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Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern is adamant that New Zealand will complete four weeks of lockdown — two full 14-day incubation cycles — before letting up. She has, however, given the Easter Bunny special dispensation to work this weekend.

this heavily tourism-reliant country — it gets about 4 million international visitors a year, almost as many as its total population — did the previously unthinkable: It shut its borders to foreigners March 19.

Two days later, Ardern delivered a televised address from her office — the first time since 1982 that an Oval Office-style speech had been given — announcing a coronavirus response alert plan involving four stages, with a full lockdown being Level 4.

A group of influential leaders got on the phone with her the following day to urge moving to Level 4.

“It’s inevitable that we will have to shut down anyway, so we would rather it be sharp and short.”

On March 23, a Monday, Ar­dern delivered another statement and gave the country 48 hours to prepare for a Level 4 lockdown. “We currently have 102 cases,” she said. “But so did Italy once.”

From that Wednesday night, everyone had to stay at home for four weeks unless they worked in an essential job, such as health care, or were going to the supermarket or exercising near their home.

From the earliest stages, Ar­dern and her team have spoken in simple language: Stay home. Don’t have contact with anyone outside your household “bubble.” Be kind. We’re all in this together.

there has been a sense of collective purpose. The police phone line for nonemergencies has been overwhelmed with people calling to “dob in,” as we say here, reporting others they think are breaching the rules.

The response has been notably apolitical. The center-right National Party has clearly made a decision not to criticize the government’s response — and in fact to help it.

After peaking at 89 on April 2, the daily number of new cases ticked down to 67 on Monday and 54 on Tuesday. The vast majority of cases can be linked to international travel, making contact tracing relatively easy, and many are consolidated into identifiable clusters.

The nascent slowdown reflected “a triumph of science and leadership,”

“Other countries have had a gradual ramp-up, but our approach is exactly the opposite,” he said. While other Western countries have tried to slow the disease and “flatten the curve,” New Zealand has tried to stamp it out entirely.

The government won’t be able to allow people free entry into New Zealand until the virus has stopped circulating globally or a vaccine has been developed

with strict border control, restrictions could be gradually relaxed, and life inside New Zealand could return to almost normal.

Ardern has said her government is considering mandatory quarantine for New Zealanders returning to the country post-lockdown. “I really want a watertight system at our border,”

About 4,000 years ago, people started burning the forest, which was mostly bamboo, just enough to make small openings. They may have planted maize or squash, weeded out some underbrush, and transported seeds or saplings to create a partly curated forest of useful tree products that Dr. Watling calls a “prehistoric supermarket.” After that, they started building the geoglyphs. The presence of just a few artifacts, and the layout of the earthworks, suggest they weren’t used as ancient villages or for military defenses. They were likely built for rituals, some archaeologists suspect.

in contrast with the large-scale deforestation we see today — which threatens about 20 percent of the largest rain forest in the world — ancient indigenous people of the Amazon practiced something more akin to what we now call agroforestry. They restricted burns to site locations and maintained the surrounding landscape, creating small, temporary clearings in the bamboo and promoting the growth of plants like palm, cedar and Brazil nut that were, and still are, useful commodities. Today, indigenous groups around the world continue these sustainable practices in forests.

Another permanent exhibit, on China’s ancient history, also presents an idealized version of the past. It tells the uplifting story of Chinese ethnic groups pulling together to create “brilliant achievements.”

few countries can compete with China in so completely suppressing the shades of gray about their past.

“Ancient China,” a mammoth survey of thousands of years of history scheduled to open April 15. The exhibition walks a delicate line. Organized by Chinese dynasties, it tries to show how all of the 56 ethnic groups in today’s China have always worked together harmoniously. Even the Mongolian empire, which conquered China in the 12th century, is made part of the story. It is referred to as a precursor of today’s multicultural China. “It ignores the conflicts, which real history shouldn’t do,” said an archaeology professor at Peking University who asked to remain anonymous because of the issue’s delicacy. “This is why I would not call this exhibition real history but propaganda.”

