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Mr. Biden has pledged to reinvigorate America’s climate policy by swiftly rejoining the Paris climate accord. Analysts said he would also try to heal strains in the NATO alliance, which has been under relentless attack by Mr. Trump, who has accused other members of not paying their fair share of its costs.

Mr. Johnson cast his initiatives as gestures of support to allies, even at a time when the pandemic has busted public finances.

“Britain must be true to our history, to stand alongside our allies, sharing the burden, and bringing our expertise to bear on the world’s toughest problems,” Mr. Johnson said in introducing the defense spending plan to the House of Commons.

the Biden team will look favorably on this announcement because Biden will be as sensitive as Trump was, and Obama was, to the willingness of allies to shoulder more of the burden.”

Mr. Johnson has yet to deliver on another challenge that would please Mr. Biden: a trade agreement with the European Union. Mr. Biden has already voiced concern to Mr. Johnson that if the negotiations go awry, it could jeopardize the Good Friday Accord, which ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.

The defense budget, Mr. Johnson claimed, will be the largest expansion of military spending since the Cold War: an increase of 24.1 billion pounds ($31.9 billion) over the next four years. That is nearly triple the increases his Conservative Party promised in its policy manifesto during the 2019 election.

The climate package, which claims to do nothing less than ignite a “green industrial revolution,” sets a goal of making Britain a net zero emitter of carbon dioxide by 2050. It would change the way people heat their homes and invest in alternative energy sources, in addition to banning the sale of new fossil fuel-powered vehicles by 2030.

The climate package lacked the levels of investment pledged by Germany and France to reach their emissions-reduction targets. The military budget contained no information on what the money would be spent on; that is to be decided by a review of foreign, defense, security and development policy that will concluded early next year.

Mr. Biden’s defeat of Mr. Trump has radically reshaped the landscape for Mr. Johnson, confronting him with an American leader who opposed Brexit and is unlikely to make an Anglo-American trade agreement a priority, as the pro-Brexit Mr. Trump did.

Britain’s emphasis on defense, Mr. Fraser said, plays up a competitive advantage over France and Germany. Both spend proportionately less on their militaries and are not as closely integrated in security matters with the United States.

Britain confirmed the creation of a National Cyber Force, a joint venture of the Defense Ministry and GCHQ, the electronic surveillance agency.

Still, as several experts noted, Mr. Johnson’s bid to be useful to Mr. Biden will mean far less if Britain fails to strike a trade deal with Brussels. A yearlong transition period is set to expire on Jan. 1, and economists warn that not having a new agreement to take its place would do serious harm.

Mr. Biden, whose campaign said he had tested negative for the coronavirus on Sunday,

But on Monday, after the president unleashed a flurry of all-caps tweets urging his supporters to vote, Mr. Biden issued several sharp remarks about the administration’s approach to the virus, even as he expressed well wishes for the president’s health.

Mr. Biden said during an address that he delivered in the Little Havana neighborhood of Miami while wearing a mask. “Now that he’s busy tweeting campaign messages, I would ask him to do this: Listen to the scientists. Support masks. Support a — mask mandates nationwide.”

Mr. Trump left the hospital after tweeting in reference to a disease that has killed more than 209,000 people in the United States: “Don’t be afraid of Covid. Don’t let it dominate your life.” He emphasized that message in a video he posted on Twitter soon after arriving back at the White House.

“There’s a lot to be concerned about,” Mr. Biden responded on NBC, noting the death count. “I hope no one walks away with the message, thinking that it is not a problem. It’s a serious problem.”

“President Trump cannot advance democracy and human rights,” Mr. Biden said, “when he has embraced so many autocrats around the world, starting with Vladimir Putin.”

“I look like a socialist?” Mr. Biden said. “I’m the guy that ran against the socialist, remember? I got in trouble through the whole campaign, twenty-some candidates — ‘Joe Biden was too centrist, too moderate, too straightforward.’ That was Joe Biden.”

“Cuba is no closer to freedom and democracy than it was four years ago,” he said, arguing that the current “administration’s approach is not working.”

An adverse ruling could cost him more than $100 million.

often direct conflict of interest with his job as presiden

“Over the past decade, President Trump has paid tens of millions of dollars in personal taxes to the federal government, including paying millions in personal taxes since announcing his candidacy in 2015,” Mr. Garten said in a statement.

Ultimately, Mr. Trump has been more successful playing a business mogul than being one in real life.

“There’s nothing to learn from them,” he told The Associated Press in 2016. There is far more useful information, he has said, in the annual financial disclosures required of him as president — which he has pointed to as evidence of his mastery of a flourishing, and immensely profitable, business universe.

Most of Mr. Trump’s core enterprises — from his constellation of golf courses to his conservative-magnet hotel in Washington — report losing millions, if not tens of millions, of dollars year after year.

He reported paying taxes, in turn, on a number of his overseas ventures. In 2017, the president’s $750 contribution to the operations of the U.S. government was dwarfed by the $15,598 he or his companies paid in Panama, the $145,400 in India and the $156,824 in the Philippines.

The leak of Mr. Nixon’s small tax payment caused a precedent-setting uproar: Henceforth, presidents, and presidential candidates, would make their tax returns available for the American people to see.

that he might release the returns if President Barack Obama released his birth certificate.

He often claims that he cannot do so while unde

r audit — an argument refuted by his own I.R.S. commissioner.

Throughout his career, Mr. Trump’s business losses have often accumulated in sums larger than could be used to reduce taxes on other income in a single year. But the tax code offers a workaround: With some restrictions, business owners can carry forward leftover losses to reduce taxes in future years. That provision has been the background music to Mr. Trump’s life.

each new acquisition only fed the downward draft on his bottom line.

“consulting fees” as a business expense across nearly all of his projects.

Mr. Trump reduced his taxable income by treating a family member as a consultant, and then deducting the fee as a cost of doing business.

The “consultants” are not identified in the tax records. But evidence of this arrangement was gleaned by comparing the confidential tax records to the financial disclosures Ivanka Trump filed when she joined the White House staff in 2017. Ms. Trump reported receiving payments from a consulting company she co-owned, totaling $747,622, that exactly matched consulting fees claimed as tax deductions by the Trump Organization for hotel projects in Vancouver and Hawaii.

