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Then, just as Lee was extolling his notion of “Asian values” abroad, something unexpected happened in China. Faced with social upheaval brought about by Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, leaders in Beijing began groping for new ways to maintain order themselves. Intrigued by what Lee had been doing in Singapore, they too began reviving aspects of their old cultural edifice as a stabilizing force. The cultural vacuums in Singapore and China may have had different origins, but some version of “Asian values” suddenly felt like a comfortable remedy for both.

“I consider Deng a greater leader who changed the destiny of China and the world,” he said. He was deeply gratified by the way that Deng had brought wealth, power, order and pride back to China—still his racial homeland—as well as to all Chinese.

Deng’s admiration of Lee was just as deep. He appreciated Lee’s pragmatism and friendship, especially his refusal to criticize China for its undemocratic form of statecraft, even after the infamy of 1989. And, because “the Singapore model” proved that a country could modernize without surrendering to “wholesale Westernization,” Deng (and all subsequent leaders in Beijing) celebrated it. “If I had only Shanghai, I too might be able to change Shanghai as quickly,” he once wistfully lamented of his success. “But I have the whole of China!”

For Lee, the Chinese aphorism that best captured the uniquely Asian/Confucian view of the individual’s role in society was: Xiushen, qijia, zhiguo, pingtianxia: “Bringing peace under heaven first requires cultivating oneself, then taking care of one’s family, and finally looking after one’s country.”

Various people have described today’s supremely well-ordered Singapore as “a think tank state,” “a paradise designed by McKinsey” or “Disneyland with the death penalty.”

Modern Singapore boasts the world’s second-busiest port, its most celebrated airline and an airport that hosts 15 million visitors a year. With an annual average growth rate of almost 7% since 1976, it now has a per capita income of well over $50,000, making it the wealthiest country in Asia. And it has the second most entrepreneurs per capita in the world, trailing only the U.S.

Where did his enormous commitment and energy come from? How was he able to create such an unusual success story from virtually nothing?

Lee was a very different leader from his confreres in Beijing, but he shared something important with them: a mutual sense that, despite the long, painful and humiliating history of the Chinese people’s modern weakness, it was their destiny to make something of themselves

Lee once described the Chinese as burdened by “a sense of frustration that they were down for so long” and as “enormously ambitious to catch up.” As this rebirth finally began in the 1990s, it allowed Lee to proudly proclaim that China’s “reawakened sense of destiny is an overpowering force.” In making such utterances, he seemed to be speaking as a Chinese who identified as much with his race as with his nation

When Lee’s ancestors joined the great Chinese diaspora, they were stripped of their culture and national identities. This defoliating process created, in them and later generations of overseas Chinese, a strange kind of hunger for advancement

in Singapore, Lee could begin to satisfy that longing for progress uninhibited by the conservative traditions that have so often clashed with modernizing impulses around the world. His new country may have been an almost synthetic nation, without a coherent cultural core, but this relative vacuum ended up being a blessing in disguise when it came to the challenges of creating a completely new state from the bottom up.

China faced a similar situation in the wake of its own tectonic revolutionary upheavals. Mao Zedong once spoke of his people as possessing “two remarkable peculiarities.” They were, he said, “first poor and secondly blank,” which meant that they were inclined to “want revolution.” As he observed, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.”

Mao’s savage Cultural Revolution destroyed even more of his country’s cultural legacy. But he was fond of reminding his followers that, “Without destruction there can be no reconstruction.” By the time Deng came to power in the late 1970s, his own reforms met with little resistance from those traditional forces that had so obstructed change earlier in the century. Like Lee in Singapore, Deng was aided by the fact that traditional culture had already been demolished.

Lee Kuan Yew not only made Singaporeans proud; he also made Chinese and other Asians proud. He was a master builder, a sophisticated Asian nationalist dedicated not only to the success of his own small nation but to bequeathing the world a new model of governance

Instead of trying to impose Western political models on Asian realities, he sought to make autocracy respectable by leavening it with meritocracy, the rule of law and a strict intolerance for corruption to make it deliver growth.