“The Road to Rejuvenation,” which recounts the history of China from the First Opium War of 1839 to the present day. This was the exhibit that in past years was fraught with the mos

The general story line, ingrained in every Chinese student, is that China was humiliated by Western powers. Then some well-meaning but misguided patriots took up the fight until they were properly led by the Communists, whose inevitable victory in 1949 started China’s recovery. After “building socialism” during the Communists’ first 30 years in power, the country took off during the past 30 years of reform. There is no discussion of why the party dropped central planning policies in the late 1970s, or even that such a momentous shift took place.

The Enlightenment show, although tantalizing, will also avoid overt mention of the political ideas — such as universal human rights — that drove that period of European history. “It’s an art exhibit and not a political show,”

But Milton also stirringly articulated  how the formation of private convictions required public spaces, public institutions—what Jürgen Habermas so famously defined as the “public sphere.”

By the time, he wrote Areopagitica, it was robust: coffee houses, newspapers, book publishers and bookstores, theatres, and meeting places—the locales that allowed individuals to come together to form a public. These were spaces largely outside the grasp of church and state—and, in fact, many of these institutions emerged with the express purpose of liberating society from the grasp of church and state.

Nobody designed the public sphere from a dorm room or a Silicon Valley garage. It just started to organically accrete, as printed volumes began to pile, as liberal ideas gained currency and made space for even more liberal ideas. Institutions grew, and then over the centuries acquired prestige and authority. Newspapers and journals evolved into what we call media. Book publishing emerged from the printing guilds, and eventually became taste-making, discourse-shaping enterprises. What was born in Milton’s lifetime lasted until our own.

It took centuries for the public sphere to develop—and the technology companies have eviscerated it in a flash. By radically remaking the advertising business and commandeering news distribution, Google and Facebook have damaged the economics of journalism. Amazon has thrashed the bookselling business in the U.S. They have shredded old ideas about intellectual property—which had provided the economic and philosophical basis for authorship

Big tech has made a fetish of efficiency, of data, of the wisdom of the market. These are the underlying principles that explain why Google returns such terrible responses to the God query. Google is merely giving us what’s popular, what’s most clicked upon, not what’s worthy

This assault on the public sphere is an assault on free expression. In the West, free expression is a transcendent right only in theory—in practice its survival is contingent and tenuous.

We’re witnessing the way in which public conversation is subverted by name-calling and harassment. We can convince ourselves that these are fringe characteristics of social media, but social media has implanted such tendencies at the core of the culture. They are in fact practiced by mainstream journalists, mobs of the well meaning, and the president of the United States. The toxicity of the environment shreds the quality of conversation and deters meaningful participation in it

it becomes harder and harder to cling to the idea of the rational individual, formulating opinions on the basis of conscience. And as we lose faith in that principle, the public will lose faith in the necessity of preserving the protections of free speech.

The public sphere was always rife with manipulation—political persuasion, after all, involves a healthy dose of emotionalism and the tapping of submerged biases

humankind is entering into an era where manipulation has grown simultaneously invisible, terrifyingly precise, and embedded in everyday life.

And now, the tech giants are racing to insert themselves more intimately in people’s lives, this time as  personal assistants. The tech companies want us to tie ourselves closely to their machines

These machines don’t present us with choices. They aren’t designed to present us with a healthy menu of options. They anticipate our wants and needs, even our informational and cultural wants and needs.

What’s so pernicious about these machines is that they weaponize us against ourselves. They take our data—everywhere we have traveled on the web, every query we’ve entered into Google, even the posts we begin to write but never publish—and exploit this knowledge to reduce us to marionettes

To state the obvious, these are multinational corporations, with an ultimate interest in their bottom lines. They will never be capable of regulating the public sphere that they control in any name other than their own profit.

the Facebook CEO supplied a response that befuddled the senator: “I think the real question, as the internet becomes more important in people's lives, is what is the right regulation, not whether there should be or not.”

now that these companies bestride the markets in which they roam, the primary danger they face isn’t meddling regulators or hyperactive legislators. What the behemoths of Silicon Valley truly fear is the possibility that antitrust laws will be deploye

tech companies carry a very different sort of cargo—they trade in the commodities of speech. Once we extend the state into this realm, we’re entering danger territory.