Hair stylists, table linens, property taxes on a family estate — all have been deducted as business expenses.

he ethical quandaries created by Mr. Trump’s decision to keep his business while in the White House have been documented. But the full financial measure of his extraordinary confluence of interests — a president with a wealth of business entanglements at home and in myriad geopolitical hot spots — has remained elusive.

how heavily he has come to rely on leveraging his brand in ways that pose potential or direct conflicts of interest while he is president.

he president’s conflicts have been most evident with Turkey, where the business community and the authoritarian government of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan have not hesitated to leverage various Trump enterprises to their advantage.

Some of the largest payments from business groups for events or conferences at Mar-a-Lago and other Trump properties have come since Mr. Trump became president, the tax records show.

Beyond one-time payments for events or memberships, large corporations also pay rent for space in the few commercial buildings Mr. Trump actually owns.

his barrage of derogatory remarks about immigrants quickly cost him two of his biggest and easiest sources of cash — licensing deals with clothing and mattress manufacturers that had netted him more than $30 million. NBC, his partner in Miss Universe — source of nearly $20 million in profits — announced that it would no longer broadcast the pageant; he sold it soon after.

“They say, ‘Trump is getting rich off our nation,’” he said at a rally in Minneapolis last October. “I lose billions being president, and I don’t care. It’s nice to be rich, I guess, but I lose billions.”

He had paid no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years — largely because he reported losing much more money than he made.

Now, with his financial challenges mounting, the records show that he depends more and more on making money from businesses that put him in potential and often direct conflict of interest with his job as president.

The tax data examined by The Times provides a road map of revelations, from write-offs for the cost of a criminal defense lawyer and a mansion used as a family retreat to a full accounting of the millions of dollars the president received from the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow.

Indeed, his financial condition when he announced his run for president in 2015 lends some credence to the notion that his long-shot campaign was at least in part a gambit to reanimate the marketability of his name.

Capital and Ideology, Thomas Piketty’s recent entry into the genre, places inequality as the ultimate driving force of politics, society, and religion

The Upswing proposes another, similar arc

this one is “a long arc of increasing solidarity and then increasing individualism” which “had implications for equality, for politics, for social capital, and for culture. It led to an increasingly zero-sum, tribal view of society, and, eventually, to Trumpism.”

The evidence justifying the thesis, intriguing as it is, is not nearly so strong.

The authors assign ultimate importance to the route from individualism to communitarianism and back again, called the “I-we-I” curve in their shorthand.

Was it possible for America to become a society of solidarity, a “we” society (as Putnam and Garrett term it), only because it was a Mad Men one, undergirded by the exclusion of blacks and women?

Many concurrent transformations, of course, could also have driven these trends

Putnam and Garrett nonetheless present a clear story. They propose that the communitarian ethos of the Progressive Era—of muckrakers like Ida B. Wells and Jacob Riis and social reformers like the suffragette Jane Addams and education evangelist John Dewey—is the generating impulse of the upswing. And the various traumas of the 1960s—assassinations, campus violence, the civil-rights struggle, urban riots, the Vietnamese debacle—are proposed as the instigators for the downswing.

Google’s ambition to digitize millions of books has yielded a database that the curious can use to check trends in English usage over decades with only a few keystrokes. Putnam and Garrett rely on this tool to track the rate of usage of “we” compared to “I”—and find that the resulting curve traces the familiar U-turn that recurs everywhere else in the book.

Similar accounts of increasing selfishness fossilized in Google Books data have been offered before, most notably by the psychologist Jean Twenge, but they do not seem to be taken that seriously by many linguists.

My brief experimentation also showed that writers also discuss “you” more than “I” these days. From these analogies, one could conclude the exact opposite: a resurrected communitarianism after all.

Other attempts at constructing a meta-narrative for American history, like the recent These Truths by Kemper professor of American history Jill Lepore, place at their center the crisis of race and the centuries-long inability of whites to accept blacks as equal.

What evidence is there that, in the midst of all of these bewildering changes, it was really “most fundamentally the self-centeredness” that accounted for present-day malaise?

the argument is that “America took its foot off the gas”—so the drive toward equality decelerated and stalled. “As that ‘we’ came apart, racial progress in many important realms came to a halt,” they claim

This is certainly true in some respects. But it does feel like a disservice to give the overriding impression that to be black in 2020 is only marginally better than it was in 197

In fact, there has been substantial convergence in life expectancy, high-school graduation rates, and voter turnout between black and white Americans, for example. And the notion that the communitarian ethos of the “we” society reinforces the drive toward equality for the disadvantaged is difficult to square with the continuous progress of women,

By reaching further back in time than most academics ever venture (because data are scant and require more care to interpret), he and Garrett are able to focus on a more positive period in which the United States was broadly improving, when children could expect almost surely to earn more than their parents, and Congress was not wrecked by partisanship. It cannot be wrong to yearn for a time when progress was palpable, when projects like the Great Society were being proposed and enacted. Even if we do not precisely know the reasons for the upswing all those years ago, one happened all the same.

There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view.

Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.

I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem.

Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.

Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence.

The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning.

Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences.

Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.

No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response.

Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are.

The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site.

there aren’t enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person.

At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.

These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people

Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook as a main battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its site.

it wasn’t until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as well as any posts denying the Holocaust.

In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and hyper-partisan pages such as Breitbart News’s and Occupy Democrats’ would be buried, according to The New York Times, offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.

reducing the prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human intervention, the Times reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that just enough harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them coming back for more.

Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst.

Facebook is a borderless nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms

How much real-world violence would never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, every single minute” through Facebook.

Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.

In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.”

Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.

Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful person on the planet, he’s very near the top.

“The thing he oversees has such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”

Facebook’s new oversight board, formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s power. That’s real power.”

Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?

In 2004, Zuckerberg said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped them all up anyway.

In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.

in 2007, Zuckerberg said something in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that now takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have happened otherwise.”

We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible

The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people.

we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.

localized approach is part of what made megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among clearly defined demographics was good for business.

we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather.

The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case.

We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.

Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.

The investigation into the Hastings massacres began in 2017 after a Bay Area lawyer, John Briscoe, published an opinion essay in The San Francisco Chronicle under the headline, “The Moral Case for Renaming Hastings College of the Law.”

A number of prominent Hastings alumni, including senior retired judges, disagree and have called for a renaming. They say that like the fortune of the Sackler family, derived from the opioids that ultimately killed multitudes of Americans, the gold Mr. Hastings donated to found the school is tainted.