He saw “Asian values” as a source of legitimacy for the idea that authoritarian leadership, constrained by certain Western legal and administrative checks, offered an effective “Asian” alternative to the messiness of liberal democracy. Because his thinking proved so agreeable to the Chinese Communist Party, he became the darling of Beijing. And because China has now become the political keystone of the modern Asian arch, Beijing’s imprimatur helped him and his ideas to gain a pan-Asian stature that Singapore alone could not have provided.

The modern GE was built by Jack Welch, the youngest CEO and chairman in company history when he took over in 1981. He ran it for 20 years, becoming the rare CEO who was also a household name, praised for his strategic and operational mastery.

their most obvious problem. GE couldn’t live without GE Capital, still so big it was essentially the nation’s seventh largest bank. But investors couldn’t live with GE Capital and its unshakable shadow of risk, either.

it worked more like a collection of businesses under the protection of a giant bank. As the financial sector came to drive more of the U.S. economy, GE Capital, the company’s finance arm, powered more of the company’s growth. At its height, Capital accounted for more than half of GE’s profits. It rivaled the biggest banks in the country, competed with Wall Street for the brightest M.B.A.s and employed hundreds of bankers.

The industrial spine of the company gave GE a AAA credit rating that allowed it to borrow money inexpensively, giving it an advantage over banks, which relied on deposits. The cash flowed up to headquarters where it powered the development of new jet engines and dividends for shareholders.

Capital also gave General Electric’s chief executives a handy, deep bucket of financial spackle with which to smooth over the cracks in quarterly earnings reports and keep Wall Street happy

GE shares were trading at 40 times its earnings when Welch retired in 2001, more than double where it had historically. And much of those profits were coming from deep within Capital, not the company’s factories.

When the financial crisis hit, Capital fell back to earth, taking GE’s share price and Immelt with it. The stock closed as low as $6.66 in March 2009. General Electric was on the brink of collapse. The market for short-term loans, the lifeblood of GE Capital, had frozen, and there was little in the way of deposits to fall back on. The Federal Reserve stepped in to save it after an emergency plea from Immelt.

the near-death experience taught investors to think of GE like a bank, a stock always vulnerable to another financial collapse

At its peak, General Electric was the most valuable company in the U.S., worth nearly $600 billion in August 2000. That year, GE’s third of a million employees operated 150 factories in the U.S., and another 176 in 34 other countries. Its pension plan covered 485,000 people.

What if the GE Jack Welch built didn’t work any more?

Cracks in the performance of the company’s industrial lines—its power turbines, jet engines, locomotives and MRI machines—would now be plain to see, some executives worried, without Capital’s cash to help cover the weak quarters and pay the sacrosanct dividend

Most of the shortfall came from its service contracts, which should have been the source of the easiest profits. Instead, the heart of the industrial business was hollow. And its failure was about to tip the entire company into crisis.

Former colleagues compared him to Bill Clinton because of his magnetic ability to hold the focus of a room. He sounded like a leader. He was a natural salesman.

Immelt was so confident in GE’s managerial excellence that he projected a sunny vision for the company’s future that didn’t always match reality. He was aware of the challenges, but he wanted his people to feel like they were playing for a winning team. That often left Immelt, in the words of one GE insider, trying to market himself out of a math problem.

Alstom’s problems hadn’t gone away, but now its stock was cheaper, and Immelt saw the makings of a deal that fit perfectly with his vision for reshaping his company. GE would essentially swap Capital, the cash engine that no longer made sense, for a new one that could churn out profits each quarter in the reliable way that industrial companies were supposed to.

To the dismay of some involved, GE’s bid crept upward, from the €30 a share that the power division’s deal team already believed was too high, to roughly €34, or almost $47. Immelt and Kron met one-on-one, and the deal team realized the game was over. The principals had shaken hands.