We don’t need to use our imaginations here. There are examples all over the world—in Russia, in China—where governments have made their peace with social media, by setting the terms that govern it. These regimes permit a cacophony of ideas, except for the ones that truly challenge political power.

The present global explosion of anxiety and hate is unlike anything most of us have ever witnessed. People don’t know how to confront these evils

In the face of such menace, it’s natural to appeal to a higher power for protection—but in our panic we need to be clear about which threats are genuine and which are merely rhetorical. And panic shouldn’t lead us to seek protection that inadvertently squashes our own liberties.

Silicon Valley doesn’t understand truth as a quest or trial, but as an engineering challenge. They believe human behavior and human choices can be predicted by algorithms on the basis of past behavior

They believe that our lives can be programmed to be more efficient. By steering and nudging us, by designing the architecture of our decision-making process, they claim to be relieving of us of the burden of choice. Silicon Valley talks endlessly about the virtues of the frictionless life.

As we join Zuckerberg’s community, he fantasizes that the sense of connection will cause our differences to melt away—like a digital version of the old Coca Cola commercial, or, as I argue in my book, World Without Mind, a revival of the sixties counterculture and the vision of life on a commune.

In other words, preservation of democracy requires preserving this ecosystem of ideas that has miraculously persisted with us since the 17th century. People can’t afford to be seduced by the false prophets of disruption, the charlatans who argue that we abandon old wisdoms in the face of new gadgets

We need to shape the culture so that the prestige of engineering doesn’t continue to come at the expense of the humanities. We need to preserve literature as a primary technology for interrogating the meaning of life. We need to resist the tendency to reduce the world to data.

In both countries, the public initially resisted and then complied, in part because the information flowing from officials at every level was largely consistent.

Playing their own versions of explainer in chief, Mr. Morrison has veered toward conservative radio, while Ms. Ardern prefers Facebook Live. But they’ve both received praise from scientists for listening and adapting to evidence.

“It’s a case of politicians just not being in the way,” said Ian Mackay, an immunologist at the University of Queensland who has been involved in response planning for the pandemic. “It’s a mix of things, but I think it comes down to taking advice based on expertise.”

Australia and New Zealand have squashed the curve

Australia, a nation of 25 million people that had been on track for 153,000 cases by Easter, has recorded a total of 6,670 infections and 78 deaths. It has a daily growth rate of less than 1 percent, with per capita testing among the highest in the world.

New Zealand’s own daily growth rate, after soaring in March, is also below 1 percent, with 1,456 confirmed cases and 17 deaths. It has just 361 active cases in a country of five million.

These figures put the two countries closer to Taiwan and South Korea, which have controlled the virus’s spread for now, than to the United States and Europe — even places seen as success stories, like Germany.

It all started with scientists. In Australia, as soon as China released the genetic code for the coronavirus in early January, pathologists in public health laboratories started sharing plans for tests. In every state and territory, they jumped ahead of politicians.

The government then opened the budgetary floodgates to support suffering workers and add health care capacity. When infections started climbing, many of the labs and hospitals hired second and third rounds of scientists to help.

That collaboration set the tone. Many of the state and local task forces spurred on by Mr. Morrison’s early action have stayed in constant contact, drawing in academics who independently started to model the virus’s spread

The newly formed national cabinet has delivered a surprising level of consensus for a country with a loose federal system subject to high levels of discord among state premiers, whose roles and powers resemble those of American governors.

Dr. Michael Baker, a physician and professor at the University of Otago in Wellington, became a prominent voice outside the government pushing for elimination of the virus, not just its suppression.

In Australia, officials are mostly discussing elimination in private, as a potential side effect of a strategy they still describe as suppression

elimination would be a “nirvana” scenario — an achievement that would be tough to maintain without indefinite bans on international travel or 14-day quarantines until a vaccine arrives.

