused of not policing anti-Muslim content from political figures for fear of upsetting the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his ruling party.

“Developments in our countries aren’t addressed seriously,” said Mishi Choudhary, a technology lawyer and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center, a digital rights group in India. “Any takedown of content raises the questions of free expression, but incitement of violence or using a platform for dangerous speech is not a free speech matter but a matter of democracy, law and order.”

The future of American democracy depends on our defusing that bomb — together.

Social media posts from the event also showed live performances by Teri Nunn, the lead singer of the 1970s and ’80s new-wave band Berlin, famous for the song “Take My Breath Away,” and two members of the Beach Boys, who now perform without the founding members Al Jardine and Brian Wilson.

Mr. Trump and the first lady, Melania Trump, unexpectedly returned to the White House hours before the party, which he had originally planned to attend. It was unclear why Mr. Trump flew back to Washington, where he has not appeared in public since his return.

“Now they want to give people ravaged by the China Virus $600, rather than the $2000 which they so desperately need,” he wrote. “Not fair, or smart!”

The group’s reopening recommendations include widespread testing, contact tracing and isolation of people who are infected or exposed.

One important factor in transmission is that seemingly benign activities like speaking and breathing produce respiratory bits of varying sizes that can disperse along air currents and potentially infect people nearby.

Health agencies have so far identified respiratory-droplet contact as the major mode of Covid-19 transmission. These large fluid droplets can transfer virus from one person to another if they land on the eyes, nose or mouth. But they tend to fall to the ground or on other surfaces pretty quickly.

Proper ventilation—such as forcing air toward the ceiling and pumping it outside, or bringing fresh air into a room—dilutes the amount of virus in a space, lowering the risk of infection.

The so-called attack rate—the percentage of people who were infected in a specific place or time

that is only a rule of thumb, he cautioned. It could take much less time with a sneeze in the face or other intimate contact where a lot of respiratory droplets are emitted, he said.

When singing, people can emit many large and small respiratory particles. Singers also breathe deeply, increasing the chance they will inhale infectious particles.

Similar transmission dynamics could be at play in other settings where heavy breathing and loud talking are common over extended periods, like gyms, musical or theater performances, conferences, weddings and birthday parties.

An estimated 10% of people with Covid-19 are responsible for about 80% of transmissions, according to a study published recently in Wellcome Open Research. Some people with the virus may have a higher viral load, or produce more droplets when they breathe or speak, or be in a confined space with many people and bad ventilation when they’re at their most infectious point in their illness

additional protocols to interrupt spread, like social distancing in workspaces and providing N95 respirators or other personal protective equipment, might be necessary as well, she said.

overall, “the risk of a given infected person transmitting to people is pretty low,” said Scott Dowell, a deputy director overseeing the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s Covid-19 response. “For every superspreading event you have a lot of times when nobody gets infected.”

The attack rate for Covid-19 in households ranges between 4.6% and 19.3%, according to several studies. It was higher for spouses, at 27.8%, than for other household members, at 17.3%, in one study in China.

The 37-year-old stay-at-home mother was hospitalized with a stroke on April 18 that her doctors attributed to Covid-19, and was still coughing when she went home two days later.

She pushed to get home quickly, she said, because her 4-year-old son has autism and needed her. She kept her distance from family members, covered her mouth when coughing and washed her hands frequently. No one else in the apartment has fallen ill, she said. “Nobody went near me when I was sick,” she said.

Being outside is generally safer, experts say, because viral particles dilute more quickly. But small and large droplets pose a risk even outdoors, when people are in close, prolonged contac

No one knows for sure how much virus it takes for someone to become infected, but recent studies offer some clues

In one small study published recently in the journal Nature, researchers were unable to culture live coronavirus if a patient’s throat swab or milliliter of sputum contained less than one million copies of viral RNA.

“Based on our experiment, I would assume that something above that number would be required for infectivity,” said Clemens Wendtner, one of the study’s lead authors

He and his colleagues found samples from contagious patients with virus levels up to 1,000 times that, which could help explain why the virus is so infectious in the right conditions: It may take much lower levels of virus than what’s found in a sick patient to infect someone else.