Native leaders say they hope the Hastings controversy could be a possible catalyst to bring awareness to a terrible legacy that few Californians know about. Greg Sarris, the chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, a Northern California confederation of tribes, is donating proceeds from his tribe’s casino to fund efforts at the Smithsonian to produce curriculums about Native history, including an Indian perspective on the Gold Rush era.

That period was a particularly treacherous and murderous time in California — “a catalog of slit throats, gunshot wounds and crushed skulls,” wrote Kevin Starr, a California historian.

Brendan Lindsay, author of the 2012 book “Murder State: California’s Native American Genocide, 1846-1873,” says ranchers hunted Indians in the way they might track down a fox that ventured into a henhouse.

According to the chronology by Dr. Lindsay, one set of killings was carried out by H.L. Hall, who was hired to look after Mr. Hastings’s cattle and horse ranches in 1858. When four or six — accounts differ — of the nearly 400 horses on the ranch were killed, Mr. Hall and three other men raided a Yuki village and killed nine or 11 tribespeople. During subsequent massacres, he rode into Yuki villages and killed women and children, including the girl he said he killed for “stubbornness.”

an encounter between Monty and an eccentric Finnish scholar, Valter Juvelius, who claimed he had identified ciphers in the Old Testament that showed where the ark was hidden in Jerusalem. He wanted to go and find it;

Monty, a veteran of the Boer War and a son of a wealthy politician, had the connections and credibility to make it happen.

Monty gathered investors, permissions and a team, and in 1909 the “Parker expedition” started digging in Jerusalem for the ark, a holy relic whose value — immeasurable — Monty promised to split with the Ottoman government.

A mosque attendant, appalled, caught the diggers in action and rumors began to fly, scandalizing members of the city’s various faiths.

I started to research the story, not knowing that my explorations made me a member of a curious, modern-day venture that paralleled its historical counterpart: the Parker expedition writers.

My grandfather gave her a few photos and documents, and in 1996 she staged an exhibition on the Parker expedition, her paper on it making her a key contact for everyone who came to the story later, looking for sources.

She welcomed each of us who wrote to her as though she were our party host, passing on news of our fellow expedition explorers and enjoying the coincidence that these books were all happening at once.

I felt my loose connection to Great-Great-Uncle Monty shift into possessiveness:

Nirit emailed with a smiling emoji about “the new guy in town”: Brad Ricca, an author in Cleveland who writes books that blend fact and fiction. And four months after that, my dad was sitting down for dinner one evening when Nirit rang to introduce him to Lior Hanani, a young Israeli software developer who chose the expedition as the basis for his debut novel.

Graham shared a scoop he’d found in the British archives: Monty had a diagnosis of neurasthenia, what we’d now call PTSD.

In 1995, Nirit, then early in her career but with characteristic resolve, tracked down a box of glass negatives from the expedition, enlisted a student to locate the great-grandson of Valter Juvelius in Finland and reached out to my grandfather in England.

Samuelson did write a best-selling textbook that brought Keynesian economics — the idea that changes in government spending and taxes can be used to manage the economy — to American college classrooms. And his concept of the “neoclassical synthesis” — markets can work, but only with government-created guardrails — in effect provided the intellectual justification for the postwar economy. But it’s clear that for him politics was never more than a peripheral concern.

Still, most economists continued to believe that a more flexible form of monetary policy could keep things under control — that the Federal Reserve could manage the economy without bringing Congress into the act

his magnum opus, “A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960” (with Anna Schwartz), while a magisterial work of scholarship, clearly had a major political ax to grind. For its big takeaway was the claim that the Great Depression wouldn’t have happened if the Federal Reserve Board had done its job and stabilized the money supply. That is, simple technocratic measures would have been sufficient — no need for all that Keynesian stuff.

The influence of Friedman’s monetary ideas peaked around 1980, then went into steep decline. Both the United States and Britain tried to implement Friedman’s belief that the authorities could stabilize the economy by ensuring steady, slow growth in the money supply; both efforts failed dismally

Friedman was no mere propagandist: He was a brilliant analytical economist capable of doing pathbreaking academic work when he set his mind to it. His work on monetary policy, in particular, persuaded many economists who disagreed with him about almost everything else.

But a number of economists had looked closely at Friedman’s arguments about the Great Depression, and found them wanting. And the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis vindicated the doubters. Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair and a huge Friedman admirer, did everything Friedman and Schwartz said the Fed should have done in the 1930s — and it wasn’t enough. Soon Bernanke was pleading for help from fiscal policy — that is, pleading for Keynesianism to come to the rescue.

What about Friedman’s broader faith in free markets? Libertarian policies reached a high-water mark in the 1990s, as industries from power generation to banking were deregulated. But all too many of these deregulatory ventures ended in grief, with incidents like the California power crisis of 2000-1 and, yes, the banking crisis of 2008.

And where are we now? If you look at the Biden administration’s proposals

they sound a lot like what Paul Samuelson was saying decades ago.

So by all means you should read Wapshott’s history of the disputes that roiled economics over much of the second half of the 20th century

you should also ask a question I don’t think the book answers: Was all of this just a grand, ideologically driven detour away from sensible economic theory and policy? And why did that happen?

He sounded a similar alarm in his final lecture at Yale, in 2013. Liberal education, he said, was failing to provide students with a common set of values and the tools to make sense of the world.

“I find a kind of cultural void and ignorance of the past, a sense of rootlessness and aimlessness, as though not only the students but the whole world was born yesterday,”

With most speaking on the assumption that their remarks would not become public, U.S. officials acknowledged that their warfighting strategies were fatally flawed and that Washington wasted enormous sums of money trying to remake Afghanistan into a modern nation.

The interviews also highlight the U.S. government’s botched attempts to curtail runaway corruption, build a competent Afghan army and police force, and put a dent in Afghanistan’s thriving opium trade.

Since 2001, the Defense Department, State Department and U.S. Agency for International Development have spent or appropriated between $934 billion and $978 billion

Those figures do not include money spent by other agencies such as the CIA and the Department of Veterans Affairs, which is responsible for medical care for wounded veterans.

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

SIGAR departed from its usual mission of performing audits and launched a side venture. Titled “Lessons Learned,” the $11 million project was meant to diagnose policy failures in Afghanistan so the United States would not repeat the mistakes the next time it invaded a country or tried to rebuild a shattered one.

the reports, written in dense bureaucratic prose and focused on an alphabet soup of government initiatives, left out the harshest and most frank criticisms from the interviews.