Like Dr. Anthony Fauci, the face of the American government’s scientific response, they are known for extensive public health pedigrees, calm demeanors and no-nonsense adherence to facts.

He and others like him at the local level are key factors in a revival of trust in government that has appeared in poll after poll lately, even as the two countries’ economies have cratered and people have been told to severely restrict their lives.

some scientists wonder if eliminating the virus with good management might rebuild some faith not just in democracy, but also in the value of expertise.

“Maybe we’ll see the return of science,” Dr. Mackay added. “I doubt it, but who knows.”

“I think everyone is seeing through the P.R. at this point and focusing on both their economic and political power,” Sarah Miller, a critic of Amazon, said about the company. Ms. Miller, who runs the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust think tank, added, “I think the narrative is cooked now on their status as a monopoly, their status as an abusive employer and their status as one of the biggest spenders on lobbying in Washington, D.C.”

“As it relates to progressive Democrats in general, we’ve been surprised by some of the negative things we’ve seen certain members say in the press and on social media,” he said. “If there’s a progressive company in this country, it’s Amazon. Find me another large company paying two times the minimum wage, providing great health benefits from Day 1, 95 percent education reimbursement, safe working environment, and so on. We really think we are an example of what a U.S. company should be doing for its employees.”

Mr. Sanders said he appreciated Amazon’s help on the minimum wage. “On the other hand,” he said, “to my mind, I find it hard to understand why Jeff Bezos, the owner of Amazon and the wealthiest guy in the world, worth about $182 billion, is spending millions of dollars fighting a union organizing effort in Alabama, where his workers are trying to organize for better wages and better working conditions.”

Under Mr. Carney’s leadership, Amazon has taken steps to satisfy its liberal critics. In 2018, Senator Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, attacked the company over its wages. Not long after that, the company announced that it would raise its minimum wage to $15 an hour and push federal policymakers to do the same.

The union organizers in Bessemer have increasingly attracted support from the White House and top lawmakers in Congress. Labor leaders spent weeks pushing Mr. Biden’s staff to have him weigh in on the election at the warehouse.

“We’ve got to protect every worker’s right to form and join a union, and to bargain collectively for better pay, quality health care, a safer workplace and a secure retirement,” said Senator Patty Murray, a Democrat from Washington

Amazon has made efforts to reach out to the new administration. Dave Clark, who runs the company’s consumer business, sent a letter to the White House in January offering to help with the distribution of the coronavirus vaccine and met virtually with Jeff Zients, the White House’s coronavirus coordinator, to discuss the vaccine rollout.

It recalled the message Amazon had waiting for a delegation of progressive lawmakers who met with union representatives in Alabama this month.At the warehouse, workers held up a large banner with text in bold letters: “CONGRESS: PLEASE MATCH AMAZON’S $15/HOUR MINIMUM WAGE!”

The impact of Haajar’s story may be even broader, according to one team of researchers. David Clingingsmith, Asim Ijaz Khwaja, and Michael Kremer studied the impact of the Hajj on social tolerance and found, when comparing Pakistanis who had completed the pilgrimage with those who had not, that the experience of the pilgrimage “increases belief in equality and harmony among ethnic groups and Islamic sects and leads to more favorable attitudes toward women, including greater acceptance of female education and employment.”

While experiencing the rituals of Hajj, the crowds and the chaos, the calm and the heat, the traffic and the peaceful moments of contemplation, all of life seems to be squashed into small spaces in small pockets of time. Walking between Haajar’s hills of Safa and Marwa, I was reminded that the Islamic feminist scholars of today still walk in the brave footsteps of one of the noble mothers of Islam: Haajar.

Iran has also admitted shooting down a Ukrainian passenger jet in error, killing 176 people. Amid anti-regime protests in Tehran, the threat of a US-Iran war has receded.

“They’re together sir,” Trump said he was told. “Sir, they have two minutes and 11 seconds. No emotion. ‘Two minutes and 11 seconds to live, sir. They’re in the car, they’re in an armoured vehicle. Sir, they have approximately one minute to live, sir. Thirty seconds. Ten, nine, eight ...’