Current CDC workplace guidelines don’t talk about distribution of aerosols, or small particles, in a room, said Lisa Brosseau, a respiratory-protection consultan

Another factor is prolonged exposure. That’s generally defined as 15 minutes or more of unprotected contact with someone less than 6 feet away

Some scientists say while aerosol transmission does occur, it doesn’t explain most infections. In addition, the virus doesn’t appear to spread widely through the air.

“If this were transmitted mainly like measles or tuberculosis, where infectious virus lingered in the airspace for a long time, or spread across large airspaces or through air-handling systems, I think you would be seeing a lot more people infected,” said the CDC’s Dr. Brooks.

High-touch surfaces like doorknobs are a risk, but the virus degrades quickly so other surfaces like cardboard boxes are less worrisome,

Churchill set a frenetic pace for his whole government, showering his aides with “Action This Day” memos.

The second element of British resilience was intense social connection. People were forced together every night in tightly packed group or family shelters.

In national crises, a sort of social and psychological arms race takes place. The threat—whether bombings or a pandemic—ramps up fear, unpredictability, divisiveness, fatalism, and feelings of weakness and meaninglessness. Nations survive when they can ramp up countervailing emotions and mindsets

Third, laughter. Brits credit themselves, accurately, for being a comic people. During the war, every disaster was turned into an occasion for humor,

The fourth factor in British resilience was moral purpose. Friedrich Nietzsche once remarked that “he who has a why to live for can endure any how.” The Brits had a firm sense of the moral rightness of their cause, the unique evil Hitler represented, and the reason they had to endure all this

Finally, there was equality. During moments of threat and crisis, people are intensely sensitive to inequality, to the feeling that some people are being treated better than everybody else.

The pressure of the situation induced people to be frenetically social. Singers offered free concerts, which were packed. Larson reports that young women would set up dates for every night, planning weeks in advance, so as to never be alone

This happens when countries take actions, even if only symbolic ones, that make frightening situations feel more controllable and predictable. This happens when they foster social solidarity by paying extreme attention to fairness. This happens when they intensify social connection and create occasions for social bonding and shared work.

Societies that build resilience do not hide behind a wall of happy talk or try to minimize the danger.

Resilience is built when people confront a threat realistically, and discover that they have the resources to cope with it together.

Resilience is built when people tell a collective story about the danger that places the current terror they are facing within a larger redemptive context. When all this is over, we’ll be better because of it.

What was once a scary threat to be avoided, releasing a surge of destructive cortisol, becomes a challenge to be met, releasing a cascade of adrenaline.

Evolution equipped us to deal with short bursts of terror, such as getting chased by a lion, not to cope with long, unrelenting months of stress.

Isolation, fear, and stress send the autonomic nervous system into overdrive, and weaken the immune system. The social-distancing measures we are taking to avoid the coronavirus make us more susceptible to it when it comes.

in some ways, COVID-19 presents an even more dire challenge to us than the bombing did to Great Britain in 1940. A study by the Russell Sage Foundation found that what makes societies resilient during a crisis are high levels of faith in institutions, high social trust, high levels of patriotism and optimism, and high levels of social and racial integration. The United States that confronts the coronavirus pandemic has catastrophically low levels of all these things.

Worse, unlike the Blitz, this pandemic deprives us of the thing social resilience needs most—close physical and social connectio

In America, the pandemic finds a country that has already seen a recent tripling of the number of people suffering from depression, a sharp increase in mental-health issues of all varieties; a sharp rise in suicides, and record levels of tribal hostility and polarization. The dread and isolation that COVID-19 causes threaten to exacerbate all this, to drive people even farther apart.

Today, the world is threatened by a virus. The moral story we tell has to be less about the evil we face and more about the solidarity we are building with one another. The story we tell has to be about how we took this disease and turned it into an occasion to become a better society

Unfortunately, the February Revolution also mimicked the French Revolution by giving way to anarchy, violence and repression. As Alexander Kerensky’s provisional government floundered, Petrograd’s expatriates watched in horror as the air of optimism quickly grew toxic. Their diaries and letters detail the descent into violence as looting and killing became a common occurrence.