“We found the stabilization strategy and the programs used to achieve it were not properly tailored to the Afghan context, and successes in stabilizing Afghan districts rarely lasted longer than the physical presence of coalition troops and civilians,” read the introduction to one report released in May 2018.

To augment the Lessons Learned interviews, The Post obtained hundreds of pages of previously classified memos about the Afghan war that were dictated by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld between 2001 and 2006.

Together, the SIGAR interviews and the Rumsfeld memos pertaining to Afghanistan constitute a secret history of the war and an unsparing appraisal of 18 years of conflict.

With their forthright descriptions of how the United States became stuck in a faraway war, as well as the government's determination to conceal them from the public, the Lessons Learned interviews broadly resemble the Pentagon Papers, the Defense Department's top-secret history of the Vietnam War.

running throughout are torrents of criticism that refute the official narrative of the war, from its earliest days through the start of the Trump administration.

At the outset, for instance, the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan had a clear, stated objective — to retaliate against al-Qaeda and prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Yet the interviews show that as the war dragged on, the goals and mission kept changing and a lack of faith in the U.S. strategy took root inside the Pentagon, the White House and the State Department.

Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.

The Lessons Learned interviews also reveal how U.S. military commanders struggled to articulate who they were fighting, let alone why.

Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll? According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.

As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe.

The United States has allocated more than $133 billion to build up Afghanistan — more than it spent, adjusted for inflation, to revive the whole of Western Europe with the Marshall Plan after World War II.

As commanders in chief, Bush, Obama and Trump all promised the public the same thing. They would avoid falling into the trap of "nation-building" in Afghanistan.

U.S. officials tried to create — from scratch — a democratic government in Kabul modeled after their own in Washington. It was a foreign concept to the Afghans, who were accustomed to tribalism, monarchism, communism and Islamic law.

During the peak of the fighting, from 2009 to 2012, U.S. lawmakers and military commanders believed the more they spent on schools, bridges, canals and other civil-works projects, the faster security would improve. Aid workers told government interviewers it was a colossal misjudgment, akin to pumping kerosene on a dying campfire just to keep the flame alive.

One unnamed executive with the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) guessed that 90 percent of what they spent was overkill: “We lost objectivity. We were given money, told to spend it and we did, without reason.”Lessons Learned interview | 10/7/2016Tap to view full document

The gusher of aid that Washington spent on Afghanistan also gave rise to historic levels of corruption.

In public, U.S. officials insisted they had no tolerance for graft. But in the Lessons Learned interviews, they admitted the U.S. government looked the other way while Afghan power brokers — allies of Washington — plundered with impunity.

Christopher Kolenda, an Army colonel who deployed to Afghanistan several times and advised three U.S. generals in charge of the war, said that the Afghan government led by President Hamid Karzai had “self-organized into a kleptocracy”Christopher Kolenda | Lessons Learned interview | 4/5/2016Tap to view full document by 2006 — and that U.S. officials failed to recognize the lethal threat it posed to their strategy.

By allowing corruption to fester, U.S. officials told interviewers, they helped destroy the popular legitimacy of the wobbly Afghan government they were fighting to prop up. With judges and police chiefs and bureaucrats extorting bribes, many Afghans soured on democracy and turned to the Taliban to enforce order.

None expressed confidence that the Afghan army and police could ever fend off, much less defeat, the Taliban on their own. More than 60,000 members of Afghan security forces have been killed, a casualty rate that U.S. commanders have called unsustainable.

In the Lessons Learned interviews, however, U.S. military trainers described the Afghan security forces as incompetent, unmotivated and rife with deserters. They also accused Afghan commanders of pocketing salaries — paid by U.S. taxpayers — for tens of thousands of “ghost soldiers.”

an army and national police force that can defend the country without foreign help.

Year after year, U.S. generals have said in public they are making steady progress on the central plank of their strategy: to train a robust Afgh

From the beginning, Washington never really figured out how to incorporate a war on drugs into its war against al-Qaeda. By 2006, U.S. officials feared that narco-traffickers had become stronger than the Afghan government and that money from the drug trade was powering the insurgency

throughout the Afghan war, documents show that U.S. military officials have resorted to an old tactic from Vietnam — manipulating public opinion. In news conferences and other public appearances, those in charge of the war have followed the same talking points for 18 years. No matter how the war is going — and especially when it is going badly — they emphasize how they are making progress.

Two months later, Marin Strmecki, a civilian adviser to Rumsfeld, gave the Pentagon chief a classified, 40-page report loaded with more bad news. It said “enormous popular discontent is building” against the Afghan government because of its corruption and incompetence. It also said that the Taliban was growing stronger, thanks to support from Pakistan, a U.S. ally.

Since then, U.S. generals have almost always preached that the war is progressing well, no matter the reality on the battlefield.

he Lessons Learned interviews contain numerous admissions that the government routinely touted statistics that officials knew were distorted, spurious or downright false

A person identified only as a senior National Security Council official said there was constant pressure from the Obama White House and Pentagon to produce figures to show the troop surge of 2009 to 2011 was working, despite hard evidence to the contrary.

Even when casualty counts and other figures looked bad, the senior NSC official said, the White House and Pentagon would spin them to the point of absurdity. Suicide bombings in Kabul were portrayed as a sign of the Taliban’s desperation, that the insurgents were too weak to engage in direct combat. Meanwhile, a rise in U.S. troop deaths was cited as proof that American forces were taking the fight to the enemy.

“And this went on and on for two reasons,” the senior NSC official said, “to make everyone involved look good, and to make it look like the troops and resources were having the kind of effect where removing them would cause the country to deteriorate.”

Meanwhile, donors such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk, disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, Skype founder Jaan Tallinn and ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin — as well as institutions like Open Philanthropy, a charitable organization started by billionaire Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz — have worked to push doomsayers from the tech industry’s margins into the mainstream.

More recently, wealthy tech philanthropists have begun recruiting an army of elite college students to prioritize the fight against rogue AI over other threats

Other skeptics, like venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, are AI boosters who say that hyping such fears will impede the technology’s progress.

Critics call the AI safety movement unscientific. They say its claims about existential risk can sound closer to a religion than research

And while the sci-fi narrative resonates with public fears about runaway AI, critics say it obsesses over one kind of catastrophe to the exclusion of many others.

Open Philanthropy spokesperson Mike Levine said harms like algorithmic racism deserve a robust response. But he said those problems stem from the same root issue: AI systems not behaving as their programmers intended. The theoretical risks “were not garnering sufficient attention from others — in part because these issues were perceived as speculative,” Levine said in a statement. He compared the nonprofit’s AI focus to its work on pandemics, which also was regarded as theoretical until the coronavirus emerged.