According to CNN, Trump told his audience in Florida the death of al-Muhandis meant the US took out “two for the price of one”. He also repeated an erroneous claim that the Iraqi was “the head of Hezbollah”. Hezbollah is an Iranian-backed militant group based in Lebanon.

CNN said the audio of Friday’s speech also included a complaint that Conan, a Belgian Malinois dog wounded in the Baghdadi raid, “became very famous” and “got more credit than I did”.

...we’re asking readers, like you, to make a contribution in support of the Guardian’s open, independent journalism. This has been a turbulent decade across the world – protest, populism, mass migration and the escalating climate crisis. The Guardian has been in every corner of the globe, reporting with tenacity, rigour and authority on the most critical events of our lifetimes. At a time when factual information is both scarcer and more essential than ever, we believe that each of us deserves access to accurate reporting with integrity at its heart.

We have upheld our editorial independence in the face of the disintegration of traditional media – with social platforms giving rise to misinformation, the seemingly unstoppable rise of big tech and independent voices being squashed by commercial ownership. The Guardian’s independence means we can set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Our journalism is free from commercial and political bias – never influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This makes us different. It means we can challenge the powerful without fear and give a voice to those less heard.

That night the temporary campground under the bridge swelled to the hundreds, including many who had fled with just the clothes on their backs and who were now sleeping in their cars. The discount department store sold out of tents that night, we were told. Many people had not intended to flee, but changed their minds when they saw the size and speed of the smoke column.

The next morning at the official evacuation centre it was easy to spot those whose houses had been lost. They walked around white-faced, desperate to talk to someone but wary of the notebook. I made friends with the animals: 250 horses held safe in the saleyards, countless dogs, five chickens laying eggs in the back of a Landrover. Shellshocked humans who did not want to talk about how they were doing told me about how their pets were faring, and then their kids, and then finally themselves.

My first fire callout this season was to the well-heeled Sydney suburb of Turramurra in November, where no property was lost, houses were doused in the delightfully coloured pink fire retardant and some departing firefighters handed us ice creams on their way out.

But of course an event of this size and drama cannot be covered solely from the office. The logistical challenges of putting reporters and photographers into fire zones hundreds of kilometres from their Sydney or Melbourne bases have been huge

In Kurrajong Heights, photographer Jessica Hromas and I met a strike team waiting for a fire to come up from the gorge and into the suburbs. A firefighter told us where to park our car – facing out and with doors unlocked – and said he’d give us a radio so he could tell us when to escape.

There has been a lot of anger and politics swirling around Australia’s bushfires, as well as a lot of facts – some relevant, some not, and some fake.

So while some of my colleagues have been delivering blistering and heart-wrenching narratives from the fire grounds, I’ve been knee deep in academic papers about bushfires, and conversations about the Forest Fire Danger Index and the Indian Ocean dipole.

As the fires took hold in NSW and continued in Queensland, a blame game emerged. These fires had little to do with the climate crisis, some were saying, but were down to “greenies” and their “policies” to stop hazard-reduction burning in forests and national parks.

I’ve spoken to I don’t know how many experts in their field over the last few months. I’ve disturbed conservationists and scientists on their holidays. One ecologist on Kangaroo Island was telling me what was going on while she and her children evacuated her house from the threat of a fire. The climate crisis comes up in every conversation.

We have upheld our editorial independence in the face of the disintegration of traditional media – with social platforms giving rise to misinformation, the seemingly unstoppable rise of big tech and independent voices being squashed by commercial ownership. The Guardian’s independence means we can set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Our journalism is free from commercial and political bias – never influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This makes us different. It means we can challenge the powerful without fear and give a voice to those less heard.

Acerbic, even curmudgeonly – his catalogue of America’s social ills is harsh but fair – Bacevich veers between the commonplace and the sarcastic. “The promotion of globalization included a generous element of hucksterism,” he writes, “the equivalent of labeling a large cup of strong coffee a ‘grande dark roast’ while referring to the server handing it to you as a ‘barista’.”