The February Revolution had surprised the Bolsheviks as much as anyone, and they were not powerful enough to take control early in 1917, Rappaport says. The return of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin from exile, however, galvanized the radical socialists. By the fall of 1917, the residents of Petrograd were so desperate for relief from the seemingly endless chaos that they cared little about who could bring it.

Rappaport says the first-hand accounts of Americans and other foreigners in Petrograd are valuable because they provide an unvarnished window into the events of 1917. “These were private citizens writing personal diary entries or letters. They didn’t have a particular political agenda. I looked at Russian accounts and had to wade through so much tedious politics. Their response, though, was natural and instinctive.”

We are at a continual deficit of either unity or cohesion. And in the wake of each new cataclysm, we’ve found ourselves further apart.

“It seemed as if these people did not count themselves as part of the community. That they came from another America.” They could heckle a praying singer. They could watch “The Lawrence Welk Show” but ignore a political assassination. The same economic system that put these specific Americans in the position to take this vacation — the white-collar stability, the inequality sustaining it — was what allowed them, now, to turn their backs. They didn’t really care about any of it; the broader narrative of patriotism and pride was just an excuse for doing what they wanted — for their self-interest — a narrative they could apply and discard from one situation to the next as they saw fit.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” she wrote — and, later in the essay, “I was supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it,” recounting “a time when I began to doubt the premises of all the stories I had ever told myself, a common condition but one I found troubling.”

“The White Album” clarifies something essential to our current experience: what it’s like to navigate our fractured cultural landscape when it can feel so difficult to talk to each other, because we lack the sense of a shared reality on which such a conversation depends

That sense of “the final unraveling,” as Mr. Dunne described it, often feels like it’s currently underway.

For Ms. Didion, there was no overarching narrative we could rely on either to magically put things back together or to predict how it all might finally fall apart. “Writing has not yet helped me to see what it means,” she wrote in the essay’s final line.

New communications director Jonah Furman, 33, coordinated a publicity campaign to make Fain and coverage of the strike ubiquitous in the media. Fain shared details of the contract talks on weekly livestream updates, a tactic that stunned auto executives accustomed to behind-closed-doors discussions.

Fain, a former electrician who made an unexpected ascent to the top role this spring, and his team deployed a pugnacious strategy that hit directly at criticism that the UAW has long been too chummy with carmakers. 

“I thought it was important to bring in people that weren’t ingrained in the system,”

The group includes Chris Brooks, a 39-year-old labor activist recruited early this year to manage the new president’s transition team who then became a top aide. He helped overhaul the 88-year-old union, bringing a renewed militancy and empowering rank-and-file workers by pushing for frequent rallies and events where Fain heard them out.  

Part of his strategy has also been to make sure nonunion workers at factories in the South were listening. Fain indicated on Sunday that the union would turn to organizing at automakers such as EV leader Tesla and foreign car companies.

New York labor attorney Ben Dictor, 36, was heavily involved in the union’s biggest break from the past: holding talks with the three big automakers simultaneously. For decades, the UAW had picked one company to negotiate a new contract, and then used those terms as a template for the other two automakers. This time, the union combined talks to pit the companies against one another and accelerate deals with all three. 

Today, the UAW’s 146,000 automotive members at the Detroit Three account for a fraction of the nation’s more than one million auto-factory jobs

Longtime UAW members also worked closely with the new leader to shape its current strategy. Members must vote to approve the deals in coming weeks.

In the wake of GM and Chrysler’s government-led restructurings in 2009, priority was put on bringing their labor costs more in line with foreign rivals.

UAW leadership had long been regarded as insular, predictable and guarded, composed of union lifers who rose up from the auto-factory floor and spent years on negotiation teams before taking the lead.  