Among the reputational hazards of the AI safety movement is its association with an array of controversial figures and ideas, like EA, which is also known for recruiting ambitious young people on elite college campuses.

The foundation began prioritizing existential risks around AI in 2016,

there was little status or money to be gained by focusing on risks. So the nonprofit set out to build a pipeline of young people who would filter into top companies and agitate for change from the insid

Colleges have been key to this growth strategy, serving as both a pathway to prestige and a recruiting ground for idealistic talent

The clubs train students in machine learning and help them find jobs in AI start-ups or one of the many nonprofit groups dedicated to AI safety.

Many of these newly minted student leaders view rogue AI as an urgent and neglected threat, potentially rivaling climate change in its ability to end human life. Many see advanced AI as the Manhattan Project of their generation

Despite the school’s ties to Silicon Valley, Mukobi said it lags behind nearby UC Berkeley, where younger faculty members research AI alignment, the term for embedding human ethics into AI systems.

Mukobi joined Stanford’s club for effective altruism, known as EA, a philosophical movement that advocates doing maximum good by calculating the expected value of charitable acts, like protecting the future from runaway AI. By 2022, AI capabilities were advancing all around him — wild developments that made those warnings seem prescient.

At Stanford, Open Philanthropy awarded Luby and Edwards more than $1.5 million in grants to launch the Stanford Existential Risk Initiative, which supports student research in the growing field known as “AI safety” or “AI alignment.

from the start EA was intertwined with tech subcultures interested in futurism and rationalist thought. Over time, global poverty slid down the cause list, while rogue AI climbed toward the top.

In the past year, EA has been beset by scandal, including the fall of Bankman-Fried, one of its largest donors

Another key figure, Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose 2014 bestseller “Superintelligence” is essential reading in EA circles, met public uproar when a decades-old diatribe about IQ surfaced in January.

Programming future AI systems to share human values could mean “an amazing world free from diseases, poverty, and suffering,” while failure could unleash “human extinction or our permanent disempowerment,” Mukobi wrote, offering free boba tea to anyone who attended the 30-minute intro.

Open Philanthropy’s new university fellowship offers a hefty direct deposit: undergraduate leaders receive as much as $80,000 a year, plus $14,500 for health insurance, and up to $100,000 a year to cover group expenses.

Student leaders have access to a glut of resources from donor-sponsored organizations, including an “AI Safety Fundamentals” curriculum developed by an OpenAI employee.

Interest in the topic is also growing among Stanford faculty members, Edwards said. He noted that a new postdoctoral fellow will lead a class on alignment next semester in Stanford’s storied computer science department.

Edwards discovered that shared online forums function like a form of peer review, with authors changing their original text in response to the comments

Mukobi feels energized about the growing consensus that these risks are worth exploring. He heard students talking about AI safety in the halls of Gates, the computer science building, in May after Geoffrey Hinton, another “godfather” of AI, quit Google to warn about AI. By the end of the year, Mukobi thinks the subject could be a dinner-table topic, just like climate change or the war in Ukraine.

Luby, Edwards’s teaching partner for the class on human extinction, also seems to find these arguments persuasive. He had already rearranged the order of his AI lesson plans to help students see the imminent risks from AI. No one needs to “drink the EA Kool-Aid” to have genuine concerns, he said.

Edwards, on the other hand, still sees things like climate change as a bigger threat than rogue AI. But ChatGPT and the rapid release of AI models has convinced him that there should be room to think about AI safety.

Interested students join reading groups where they get free copies of books like “The Precipice,” and may spend hours reading the latest alignment papers, posting career advice on the Effective Altruism forum, or adjusting their P(doom), a subjective estimate of the probability that advanced AI will end badly. The grants, travel, leadership roles for inexperienced graduates and sponsored co-working spaces build a close-knit community.

The course will not be taught by students or outside experts. Instead, he said, it “will be a regular Stanford class.”

Altman and Geoff Hinton, a so-called godfather of AI who quit Google to warn of the potential dangers of AI, were among more than a dozen American and British AI executives and senior researchers from companies including chip maker Nvidia and generative AI leaders Midjourney and Anthropic who spoke at the conference. 

“This event is extremely rare in U.S.-China AI conversations,” said Jenny Xiao, a partner at venture-capital firm Leonis Capital and who researches AI and China. “It’s important to bring together leading voices in the U.S. and China to avoid issues such as AI arms racing, competition between labs and to help establish international standards,” she added.

By some metrics, China now produces more high-quality research papers in the field than the U.S. but still lags behind in “paradigm-shifting breakthroughs,” according to an analysis from The Brookings Institution. In generative AI, the latest wave of top-tier AI systems, China remains one to two years behind U.S. development and reliant on U.S. innovations, China tech watchers and industry leaders have said. 

The competition between Washington and Beijing belies deep cross-border connections among researchers: The U.S. and China remain each other’s number one collaborators in AI research,

During a congressional testimony in May, Altman warned that a peril of AI regulation is that “you slow down American industry in such a way that China or somebody else makes faster progress.”

At the same time, he added that it was important to continue engaging in global conversations. “This technology will impact Americans and all of us wherever it’s developed,”

Altman delivered the opening keynote for a session dedicated to AI safety and alignment, a hotly contested area of research that aims to mitigate the harmful impacts of AI on society. Hinton delivered the closing talk for the same session later Saturday, also dialing in. He presented his research that had made him more concerned about the risks of AI and appealed to young Chinese researchers in the audience to help work on solving these problems.

“Over time you should expect us to open-source more models in the future,” Altman said but added that it would be important to strike a balance to avoid abuses of the technology.

He has emphasized cautious regulation as European regulators consider the AI Act, viewed as one of the most ambitious plans globally to create guardrails that would address the technology’s impact on human rights, health and safety, and on tech giants’ monopolistic behavior.

Chinese regulators have also pressed forward on enacting strict rules for AI development that share significant overlap with the EU act but impose additional censorship measures that ban generating false or politically sensitive speech.

Tegmark, who attended in person, strode onto the stage smiling and waved at the crowd before opening with a few lines of Mandarin.

“For the first time now we have a situation where both East and West have the same incentive to continue building AI to get to all the benefits but not go so fast that we lose control,” Tegmark said, after warning the audience about catastrophic risks that could arise from careless AI development. “This is something we can all work together on.”