The visions for the present and the future were both fundamentally flawed. As GE’s research department was preparing white papers heralding “The Age of Gas,” the world was entering a multiyear decline in the demand for new gas power plants and for the electricity that made them profitable.

When advisers determined that the concessions to get the deal approved might have grown costly enough to trigger a provision allowing GE to back out, some in the Power business quietly celebrated, confiding in one another that they assumed management would abandon the deal. But Immelt and his circle of closest advisers wanted it done. That included Steve Bolze, the man who ran it and hoped someday to run all of General Electric.

“Steve’s our guy,” McElhinney said in one meeting. If Bolze was elevated to CEO, those behind him in Power would rise too. “Get on board,” he said. “We have to make the numbers.”

Immelt, trapped in Welch’s long shadow, craved a bold move to shock his company out of the doldrums that had plagued his tenure. It was time for GE to be reinvented again.

In the dry language of accounting in which he was so fluent, Flannery was declaring a pillar of Immelt’s pivot had failed: GE had been sending money out the door to repurchase its stock and pay dividends but wasn’t bringing in enough from its regular operations to cover them. It wasn’t sustainable. Buybacks and dividends are generally paid out of leftover funds.

when GE spun off Genworth, there was a chunk of the business, long-term-care insurance, that lingered. Policies designed to cover expenses like nursing homes and assisted living had proved to be a disaster for insurers who had drastically underestimated the costs

The bankers didn’t think the long-term-care business could be part of the Genworth spinoff. To make the deal more attractive, GE agreed to cover any losses. This insurance for insurers covered about 300,000 policies by early 2018, about 4% of all such policies written in the country. Incoming premiums weren’t covering payouts.

Two months after Miller flagged the $3 billion, it was clear the problem was a great deal larger. GE was preparing for it to be more than $6 billion and needed to come up with $15 billion in reserves regulators required it to have to cover possible costs in the future. The figure was gigantic. By comparison, even after the recent cut, GE’s annual dividend cost $4 billion.

JP Morgan analyst Steve Tusa, who led the pack in arguing that GE was harboring serious problems, removed his sell rating on the stock this week. GE’s biggest skeptic still thinks the businesses are broken but the risks are now known. The stock climbed back above $7 on Thursday, but is down more than 50% for the year and nearly 90% from its 2000 zenith.

the time has passed when tech companies can simply build tools, write algorithms and amass data without regard to who uses the technology and for what purpose.

Nearly a decade ago, Cisco Systems was sued in federal court on behalf of 11 members of the Falun Gong organization, who claimed that the company built a nationwide video surveillance and “forced conversion” profiling system for the Chinese government that was tailored to help Beijing crack down on the group

According to Cisco’s own marketing materials, the video analyzer — which would now be marketed as artificial intelligence — was the “only product capable of recognizing over 90 percent of Falun Gong pictorial information.”

The failure to punish Cisco set a precedent for American companies to build artificial intelligence for foreign governments to use for political oppression

Thermo Fisher, sold DNA analyzers to aid in the current large-scale domestic surveillance and internment of hundreds of thousands of Uighurs, a predominantly Muslim ethnic group, in the region of Xinjiang.

Mr. Yang defended Yahoo’s human rights commitments and emphasized the importance of the Chinese market. Google used a similar defense for Dragonfly last year.

Tech companies are spending record amounts on lobbying and quietly fighting to limit employees’ legal protections for organizing. North American legislators would be wise to answer the call from human rights organizations and research institutions by guaranteeing explicit whistle-blower protections similar to those recently passed by the European Union

Ideally, they would vocally support an instrument that legally binds businesses — via international human rights law — to uphold human rights.

The vast majority of waste — more than 80 percent — is generated by homes and consumer-facing businesses like grocery stores and restaurants.

The hype surrounding this movement is inflated by the public’s ignorance of the food supply chain.