Even if the Donald Rumsfeld-endorsed, technology-friendly “Revolution in Military Affairs” only “purported to describe the culmination of a long evolutionary march toward perfection”, which great power today does not rely on technology for military might? And what, other than isolationism, “would preclude the possibility of another Vietnam”?

Yet “one nuclear bomb can ruin your whole day”, as the bumper sticker read, and any leader is responsible for maintaining vigilance. Which threats can be ignored? Air piracy? Chemical weapons? Nuclear smuggling? Bacevich never offers what he would do to states harboring terrorists, even while noting failures in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Some people saw what was happening and sought to answer the question Rabbit Angstrom asked and Bacevich cites: “Without the cold war, what’s the point of being an American?” They were ignored.

Despite Bacevich’s call for conversation on issues formerly “beyond the pale” such as abandoning globalism and “militarism”, his book has a fatal weakness: he never quite says what or who he is for. He is too good a historian not to know there was a tendency of “anti-anti-communism” during the cold war. Perhaps his book is about “anti-anti-Trumpism”. But “the pale” is there for a reason

...we’re asking readers, like you, to make a contribution in support of the Guardian’s open, independent journalism. This has been a turbulent decade across the world – protest, populism, mass migration and the escalating climate crisis. The Guardian has been in every corner of the globe, reporting with tenacity, rigour and authority on the most critical events of our lifetimes. At a time when factual information is both scarcer and more essential than ever, we believe that each of us deserves access to accurate reporting with integrity at its heart.

We have upheld our editorial independence in the face of the disintegration of traditional media – with social platforms giving rise to misinformation, the seemingly unstoppable rise of big tech and independent voices being squashed by commercial ownership. The Guardian’s independence means we can set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Our journalism is free from commercial and political bias – never influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This makes us different. It means we can challenge the powerful without fear and give a voice to those less heard.

Those students, he says, "ought to be benefited. And by the way, a majority of those students are African American, and that's an issue that can't be ignored in this discussion either."

Popular sports bring in money for other athletic programs But at the same time, Roberts notes the NCAA system has benefited students who have scholarships to play other sports

The case before the Supreme Court involves 126 teams that play big-time football and men's and women's basketball. But for all of college sports, Roberts and other sports law experts say, the lower courts have left these issues in a legal mess.

California, for instance, passed a law last year effectively requiring schools to allow athletes to profit from their names, images, and likenesses. After the law was enacted, the NCAA abruptly reversed its long-held opposition to such benefits, and said it would issue new policies early next year.

its long-held opposition to such benefits, and said it would issue new policies early nex

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A Supreme Court decision siding with the NCAA would likely fortify the NCAA's effort to maintain tighter restrictions on benefits for big-time college and basketball players. A decision holding that the NCAA has gone too far would likely lead to more benefits for players whose hard work and frequent injuries allow the schools they play for to reap billions in TV and other revenue.

While that revenue sometimes benefits lesser-known sports and players at those schools, many experts say it more often benefits coaches and assistant coaches who are paid tens of millions of dollars, and allows schools to spend millions on mammoth stadiums and lavish locker rooms.

Last week 60 minutes reported that "at least 30 universities have cut almost 100 programs: soccer, squash, golf, gymnastics. Football powerhouse Clemson cut men's track and field. Stanford eliminated 11 sports. Schools are honoring existing scholarships, but more than 1,500 student-athletes, both men and women, will no longer have a team to compete for."

Zig-zagging through this legal minefield will be difficult for the Supreme Court, to say the least. And it may well issue a narrow opinion that still leaves most of these questions unresolved. But the fact that the justices decided to take on the this case, when it has dodged similar ones in the past, indicates they are at least serious about the issues.

For him, Tesla is about trying to save humanity from global warming while SpaceX is about making humanity a multiplanetary species in case things don’t work out on Earth.