A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.

As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts

The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.

That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts.

Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.

soon enough, all social networks became social media first and foremost. When groups, pages, and the News Feed launched, Facebook began encouraging users to share content published by others in order to increase engagement on the service, rather than to provide updates to friends. LinkedIn launched a program to publish content across the platform, too. Twitter, already principally a publishing platform, added a dedicated “retweet” feature, making it far easier to spread content virally across user networks.

The authors propose social media as a system in which users participate in “information exchange.” The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.

The toxicity of social media makes it easy to forget how truly magical this innovation felt when it was new. From 2004 to 2009, you could join Facebook and everyone you’d ever known—including people you’d definitely lost track of—was right there, ready to connect or reconnect. The posts and photos I saw characterized my friends’ changing lives, not the conspiracy theories that their unhinged friends had shared with them

Twitter, which launched in 2006, was probably the first true social-media site, even if nobody called it that at the time. Instead of focusing on connecting people, the site amounted to a giant, asynchronous chat room for the world. Twitter was for talking to everyone—which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it

on Twitter, anything anybody posted could be seen instantly by anyone else. And furthermore, unlike posts on blogs or images on Flickr or videos on YouTube, tweets were short and low-effort, making it easy to post many of them a week or even a day.

a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content,”

When we look back at this moment, social media had already arrived in spirit if not by name. RSS readers offered a feed of blog posts to catch up on, complete with unread counts. MySpace fused music and chatter; YouTube did it with video (“Broadcast Yourself”)

This is also why journalists became so dependent on Twitter: It’s a constant stream of sources, events, and reactions—a reporting automat, not to mention an outbound vector for media tastemakers to make tastes.

Other services arrived or evolved in this vein, among them Reddit, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, all far more popular than Twitter. Social networks, once latent routes for possible contact, became superhighways of constant content

Although you can connect the app to your contacts and follow specific users, on TikTok, you are more likely to simply plug into a continuous flow of video content that has oozed to the surface via algorithm.

In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow.

The ensuing disaster was multipar

“influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.

social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops.

When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.

Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships.

when social networking evolved into social media, user expectations escalated. Driven by venture capitalists’ expectations and then Wall Street’s demands, the tech companies—Google and Facebook and all the rest—became addicted to massive scale

Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive

Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach

people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either.

From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality.

That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse

Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation

The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain.

when I first wrote about downscale, the ambition seemed necessary but impossible. It still feels unlikely—but perhaps newly plausible.

To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often–and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well

We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.

— what exactly was the meme?

Cryptocurrency is little more than a decade old, and yet it has passed through several reputational phases: first, as the lawless province of black marketeers and hard-core libertarians obsessed with escaping government oversight; then as a speculative market in which many of those people made an astonishing and enviable amount of money; then as an investment sector for adventurous normies who might previously have turned to simple day-trading; then as an “asset class” eyed by big-money investors and establishment banks

And he had promised to give that magic internet money away just as quickly

To investors and legislators, he looked like the potential face of a new era for crypto, poised to legitimize through transparency and regulation what had always been an enormously shady, if often quite lucrative, sector.

To progressives, he looked like our kind of oligarch, a sort of boy wonder who seemed capable of conjuring up world-changing billions guiltlessly, effectively out of thin air.

it was very tempting to believe, and nobody was trying to look all that closely, it turns out — not the editors who put him on the covers of Forbes and Fortune; not the traders who trusted him with billions in daily trading volume; not the recipients of his philanthropic pledges, many of which will now go unfulfilled; and most conspicuously, not the investors who handed him millions without seeming to even bother checking the books.

It was part of his DGAF brand, like the unkempt hair and cargo shorts he wore onstage alongside Bill Clinton and Tony Blair

As recently as July 2021, FTX raised $900 million from, among others, Sequoia Capital, Daniel Loeb’s Third Point and SoftBank Vision Fund, which had previously written down billions of dollars in investments in Uber and WeWork. In January, a Series C round raised an additional $400 million.

In a now-legendary profile published on the Sequoia website just weeks before the collapse, almost every paragraph contained what should have been a red flag but was presented instead as a mark of Bankman-Fried’s special genius — and Sequoia’s, for endorsing it

What stage of capitalism is this?

Now the comparisons are less flattering: to Bernie Madoff, of course, and to Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos, even though Bankman-Fried has not been charged with any crimes; also to Adam Neumann of WeWork, Travis Kalanick of Uber and the other iconic start-up hucksters of this strange venture-capital era.

those founders were, for all their delusions and sociopathy, pitch-deck visionaries — persuasive proselytizers for not just new products but whole new worlds that could be simply invested into being.

In his self-presentation, Bankman-Fried seemed to be pitching something else: an outward indifference approaching disdain. His serious-seeming commitment to effective altruism underlined the impression: If he was earning his billions only to donate them, he represented a very different case study in the morality or moral potential of unregulated markets

he flatly described the crypto markets as pointless speculation bordering on fraud — one of the interviewers paraphrased Bankman-Fried’s summary as “I’m in the Ponzi business, and it’s pretty good” — it wasn’t a misstep

The death of FTX has been called crypto’s “Lehman moment,” but it was not the first such collapse — it follows the implosions of Celsius, Three Arrows Capital, Terra and Luna, among many others. But it’s fitting that Bankman-Fried will now always be remembered as this crypto crash’s central figure, because he postured as someone who could rewrite not just the rules of the financial system but its morality as well.

in the world of big money he was a genuinely new archetype: a smugly superior Gen X slacker and an entitled, world-changing millennial at once

it has also been the source of a lot of reflection and debate, about whether it had been at all reasonable to treat what made him distinct as a basis for lionization.

He said in the Sequoia profile, for instance, that no book was ever really worth reading, and he told the economist Tyler Cowen in a podcast interview that faced with a coin-flip game in which half the time he’d double the value of the world and half the time he’d destroy it, he’d choose to play again and again

he revealed himself to be wasn’t a singular bad actor but a representative one. Blockchain technology may well offer meaningful uses for the wider world in the future, but as of now, it is most significant as the basis for a realm of pure and unregulated speculation.

The volatility was not some deep secret only now revealed. It’s an almost inescapable aspect of a financial subculture erected outside the oversight and control of the law on the principle that they weren’t necessary

The world’s second-largest crypto exchange has gone belly-up, but the crypto market as a whole is down by only about 20 percent. For many speculators, it seems, collapses like these were already priced in.