Despite the dramatic anecdotes about truckloads of landfilled crops, little of farm waste is due to merely “cosmetic” blemishes. Much of it is bruised or weeping goods that can quickly break down and rot the entire crate. With many crops, misshapen produce knocks against its neighbors during transit, poking holes and jeopardizing entire bins. “Drops” (produce that’s fallen on the ground) are left behind because otherwise they tend to cause food-poisoning outbreaks. Farms till excessively damaged produce back into the soil along with the crop’s stems and leaves, recycling their nutrients.

North America’s packinghouses discard about 1 percent of the produce that enters their doors, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization — usually because it’s straight-up rotten.

For the most part, ugly-produce initiatives are simply gentrifying second-grade produce that was already being eaten — just not, perhaps, by upscale shoppers. It’s the food equivalent of Lyft “inventing” a bus.

The most effective ways to tackle that

“Approximately 20% of organic and conventional produce in the U.S. never leaves the farm just because it looks a little different. . . . We think that’s crazy.”

The single biggest source of U.S. food waste, accounting for 43 percent of the problem, is our own homes

Most of all, we should sync our shopping habits with our eating habits. Affluent shoppers waste the most produce because of how much of it they buy and then trash

The most important behavioral change consumers can make to address food waste isn’t to buy certain kinds of produce. It’s to actually eat what we bring home.

Homes, food service and grocery stores generate 7.8 million tons of food waste per year that can’t be salvaged, accounting for 12 percent of the problem. This waste needs to be recycled. The Environmental Protection Agency says that the United States composts only 5 percent of its food waste. (Compare that with 15 percent in the European Union.)

Biochar — made by heating inedible food and other organic waste until it becomes inert, odorless, nutrient-rich charcoal — could be a very effective way to recycle food waste, but it’s underutilized, because the equipment to do it at municipal scale is so new. Like composting, biochar can be used as a fertilizer, returning food waste’s nutrients back to the soil. Unlike composting, it can handle food waste that’s mixed with general nonhazardous trash — no need for costly separate collection and handling. Biochar also sequesters carbon for centuries.

But the infrastructure — donation matching software, cold storage and refrigerated trucks — to handle large donations of eggs, dairy, meat, bread and produce is still being built. Funding more food bank infrastructure, educating potential donors about liability laws, creating more donation tax incentives and standardizing food safety regulations would recover up to 996,000 tons of food, or 1.7 billion meals, per year, according to ReFED.

For certain crops like berries, tomatoes, leafy greens and cucumbers, farms can take advantage of state and federal funds that would help them switch from open-field to hoophouse or greenhouse methods. Already common in East Asia and Europe, these methods boost yields and dramatically reduce how much of the crop is too damaged to leave the farm

As long as we eat fresh food instead of shelf-stable nutrient bars, perishability is part of the bargain. The only way to completely eliminate food waste is to abolish fresh food. Beyond that, all we can do is manage the waste.

“During the run-up to the election, the Trump and Clinton campaigns bid ruthlessly for the same online real estate in front of the same swing-state voters. But because Trump used provocative content to stoke social-media buzz, and he was better able to drive likes, comments, and shares than Clinton, his bids received a boost from Facebook’s click model, effectively winning him more media for less money,” García Martínez continues. “In essence, Clinton was paying Manhattan prices for the square footage on your smartphone’s screen, while Trump was paying Detroit prices. Facebook users in swing states who felt Trump had taken over their news feeds may not have been hallucinating.”

And yet, in the context of the 2016 Presidential Election, this way of auctioning advertising—originally developed by Google and normalized in the pre-Trump age—can seem strange, unfair, and possibly even against the rules that govern election advertising.

From Facebook’s perspective, their platform is “neutral,” in the sense that it provides all advertisers with an equal opportunity to maximize their reach and minimize their costs. “The auction system works the same for everybody,” says Andy Stone, a Facebook spokesperson. “It affords equality of opportunity.”