Fain, 55, won after a change in rules let members, instead of chapter officials, vote directly for their leadership. The voting revision came after a corruption scanda

Brooks was central to Fain’s chaos-inducing strike strategy, in which select facilities at each of the Detroit automakers were taken down with little notice. Fain said the approach, which he escalated during the strike by adding more and more facilities, allowed the union to be nimble and apply pressure at key profit centers that hurt the automakers. It was a change from the all-company walkouts that were previously typical—and had never been tried before by the UAW at all three companies. 

Furman, who had worked for Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez and was the lead singer and bassist in a Boston indie-rock band named Krill, spearheaded the union’s bare-knuckle social-media strategy, where it updated members on negotiations and frequently posted videos taunting company executives about their pay. 

“Jim Farley took in $21 million last year,” said Fain in a livestream, referring to Ford’s chief executive. “We need him to do two things right now: Look in the mirror and look in Ford’s bank account.” 

The contracts are the most lucrative since the 1960s, union leaders said.  

The newly assembled group prioritized swift decision-making and responses to the companies, which required cutting through bureaucracy that had impeded previous bargaining rounds, people familiar with the union’s inner workings said. The UAW pumped out pamphlets and videos to communicate with members—key to ensuring buy-in amid a strike that affected workers unevenly.

“What has moved the needle is our willingness to take action, to be flexible, to be aggressive when we have to,” Fain said in an early October livestream to members.

Fain also recruited union longtimers to join his team, including people in research and organizing who were knowledgeable about the group’s history and had relationships with local chapters. They were key to identifying strike targets that would both cause pain to companies and be supported by workers

They were offering nearly unlimited cheap debt to keep the wheels of finance turning, and when that didn’t help, the Fed began purchasing massive quantities of government debt outright.

Investors dumped whatever they could, including ostensibly “risk-free” U.S. Treasury securities. As a global dash for dollars unfolded, Treasurys were no longer serving as the market’s traditional shock absorbers, amplifying extreme turmoil on Wall Street.

By week’s end, the Dow had plunged more than 10,000 points since mid-February as investors struggled to get their arms around what a halt to global commerce would mean for businesses that would soon have no revenue.

“It was sheer, unadulterated panic, of a magnitude that was far worse than in 2008 and 2009. Far worse,”

The idea of shutting down markets was especially discouraging: “It was a profoundly un-American thing to contemplate, to just shut everything down, and almost fatalistic—that we’re not going to get out of this.”

nearly two years later, most agree that the Fed’s actions helped to save the economy from going into a pandemic-induced tailspin.

“My thought was—I remember this very clearly—‘O.K. We have a four-or-five-day chance to really get our act together and get ahead of this. We’re gonna try to get ahead of this,’” Mr. Powell recalled later. “And we were going to do that by just announcing a ton of stuff on Monday morning.”

It worked. The Fed’s pledges to backstop an array of lending, announced on Monday, March 23, would unleash a torrent of private borrowing based on the mere promise of central bank action—together with a massive assist by Congress, which authorized hundreds of billions of dollars that would cover any losses.

If the hardest-hit companies like Carnival, with its fleet of 104 ships docked indefinitely, could raise money in capital markets, who couldn’t?

on April 9, where he shed an earlier reluctance to express an opinion about government spending policies, which are set by elected officials and not the Fed. He spoke in unusually moral terms. “All of us are affected,” he said. “But the burdens are falling most heavily on those least able to carry them…. They didn’t cause this. Their business isn’t closed because of anything they did wrong. This is what the great fiscal power of the United States is for—to protect these people as best we can from the hardships they are facing.”

They were extraordinary words from a Fed chair who during earlier, hot-button policy debates said the central bank needed to “stay in its lane” and avoid providing specific advice.

To avoid a widening rift between the market haves (who had been given access to Fed backstops) and the market have-nots (who had been left out because their debt was deemed too risky), Mr. Powell had supported a decision to extend the Fed’s lending to include companies that were being downgraded to “junk” status in the days after it agreed to backstop their bonds.