He said he worried that activating Starlink then would have further stoked the conflict. “I think if the Ukrainian attacks had succeeded in sinking the Russian fleet, it would have been like a mini Pearl Harbor and led to a major escalation,” he is quoted as saying in Walter Isaacson’s new biography, “Elon Musk.” 

“I tend to view the future as a series of probabilities—there’s certain probability that something will go wrong, some probability that it’ll go right; it’s kind of a spectrum of things. And to the degree that there is free will versus determinism, then we want to try to exercise that free will to ensure a great future.”

“Nuclear war probability is rising rapidly,” he tweeted last fall after months of fighting between the two countries. 

with the purchase of Twitter-turned-X, Musk couched the decision as keeping the social-media platform as a bastion for free speech in what he sees as a larger battle against cultural forces trying to squash diverse thought—or, as he calls it, the “woke mind virus.”

“Accept worst case outcome & assign it a probability, which is usually very low. Now think of good things in life & assign them probabilities—many are certain!” he tweeted a couple of years ago. “Bringing anxiety/fear to the conscious mind saps it of limbic emotional strength.”

“We’re like a pro sports team that has been winning the championship for so long and so many years in a row that we have forgotten what losing even looks like,” Musk said. “And that’s when the champion team loses.” 

“My brother believes an economic winter is coming every single day,” Kimbal Musk once told lawyers about his older sibling’s mindset during a legal procedure. 

“To be frank, civilization is feeling a little fragile these days,” Musk said last year during an update on SpaceX’s large rocket development. “I’m an optimist, but I think we got to protect the downside here and try to build that city on Mars as soon as possible and secure the future of life.”

Among his stated worries, of which he has tweeted: “a big rock will hit Earth eventually & we currently have no defense” and “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”

he framed his creation of an artificial-intelligence startup called xAI in his typically grandiose terms, cautioning that the technology has the potential to spiral out of control and essentially turn on its master, something akin to “The Terminator” movie. 

“I think it’s actually important for us to worry about a `Terminator’ future in order to avoid a `Terminator’ future,”

This past week, Musk returned to calling for peace, saying U.S. policies risk pushing Russia into an alliance with China just as the Israel-Hamas war has the potential to expand. He cautioned that many people overestimate U.S. military might in such a scenario

“Cheery fatalism is very effective.”

they gave many explanations, but one of the most compelling—and depressing—is rooted in how our education system teaches kids to relate to books.

where I was in public elementary school in the early ’80s, we did have state assessments that tested reading level and comprehension, but the focus was on reading as many books as possible and engaging emotionally with them as a way to develop the requisite skills.

the focus on reading analytically seems to be squashing that organic enjoyment

By middle school, not only is there even less time for activities such as class read-alouds, but instruction also continues to center heavily on passage analysis

here’s how one educator experienced in writing Common Core–aligned curricula proposes this be taught: First, teachers introduce the concepts of nonliteral and figurative language. Then, kids read a single paragraph from Amelia Bedelia and answer written questions.

Jumping into a paragraph in the middle of a book is about as appealing for most kids as cleaning their room.

the advent of accountability laws and policies, starting with No Child Left Behind in 2001, and accompanying high-stakes assessments based on standards, be they Common Core or similar state alternatives, has put enormous pressure on instructors to teach to these tests at the expense of best practices.

“There’s a whole generation of kids who associate reading with assessment now,”

this hyperfocus on analysis comes at a steep price: The love of books and storytelling is being lost.

the idea that reading all kinds of books is enjoyable is not the one kids seem to be receiving.

Longer books, for example, are considered less “fun”; in addition, some librarians, teachers, and parents are noticing a decline in kids’ reading stamina after the disruption of the pandemic.

we need to get to the root of the problem, which is not about book lengths but the larger educational system. We can’t let tests control how teachers teach: Close reading may be easy to measure, but it’s not the way to get kids to fall in love with storytelling

Teachers need to be given the freedom to teach in developmentally appropriate ways, using books they know will excite and challenge kids.

Kids should be required to read more books, and instead of just analyzing passages, they should be encouraged to engage with these books the way they connect with “fun” series, video games, and TV shows.