Their personal politics mattered far less than the politics of the system that they half-wittingly created. While the clickbait candidate this last round was Donald Trump, future elections could just as easily feature a left-wing ideologue with an equally engaging style.

The University of Virginia media-studies professor Siva Vaidhyanathan, who has a book coming out on Facebook in September—Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy—had a stark response, especially with the midterms six months away. “There is no reform. The problem with Facebook is Facebook,” he told me. “When you marry a friction-free social network of 2 billion people to a powerful, precise, cheap ad system that runs on user profiling you get this mess. And no one can switch it off. So we are screwed.”

Russian and American officials have discussed how to stabilize the situation.

Fact-checking measures adopted by major tech and social-media companies are unlikely to stop Russia from seeking out new vulnerabilities in Western democracies.

While such an attack would mark a major escalation for Russia, it would not be unprecedented. Attacks on at least a dozen electric facilities in America—including one nuclear plant—have been traced back to a Russian-linked group. Russia is also thought to be behind an increasing number of cyberattacks against private corporations and government agencies in Ukraine. Similarly, Moscow waged a massive disinformation and propaganda campaign alongside its annexation of Crimea in 2014.

In recent years, Kremlin-linked cyber and disinformation campaigns of varying ambition have hit several European countries. In Germany, Russian state news spread a fake story about the rape of an underage girl by migrants during the height of Europe’s refugee crisis in 2016 that led to dozens of protests across the country. Similarly, Russian-backed broadcasters targeted Germany’s Russian emigrant community allegedly to bolster support for the country’s right-wing Alternative for Germany party in its bid to enter parliament for the first time. In France, Russian-linked hackers were believed to have stolen and leaked emails from French President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign. Moscow also recently launched a French version of RT, the public broadcaster formerly known as Russia Today. Spanish investigators found that both private and state-led Russian-based groups disseminated information on social media to try to sway public opinion ahead of Catalonia’s independence referendum in October.

“On the security side, there are some improvements that can happen without the [Trump] administration,” Sulmeyer, the former cyber official, said. “But without a greater counterweight or cost for Russia, none of this is going to stop.”

The study, in other words, isn’t about how much see level rise happens this century, but whether this century’s emissions bank enough carbon for total ice melt down—or some less drastic version. “Our analysis really looks at a 2000 year envelope,” says Strauss.

Under the ice, Greenland and Antarctica are uncharted territories. In order to calculate the rate at which those massive ice sheets slough off, Levermann says he would need to know more about the texture of the underlying rock.

He knows that he is privileged by virtue of his gender and his skin color, but in his heart he is sick of being reminded about it. Like lots of other white men in America, he is grappling with a growing sense that the term white man has become an epithet

The bedrock issue, though, is Rogan’s courting of a middle-bro audience that the cultural elite hold in particular contempt—guys who get barbed-wire tattoos and fill their fridge with Monster energy drinks and preordered their tickets to see Hobbs & Shaw. Joe loves these guys

Why is he connecting so deeply with so many men, for such long stretches of time, at a moment when no one else can seem to hold anyone’s attention for more than two minutes?

There’s a tendency right now to make every single thing about Donald Trump, but if you don’t see the dotted line connecting the president to a wave of men who feel thwarted and besieged and sentenced to an endless apology tour, then you’re not paying attention.

The hard truth for some of Rogan’s critics in the media is that he is much better at captivating audiences than most of us, because he has the patience and the generosity to let his interviews be an experience rather than an inquisition.

how many mainstream entertainers routinely expose their audiences to Harvard biologists? Or climate-change experts? (The Uninhabitable Earth author David Wallace-Wells, episode No. 1259.) Or biosocial scientists? (The Yale professor Nicholas Christakis, episode No. 1274.) Or ethical-leadership lecturers? (The NYU Stern business-school professor Jonathan Haidt, episode No. 1221.)

“Learn, learn, learn, ladies and gentlemen,” Joe said at the start of one podcast episode this winter, wrapping up an ad read for the online education platform Skillshare. “That’s what I’m getting out of this. I think it’s very important to continue to challenge your mind.”