Most controversially, Mr. Powell recommended that the Fed purchase investment vehicles known as exchange-traded funds, or ETFs, that invest in junk debt. He and his colleagues feared that these “high-yield” bonds might buckle, creating a wave of bankruptcies that would cause long-term scarring in the economy.

Mr. Powell decided that it was better to err on the side of doing too much than not doing enough.

, Paul Singer, who runs the hedge-fund firm Elliott Management, warned that the Fed was sowing the seeds of a bigger crisis by absolving markets of any discipline. “Sadly, when people (including those who should know better) do something stupid and reckless and are not punished,” he wrote, “it is human nature that, far from thinking that they were lucky to have gotten away with something, they are encouraged to keep doing the stupid thing.”

The breathtaking speed with which the Fed moved and with which Wall Street rallied after the Fed’s announcements infuriated Dennis Kelleher, a former corporate lawyer and high-ranking Senate aide who runs Better Markets, an advocacy group lobbying for tighter financial regulations.

This is a ridiculous discussion no matter how heartfelt Powell is about ‘we can’t pick winners and losers’—to which my answer is, ‘So instead you just make them all winners?’”

“Literally, not only has no one in finance lost money, but they’ve all made more money than they could have dreamed,” said Mr. Kelleher. “It just can’t be the case that the only thing the Fed can do is open the fire hydrants wide for everybody

Mr. Powell later defended his decision to purchase ETFs that had invested in junk debt. “We wanted to find a surgical way to get in and support that market because it’s a huge market, and it’s a lot of people’s jobs… What were we supposed to do? Just let them die and lose all those jobs?” he said. “If that’s the biggest mistake we made, stipulating it as a mistake, I’m fine with that. It wasn’t time to be making finely crafted judgments,” Mr. Powell said. He hesitated for a moment before concluding. “Do I regret it? I don’t—not really.”

“We didn’t know there was a vaccine coming. The pandemic is just raging. And we don’t have a plan,” said Mr. Powell. “Nobody in the world has a plan. And in hindsight, the worry was, ‘What if we can’t really fully open the economy for a long time because the pandemic is just out there killing people?’”

Mr. Powell never saw this as a particularly likely outcome, “but it was around the edges of the conversation, and we were very eager to do everything we could to avoid that outcome,”

The Fed’s initial response in 2020 received mostly high marks—a notable contrast with the populist ire that greeted Wall Street bailouts following the 2008 financial crisis. North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, the top Republican on the House Financial Services Committee, gave Mr. Powell an “A-plus for 2020,” he said. “On a one-to-10 scale? It was an 11. He gets the highest, highest marks, and deserves them. The Fed as an institution deserves them.”

The pandemic was the most severe disruption of the U.S. economy since the Great Depression. Economists, financial-market professionals and historians are only beginning to wrestle with the implications of the aggressive response by fiscal and monetary policy makers.

Altogether, Congress approved nearly $5.9 trillion in spending in 2020 and 2021. Adjusted for inflation, that compares with approximately $1.8 trillion in 2008 and 2009.

By late 2021, it was clear that many private-sector forecasters and economists at the Fed had misjudged both the speed of the recovery and the ways in which the crisis had upset the economy’s equilibrium. Washington soon faced a different problem. Disoriented supply chains and strong demand—boosted by government stimulus—had produced inflation running above 7%.

because the pandemic shock was akin to a natural disaster, it allowed Mr. Powell and the Fed to sidestep concerns about moral hazard—that is, the possibility that their policies would encourage people to take greater risks knowing that they were protected against larger losses. If a future crisis is caused instead by greed or carelessness, the Fed would have to take such concerns more seriously.

The high inflation that followed in 2021 might have been worse if the U.S. had seen more widespread bankruptcies or permanent job losses in the early months of the pandemic.

an additional burst of stimulus spending in 2021, as vaccines hastened the reopening of the economy, raised the risk that monetary and fiscal policy together would flood the economy with money and further fuel inflation.

The surge in federal borrowing since 2020 creates other risks. It is manageable for now but could become very expensive if the Fed has to lift interest rates aggressively to cool the economy and reduce high inflation.