Mr. Gensler’s central claim is simple: For all their novel attributes, most cryptocurrencies are securities, like stocks or other investment products. That means the developers who issue cryptocurrencies must register with the U.S. government and disclose information about their plans.

Even before FTX’s collapse, the debate was reaching an inflection point: A federal judge is expected to rule in the coming months in a lawsuit brought by the S.E.C. that charges the cryptocurrency issuer Ripple with offering unregistered securities. A victory for the government would strengthen Mr. Gensler’s hand, establishing a precedent that could pave the way for more lawsuits against crypto companies.

A former Goldman Sachs partner, Mr. Gensler became one of the most aggressive financial regulators in Washington after the 2008 recession. As chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, an agency that regulates the financial markets, he helped carry out the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which aimed to protect consumers and rein in Wall Street.

when Mr. Gensler took over the S.E.C., the crypto industry hailed him as an enthusiast who understood the technology’s potential. Bitcoin “is in good hands,” one venture investor tweeted.

But it soon became clear that Mr. Gensler would take a hard-line approach. In July 2021, he met with a group of industry representatives, including the leader of the Blockchain Association, a prominent crypto trade group. He bluntly informed her that most of the organization’s members were probably violating federal rules, two people familiar with the meeting said.

Rather than devise new rules for crypto, Mr. Gensler has focused on enforcing the current ones as broadly as possible.

A few days later, Mr. Gensler called crypto “the Wild West” while speaking at a national security conference in Washington.

Behind closed doors, Mr. Gensler has been equally aggressive. “I’ve heard about other groups going in and getting in arguments,” said Perianne Boring, the founder of the Chamber of Digital Commerce, a crypto advocacy group. “You want to have a fight, you can have one.”

In crypto circles, mentioning Mr. Gensler’s name elicits quivers of fury. A Twitter account for the crypto company LBRY once called him “a demon wearing human flesh.”

The basis for Mr. Gensler’s claim that cryptocurrencies are securities is a legal analysis known as the Howey Test, which the Supreme Court outlined in 1946. Under the framework, a financial product is deemed a security when it offers the chance to invest in a “common enterprise” with the expectation of profiting from the efforts of others.

FTX’s collapse has unleashed a new level of scrutiny. Screenshots of Mr. Gensler’s public meeting schedule, which show multiple sessions with Mr. Bankman-Fried, have circulated on Twitter, where crypto fans who once said Mr. Gensler was overly aggressive have now accused him of cozying up to a criminal.

“If you don’t like him, you don’t like the current S.E.C., then of course you’re just going to blame him, regardless of the facts,” Mr. Reiners said. “If Sam Bankman-Fried tried to get a meeting with the S.E.C., and Gary Gensler said absolutely not, I’ll never talk to you, the Republicans would’ve gone ballistic prior to the collapse.”

“Why we often separate these things out is so that the public is better protected about the inherent conflicts,” he said. “It’s really important to make sure that this field comes in, gets registered, gets regulated.”

In public remarks shortly after FTX imploded, Mr. Gensler argued that too many crypto companies performed multiple financial roles at the same time — like running an exchange and making trades, an apparent reference to the close relationship between FTX and Alameda.

The outcome will also draw attention in Congress, where a slate of crypto-related bills was introduced this year. When Mr. Gensler testified in front of the Senate Banking Committee in September, he was grilled by Republican senators, who said the S.E.C. was offering insufficient legal guidance to crypto companies that wanted to comply with federal law.“Not liking the answer from the S.E.C.,” he shot back, “doesn’t mean there isn’t guidance.”

In a few short years, effective altruism has become the giving philosophy for many Silicon Valley programmers, hedge funders and even tech billionaires. That includes not just Mr. Bankman-Fried but also the Facebook and Asana co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife, Cari Tuna, who are devoting much of their fortune to the cause.

“If I can help encourage people who do have enormous resources to not buy yachts and instead put that money toward pandemic preparedness and A.I. safety and bed nets and animal welfare that’s just like a really good thing to do,” Mr. MacAskill said.

Mr. Musk has not officially joined the movement but he and Mr. MacAskill have known each other since 2015, when they met at an effective altruism conference. Mr. Musk has also said on Twitter that Mr. MacAskill’s giving philosophy is similar to his own.

Mr. MacAskill was one of the founders of the group Giving What We Can, started at Oxford in 2009. Members promised to give away at least 10 percent of what they earned to the most cost-effective charities possible.

The rise of this kind of thinking, known as longtermism, has meant the Effective Altruists are increasingly associated with causes that have the ring of science fiction to them — like preventing artificial intelligence from running amok or sending people to distant planets to increase our chances of survival as a species

Traditionally, effective altruism was focused on finding the lowest-cost interventions that did the most good. The classic example is insecticide-treated bed nets to prevent mosquitoes from giving people malaria.

Mr. MacAskill argues that people living today have a responsibility not just to people halfway around the world but also those in future generations.

If the movement has an ur-text, it is the Australian philosopher Peter Singer’s article, “Famine, Affluence and Morality,” published in 1972. The essay, which argued that there was no difference morally between the obligation to help a person dying on the street in front of your house and the obligation to help people who were dying elsewhere in the world, emerged as a kind of “sleeper hit” for young people in the past two decades,

The two men first met in 2012, when Mr. Bankman-Fried was a student at M.I.T. with an interest in utilitarian philosophy.

Over lunch, Mr. Bankman-Fried said that he was interested in working on issues related to animal welfare. Mr. MacAskill suggested that he might do more good by entering a high-earning field and donating money to the cause than by working for it directly.

Mr. Bankman-Fried contacted the Humane League and other charities, asking if they would prefer his time or donations based on his expected earnings if he went to work in tech or finance. They opted for the money, and he embarked on a remunerative career, eventually founding the cryptocurrency exchange FTX in 2019.

Bloomberg recently estimated that Mr. Bankman-Fried was worth $10.5 billion, even after the recent crash in crypto prices. That puts Mr. Bankman-Fried in the unusual position of having earned his enormous fortune on behalf of the effective altruism cause, rather than making the money and then searching for a sense of purpose in donating it.

Mr. Bankman-Fried said he expected to give away the bulk of his fortune in the next 10 to 20 years.

Mr. Moskovitz and Ms. Tuna’s net worth is estimated at $12.7 billion. They founded their own group, Good Ventures, in 2011. The group said it had given $1.96 billion in donations

Those two enormous fortunes, along with giving by scores of highly paid engineers at tech companies, mean the community is exceptionally well funded.