He’s right! It is! And don’t we want men thirsting for knowledge? Don’t we want them striving, setting goals, learning, learning, learning? Don’t we want more Joes?

Plenty of the role models that men choose for themselves draw eye rolls from everyone else, or dire warnings, or #cancel tweets

if we’re all going to make it through this era alive, men do need alternatives to look up to

the irony is that so many of the men who demonstrate a level of intelligence and empathy worth aspiring to—they’ve pretty much all been on Joe Rogan’s podcast

Free speech and its consequences, particularly the deplatforming of right-wing political provocateurs, is a push-button subject for Rogan, and it’s where he gets himself into the most trouble.

the same core stimulus: a plunging sense of self-worth caused by a rapidly changing society.

that’s not why people are obsessed with him. In reality, it’s because Joe Rogan is a tireless optimist, a grab-life-by-the-throat-and-bite-out-its-esophagus kind of guy, and many, many men respond to that.

like lots of other men in America, not just the white ones, he’s reckoning out loud with a fear that the word masculinity has become, by definition, toxic

It’s a tough message for a very rich guy like Joe Rogan to sell, but he pulls it off because he has never stopped coming across as stubbornly normal. He’s from a middle-class Boston suburb, he’s bald, and for God’s sake, his name is Joe.

Rogan seems like a regular Joe, but he’s not. He is driven, inexhaustible, and an honest-to-goodness autodidact.

His brain is wicked absorbent, like Neo in The Matrix, uploading knowledge through a hot spear jammed into the back of his skull. He’s a freak of nature, and most of his fans cannot, in fact, be just like him.

a key thing Joe and his fans tend to have in common is a deficit of empathy. He seems unable to process how his tolerance for monsters like Alex Jones plays a role in the wounding of people who don’t deserve it.

At the very least, he shows too much compassion for bad actors, and not enough for people on the receiving end of their attacks.

In order to get at the truth of Joe’s beliefs, you have to ignore what he says and watch what he does. Rogan likes to say that he’s voted for a Democrat in every presidential election—aside from a brief ill-advised fling with Gary Johnson—and that he despises Trump.

More revealing is who he invites onto his podcast, and what subjects he chooses to feast on in his stand-up specials. And if you cast a wide enough net, clear patterns emerge. If there’s a woman or a person of color (or both) on Joe’s podcast, the odds are high that person is a fighter or an entertainer, and not a public intellectual.

if you look past the jokes themselves and focus on the targets he’s choosing, the same patterns emerge. Hillary, the #MeToo movement, why it sucks that he can’t call things “gay,” vegan bullies,

All the same, because of their core DNA and their comfort with getting booed, comedians still tend to be at the forefront of so many of these debates over language and identity, touching those electrical wires in ways other people wouldn’t dare. Joe touches them all the time

The competitive energy, the drive to succeed, the search for purpose, for self-respect. Get better every day. Master your domain. Total human optimization

Joe likes Jack. He likes Milo Yiannopoulos. He likes Alex Jones. He wants you to know that he doesn’t agree with much of what they say, but he also wants you to know that off camera they’re the nicest guys. If we all have fatal flaws, this is Joe’s: his insistence on seeing value in people even when he shouldn’t, even when they’ve forfeited any right to it, even when the harm outweighs the good.

It comes from a generous place, but it amounts to careless cruelty. He just won’t write people off, and then he compounds the sin by throwing them a lifeline at the moment when they least deserve it.

His invitation to Jones was indefensible, and his defense was even worse. I had assumed going in that Rogan would explain himself at the top, similar to what he’d done after booting the Jack Dorsey interview. But he didn’t. He went the other way. He promised a “fun” interview with Jones, as if it was a joyful, long-awaited reunion rather than offensive for even existing, and he assured his listeners that “you’re gonna love it.”