The Congressional Budget Office forecast in December 2020 that if rates rose by just 0.1 percentage point more than projected in each year of the decade, debt-service costs in 2030 would rise by $235 billion—more than the Pentagon had requested to spend in 2022 on the Navy.

its low-rate policies have coincided with—and critics say it has contributed to—a longer-running widening of wealth inequality.

In 2008, household wealth fell by $8 trillion. It rose by $13.5 trillion in 2020, and in the process, spotlighted the unequal distribution of wealth-building assets such as houses and stocks.

Without heavy spending from Washington, focused on the needs of the least well-off, these disparities might have attracted more negative scrutiny.

Finally, the Fed is a technocratic body that can move quickly because it operates under few political constraints. Turning to it as the first line of defense in this and future crises could compromise its institutional independence.

Step one, he said, was to get in the fight and try to win. Figuring out how to exit would be a better problem to have, because it would mean they had succeeded.

“We have a recovery that looks completely unlike other recoveries that we’ve had because we’ve put so much support behind the recovery,” Mr. Powell said last month. “Was it too much? I’m going to leave that to the historians.”

The final verdict on the 2020 crisis response may turn on whether Mr. Powell is able to bring inflation under control without a painful recession—either as sharp price increases from 2021 reverse on their own accord, as officials initially anticipated, or because the Fed cools down the economy by raising interest rates.

And yet, when people act as if Mr. Altman has nearly realized his long-held vision, he pushes back.

This past week, more than a thousand A.I. experts and tech leaders called on OpenAI and other companies to pause their work on systems like ChatGPT, saying they present “profound risks to society and humanity.”

As people realize that this technology is also a way of spreading falsehoods or even persuading people to do things they should not do, some critics are accusing Mr. Altman of reckless behavior.

“The hype over these systems — even if everything we hope for is right long term — is totally out of control for the short term,” he told me on a recent afternoon. There is time, he said, to better understand how these systems will ultimately change the world.

Many industry leaders, A.I. researchers and pundits see ChatGPT as a fundamental technological shift, as significant as the creation of the web browser or the iPhone. But few can agree on the future of this technology.

Some believe it will deliver a utopia where everyone has all the time and money ever needed. Others believe it could destroy humanity. Still others spend much of their time arguing that the technology is never as powerful as everyone says it is, insisting that neither nirvana nor doomsday is as close as it might seem.

he is often criticized from all directions. But those closest to him believe this is as it should be. “If you’re equally upsetting both extreme sides, then you’re doing something right,” said OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman.

To spend time with Mr. Altman is to understand that Silicon Valley will push this technology forward even though it is not quite sure what the implications will be

in 2019, he paraphrased Robert Oppenheimer, the leader of the Manhattan Project, who believed the atomic bomb was an inevitability of scientific progress. “Technology happens because it is possible,” he said

His life has been a fairly steady climb toward greater prosperity and wealth, driven by an effective set of personal skills — not to mention some luck. It makes sense that he believes that the good thing will happen rather than the bad.

He said his company was building technology that would “solve some of our most pressing problems, really increase the standard of life and also figure out much better uses for human will and creativity.”

He was not exactly sure what problems it will solve, but he argued that ChatGPT showed the first signs of what is possible. Then, with his next breath, he worried that the same technology could cause serious harm if it wound up in the hands of some authoritarian government.

Kelly Sims, a partner with the venture capital firm Thrive Capital who worked with Mr. Altman as a board adviser to OpenAI, said it was like he was constantly arguing with himself.

“In a single conversation,” she said, “he is both sides of the debate club.”

He takes pride in recognizing when a technology is about to reach exponential growth — and then riding that curve into the future.

he is also the product of a strange, sprawling online community that began to worry, around the same time Mr. Altman came to the Valley, that artificial intelligence would one day destroy the world. Called rationalists or effective altruists, members of this movement were instrumental in the creation of OpenAI.

Does it make sense to ride that curve if it could end in diaster? Mr. Altman is certainly determined to see how it all plays out.