Mr. MacAskill said that he got to know Mr. Musk better through Igor Kurganov, a professional poker player and effective altruist, who briefly advised Mr. Musk on philanthropy.

In August, Mr. Musk retweeted Mr. MacAskill’s book announcement to his 108 million followers with the observation: “Worth reading. This is a close match for my philosophy.” Yet instead of wholeheartedly embracing that endorsement as many would, Mr. MacAskill posted a typically earnest and detailed thread in response about some of the places he agreed — and many areas where he disagreed — with Mr. Musk. (They did not see eye to eye on near-term space settlement, for one.)

Mr. MacAskill accepts responsibility for what he calls misconceptions about the community. “I take a significant amount of blame,” he said, “for being a philosopher who was unprepared for this amount of media attention.”

it comes at a time when “a confluence of at least four political and technological developments will make its practical effect significant.”

First, technological advances, as used in the Milligan case, make it easier to find new V.R.A. districts that can be reasonably configured.

Second, minority-preferred candidates can win with lower minority voting-age populations (falling from estimates as high as 65 percent in the 1990s to below 45 percent now), which means more minority voters are available to create additional V.R.A. districts.

Third, the private bar has become extremely well resourced to pursue these cases.

Fourth, the debates over partisan gerrymandering in the last decade brought many new strong social scientists into this area, in which expert analysis of maps and voting patterns plays a critical role.

John Roberts’s majority opinion is particularly important because it rejects the argument that race-based remedial districting is unconstitutional:Alabama further argues that, even if the Fifteenth Amendment authorizes the effects test of section 2, that Amendment does not authorize race-based redistricting as a remedy for section 2 violations. But for the last four decades, this Court and the lower federal courts have repeatedly applied the effects test of section 2 as interpreted in Gingles and, under certain circumstances, have authorized race-based redistricting as a remedy for state districting maps that violate section 2.In that context, Roberts continued, “we are not persuaded by Alabama’s arguments that section 2 as interpreted in Gingles exceeds the remedial authority of Congress.”

My best guess is that Roberts and Kavanaugh thought it best to proceed cautiously and bide their time. The court as an institution can only take so many bombshells at a time. The issue will come back to the court soon enough.

But, Tribe continued, “Allen v. Milligan remains highly significant as an essential reminder that the court doesn’t exist in an isolation booth, unaffected by public reactions to its decisions that venture too far from the mainstream of legal and social thought.”

Roberts and Kavanaugh, in Tribe’s view, chose not to press the case against race-based redistricting in part because of “the controversy unleashed by the court in its shattering abortion ruling in Dobbs last June, coupled with other unrestrained shocks to the system delivered by the court in the landmark cases involving guns and climate change, and aggravated by the ethical stench swirling about the court as a result of improprieties.”

These developments, Tribe continued, “almost certainly had an impact, however subconscious, on the chief justice and on Justice Kavanaugh, who has increasingly sought to distance himself from the hard right.”

Mr. Gutfeld has said he initially connected with network executives through his friendship with Andrew Breitbart, a fellow Californian and an early contributor to The Huffington Post. Mr. Gutfeld had been writing there as he moved beyond magazines, embracing the rollicking venom of the nascent blogosphere and tormenting the in-house liberals.

“He’s like America’s latchkey kid, grown up,” said Nick Gillespie, an editor at large at Reason, the libertarian magazine, and a “Red Eye” regular. “You are constantly searching out new things to pass the day when the adults aren’t around.”

What he did not know was that Fox was looking for someone like him — or at least someone unusual enough to advance an unusual new venture: proving that the right knew how to laugh.

“In every situation there’s that polarity where the Republicans are Dean Wormer in ‘Animal House,’” Mr. Gutfeld said, naming the film’s antagonist. And Democrats, he continued, came off as “the fun, Jon Stewart, ‘let’s have a great time and make fun of Dean Wormer.’ And I said that my goal was to flip that.”

“He was using a lot of all-caps,” Arianna Huffington recalled, mostly warmly.

Like media personalities before and since — including Joe Rogan and a constellation of other podcaster-comedians — Mr. Gutfeld took care to convey a vital quality to his audience: that he was getting away with something, saying what should not be said. He names Norm Macdonald, David Letterman and Tim Dillon as favored comedy minds.

Matt Sienkiewicz, a Boston College professor and Mr. Marx’s co-author of “That’s Not Funny,” said Mr. Gutfeld’s emergence was a signal accomplishment for the right: “somehow claiming conservativism or right-wing-ness as being against the squares.”

Around this period, he also often did something that feels disorienting to rewatch, given the host’s present disdain for those who moralize about Mr. Trump: He moralized about Mr. Trump.

“I’ve heard people defend him about making fun of a disability, making fun of John McCain, making fun of women,” he said on “The Five” in December 2015, accusing a Fox colleague of “Trumpsplaining” away his behavior. “No one will ever stop defending the crass stuff he says.”

“He is a salesman,” Mr. Gutfeld said, cradling his French bulldog, Gus, on his lap in the home the host shares with his wife, Elena Moussa. “Once you understand that, the derangement just kind of washes away.”

While Mr. Gutfeld mostly agrees with other Fox personalities in the lineup of Republican-friendly hours — that progressives are nuts, that Mr. Trump is unduly targeted, that President Biden is a doddering mess — “Gutfeld!” does land differently, with a host who seems adamant that his exclamation point is in on the joke.

“He’s today’s Don Rickles,” Candace Caine, a devotee from Birmingham, Ala., said after a recent taping — her third visit to see Mr. Gutfeld — where she leaned over a railing to shout “I love you!” during a commercial break.

Part of the enthusiasm behind the sky-high valuation of Tesla, where he is chief executive, comes from his predictions for the auto company’s abilities to develop humanoid robots—dubbed Optimus—that can be deployed for everything from personal assistants to factory workers. He’s also founded an AI startup, dubbed xAI, that he said aims to develop its own superhuman intelligence, even as some are skeptical of that possibility. 

Musk likes to point to another work of Sci-Fi to describe how AI could change our world: a series of books by the late-, self-described-socialist author Iain Banks that revolve around a post-scarcity society that includes superintelligent AI. 

That is the question.

“We’re actually going to have—and already do have—a massive shortage of labor. So, I think we will have not people out of work but actually still a shortage of labor—even in the future.”