My Joe Rogan experience ended because he wore me out. He never shuts up. He talks and talks and talks. He doesn’t seem to grasp that not every thought inside his brain needs to be said out loud. It doesn’t occur to him to consider whether his contributions have value. He just speaks his mind. He just whips it out and drops it on the table.

And yet I came away more comfortable with Joe’s vision of manhood—and more determined to do the exact opposite.

I’m glad, though, that the men of America have Joe Rogan to motivate and inspire and educate them in limitless ways, including how to recognize a moron

Rogan’s podcast gushes like a mighty river of content—approximately three episodes a week, usually more than two hours per episode, consisting of one marathon conversation with a subject of his choosing. Over the course of about 1,400 episodes and counting, his roster of guests can be divided roughly three ways: (1) comedians, (2) fighters, and (3) “thinkers,”

Food, like drugs, stimulates the brain’s reward circuit. Chronic exposure to high-fat and sugary foods is similarly linked with lower D2 levels, and people with lower D2 levels are also more likely to crave such foods. It’s a vicious cycle in which more exposure begets more craving.

Neuroscientists have found that food and recreational drugs have a common target in the “reward circuit” of the brain, and that the brains of humans and other animals who are stressed undergo biological changes that can make them more susceptible to addiction.

In a 2010 study, Diana Martinez and colleagues at Columbia scanned the brains of a group of healthy controls and found that lower social status and a lower degree of perceived social support — both presumed to be proxies for stress — were correlated with fewer dopamine receptors, called D2s, in the brain’s reward circuit

The reward circuit evolved to help us survive by driving us to locate food or sex in our environment

Today, the more D2 receptors you have, the higher your natural level of stimulation and pleasure — and the less likely you are to seek out recreational drugs or comfort food to compensate

people addicted to cocaine, heroin, alcohol and methamphetamines experience a significant reduction in their D2 receptor levels that persists long after drug use has stopped. These people are far less sensitive to rewards, are less motivated and may find the world dull, once again making them prone to seek a chemical means to enhance their everyday life.

Drug exposure also contributes to a loss of self-control. Dr. Volkow found that low D2 was linked with lower activity in the prefrontal cortex, which would impair one’s ability to think critically and exercise restraint

Now we have a body of research that makes the connection between stress and addiction definitive. More surprising, it shows that we can change the path to addiction by changing our environment.

At this point you may be wondering: What controls the reward circuit in the first place? Some of it is genetic. We know that certain gene variations elevate the risk of addiction to various drugs. But studies of monkeys suggest that our environment can trump genetics and rewire the brain.

simply by changing the environment, you can increase or decrease the likelihood of an animal becoming a drug addict.

The same appears true for humans. Even people who are not hard-wired for addiction can be made dependent on drugs if they are stressed

Is it any wonder, then, that the economically frightening situation that so many Americans experience could make them into addicts? You will literally have a different brain depending on your ZIP code, social circumstances and stress level.

In 1990, no state in our country had an adult obesity rate above 15 percent; by 2015, 44 states had obesity rates of 25 percent or higher. What changed?

What happened is that cheap, calorie-dense foods that are highly rewarding to your brain are now ubiquitous.

Nothing in our evolution has prepared us for the double whammy of caloric modern food and potent recreational drugs. Their power to activate our reward circuit, rewire our brain and nudge us in the direction of compulsive consumption is unprecedented.

The processed food industry has transformed our food into a quasi-drug, while the drug industry has synthesized ever more powerful drugs that have been diverted for recreational use.

Fortunately, our brains are remarkably plastic and sensitive to experience. Although it’s far easier said than done, just limiting exposure to high-calorie foods and recreational drugs would naturally reset our brains to find pleasure in healthier foods and life without drugs.

They’ve exploited the cutting-edge algorithms of Facebook and Google to feed misinformation to Americans most likely to believe and spread it.

They have targeted online ads designed to intensify our hottest culture wars: abortion, guns, sexuality, race.