“Why is he working on something that won’t make him richer? One answer is that lots of people do that once they have enough money, which Sam probably does. The other is that he likes power.”

“He has a natural ability to talk people into things,” Mr. Graham said. “If it isn’t inborn, it was at least fully developed before he was 20. I first met Sam when he was 19, and I remember thinking at the time: ‘So this is what Bill Gates must have been like.

poker taught Mr. Altman how to read people and evaluate risk.

It showed him “how to notice patterns in people over time, how to make decisions with very imperfect information, how to decide when it was worth pain, in a sense, to get more information,” he told me while strolling across his ranch in Napa. “It’s a great game.”

He believed, according to his younger brother Max, that he was one of the few people who could meaningfully change the world through A.I. research, as opposed to the many people who could do so through politics.

In 2019, just as OpenAI’s research was taking off, Mr. Altman grabbed the reins, stepping down as president of Y Combinator to concentrate on a company with fewer than 100 employees that was unsure how it would pay its bills.

Within a year, he had transformed OpenAI into a nonprofit with a for-profit arm. That way he could pursue the money it would need to build a machine that could do anything the human brain could do.

Mr. Brockman, OpenAI’s president, said Mr. Altman’s talent lies in understanding what people want. “He really tries to find the thing that matters most to a person — and then figure out how to give it to them,” Mr. Brockman told me. “That is the algorithm he uses over and over.”

Mr. Yudkowsky and his writings played key roles in the creation of both OpenAI and DeepMind, another lab intent on building artificial general intelligence.

“These are people who have left an indelible mark on the fabric of the tech industry and maybe the fabric of the world,” he said. “I think Sam is going to be one of those people.”

The trouble is, unlike the days when Apple, Microsoft and Meta were getting started, people are well aware of how technology can transform the world — and how dangerous it can be.

Mr. Scott of Microsoft believes that Mr. Altman will ultimately be discussed in the same breath as Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.

The woman was the Canadian singer Grimes, Mr. Musk’s former partner, and the hat guy was Eliezer Yudkowsky, a self-described A.I. researcher who believes, perhaps more than anyone, that artificial intelligence could one day destroy humanity.

The selfie — snapped by Mr. Altman at a party his company was hosting — shows how close he is to this way of thinking. But he has his own views on the dangers of artificial intelligence.

In March, Mr. Altman tweeted out a selfie, bathed by a pale orange flash, that showed him smiling between a blond woman giving a peace sign and a bearded guy wearing a fedora.

He also helped spawn the vast online community of rationalists and effective altruists who are convinced that A.I. is an existential risk. This surprisingly influential group is represented by researchers inside many of the top A.I. labs, including OpenAI.

They don’t see this as hypocrisy: Many of them believe that because they understand the dangers clearer than anyone else, they are in the best position to build this technology.

Mr. Altman believes that effective altruists have played an important role in the rise of artificial intelligence, alerting the industry to the dangers. He also believes they exaggerate these dangers.

As OpenAI developed ChatGPT, many others, including Google and Meta, were building similar technology. But it was Mr. Altman and OpenAI that chose to share the technology with the world.

Many in the field have criticized the decision, arguing that this set off a race to release technology that gets things wrong, makes things up and could soon be used to rapidly spread disinformation.

Mr. Altman argues that rather than developing and testing the technology entirely behind closed doors before releasing it in full, it is safer to gradually share it so everyone can better understand risks and how to handle them.

He told me that it would be a “very slow takeoff.”

When I asked Mr. Altman if a machine that could do anything the human brain could do would eventually drive the price of human labor to zero, he demurred. He said he could not imagine a world where human intelligence was useless.

If he’s wrong, he thinks he can make it up to humanity.

His grand idea is that OpenAI will capture much of the world’s wealth through the creation of A.G.I. and then redistribute this wealth to the people. In Napa, as we sat chatting beside the lake at the heart of his ranch, he tossed out several figures — $100 billion, $1 trillion, $100 trillion.

If A.G.I. does create all that wealth, he is not sure how the company will redistribute it. Money could mean something very different in this new world.

But as he once told me: “I feel like the A.G.I. can help with that.”

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.

But is the gender phantasm as crucial to the global far right as Butler claims?

Butler has little to say about the appeal of nationalism and community, insistence on ethnic purity, opposition to immigration, anxiety over economic and social stresses, fear of middle-class-status loss, hatred of “elites.”

why Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán is so popular, it would be less his invocation of the gender phantasm and more his ruthless determination to keep immigrants out, especially Muslim ones, along with his delivery of massive social services to families in an attempt to raise the birth rate

The chapter of Who’s Afraid of Gender? that is most relevant for American and British readers is probably the one about the women, many of them British, whom opponents call “TERFs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), but who call themselves “gender-critical feminists.”

But is obsession with “gender” really the primary motive behind current right-wing movements? And why is it so hard to trust that the noise around “gender” might actually be indicative of people’s real feelings, and not just the demagogue-fomented distraction Butler asser

Instead of proving that “gender” is a crucial part of what motivates popular support for right-wing authoritarianism, Butler simply asserts that it is, and then ties it all up with a bow called “fascism.”

ascism is a word that Butler admits is not perfect but then goes on to use repeatedly. I’m sure I’ve used it myself as a shorthand when I’m writing quickly, but it’s a bit manipulative. As used by Butler and much of the left, it covers way too many different issues and suggests that if you aren’t on board with the Butlerian worldview on every single one of them, a brown shirt must surely be hanging in your closet.

As they define it—“fascist passions or political trends are those which seek to strip people of the basic rights they require to live”—most societies for most of history have been fascist, including, for long stretches, our own

Instead of facing up to the problems of, for example, war, declining living standards, environmental damage, and climate change, right-wing leaders whip up hysteria about threats to patriarchy, traditional families, and heterosexuality.

They discuss only two authors at any length, the philosopher Kathleen Stock and J. K. Rowling. Butler does not engage with their writing in any detail—they do not quote even one sentence from Stock’s Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, a serious book that has been much discussed, or indeed from any other gender-crit work, except for some writing from Rowling, including her essay in which she describes domestic violence at the hands of her first husband, an accusation he admits to in part.

They dismiss, with that invocation of a “phantasm,” apprehension about the presence of trans women in women’s single-sex spaces, (as well as, gender-crits would add, biological men falsely claiming to be trans in order to gain access to same), concerns for biologically female athletes who feel cheated out of scholarships and trophies, and the slight a biological woman might experience by being referred to as a “menstruator.”

Butler wants to dismiss gender-crits as fascist-adjacent: Indeed, in an interview, they compare Stock and Rowling to Putin and the pope.

It does seem odd that Butler, for whom everything about the body is socially produced, would be so uninterested in exploring the ways that trans identity is itself socially produced, at least in part—by, for example, homophobia and misogyny and the hypersexualization of young girls, by social media and online life, by the increasing popularity of cosmetic surgery, by the libertarian-individualist presumption that you can be whatever you want.

what is authenticity

In every other context, Butler works to demolish the idea of the eternal human—everything is contingent—except for when it comes to being transgender. There, the individual, and only the individual, knows themself.

I can't tell you how many left and liberal people I know who keep quiet about their doubts because they fear being ostracized professionally or socially. Nobody wants to be accused of putting trans people's lives in danger, and, after all, don't we all want, as the slogan goes, to “Be Kind”?

The trouble is that, in the long run, the demand for self-suppression fuels reaction. Polls show declining support for various trans demands for acceptance . People don’t like being forced by social pressure to deny what they think of as the reality of sex and gender.

They cite the civil-rights activist and singer Bernice Johnson Reagon’s call for “difficult coalitions” but forget that coalitions necessarily involve compromise and choosing your battles, not just accusing people of sharing the views of fascists

What if instead of trying to suppress the questioning of skeptics, we admit we don’t have many answers? What if, instead, we had a conversation? After all, isn’t that what philosophy is all about?