The genius of this cyberwar is that unwitting Westerners do most of the work. Our eagerness to believe the worst about our political opponents makes us easy marks for fake or distorted “news” from anti-American troll farms

Our media — talk radio, cable news, every variety of digital communication — seek to cull us into like-minded echo chambers.

The West has monetized polarization; our enemies have, in turn, weaponized it.

What was first perceived as a targeted attack — Russia attempting to hack the U.S. election — is proving to be a broader and bolder war.

Seeking to weaken and discredit the Western alliance that has constrained Russia’s global ambitions for 70 years, Putin pushed the Brexit vote that rattled the European Union.

His cyber-sappers have also aided nationalist movements in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Poland and Hungary

Russia did not need to collude with Trump. He was already an ideal host for the virus they are spreading. Putin’s goal, in May’s words, is to “sow discord in the West,” and Trump eats, sleeps and breathes discord. He understands that our siloed, targeted, algorithmic media feeds on conflict and outrage, and he is happy to dish it up.

We can’t defend ourselves until we see clearly what is happening, and understand that fact-checking, truth-telling and goodwill are more than virtues now. They are patriotic duties. Pogo’s words were never so true: We’ve met the enemy, and he is us.

in the places where support for Mr. Trump runs the strongest, the proportion of the white population that didn’t finish high school is relatively high. So is the proportion of working-age adults who neither have a job nor are looking for one. The third-strongest correlation among hundreds of variables tested: the preponderance of mobile homes.

Trump counties include places that have voted for both Republicans and Democrats, and the strongest predictors of Trump support include how a county responded to two very different third-party candidates: Trump territory showed stronger support for the segregationist George Wallace in the 1968 election than the rest of the country, and substantially weaker support for the centrist former Republican John B. Anderson in 1980.

the economic problems that line up with strong Trump support have long been in the making, and defy simple fixes.

have any of the individuals commenting ever met or talked to the uneducated trailer dwellers referred to in this article. I think not. This poor pitiful underclass that we must now fix as true liberals has been making poor decisions for decades. Serial children withe serial mothers and resulting large child support payments. Job hopping and laying around the house all winter when laid off while waiting for the Wife to get home from work and make dinner. Gun purchases for thousands of dollars and 45,000 dollar trucks on an annual income of 35,000. Cashing in 401ks. To buy the latest 4 Wheeler. Oh and don't forget the biannual trips to Disney world or to hunt out west on credit cards. I sprang from uneducated people of another generation and the men by and large did not engage in self destructive behavior like this. sorry you make your bed and don't expect me to cry about it.

I think at least half of the American political class, the republican half, wants Americans to be ignorant. The ignorant are easily duped and manipulated. The GOP establishment clearly knows that, but they never expected someone like Trump to beat them at their own game. That explains why the GOP is generally unwilling to adequately fund public education and is content to punish the non-rich who seek higher education by burying them in debt.

Until now I had deceived myself into believing that I am a college educated hard working East coast Caucasian with moderate views and a penchant for reading a multi-faceted world class newspaper. However, the continued biased reports concerning Mr. Trump and his campaign are quite distasteful and have completely lost objectivity.Now, the journalistic attacks have moved toward his supporters and potential voters. Well, as with many of my fellow unintelligent white trash friends this only cements my unwavering support for the Trump campaign.

I have seen technology take jobs from people more than immigrants. It is a terrible feeling. Most of my peers and I are now working freelance jobs. Sometimes its voluntary but often times it is because we can't find full time jobs with benefits. For those of us over 60 it is the only work available. If you have never been independent you are in for a shock at how hard it can be to run a small sole proprietor business from scratch.

Enormous advances in technology have made the trans-oceanic distances disappear. Foreign-based administrative jobs are now transparent, meaning that "back-room" corporate jobs such as payroll, accounting and corporate management can be off-shored. Jobs in this category also include computer software development and computer system help-line support. The concept of the "virtual corporation", which maintains low levels of "project managers" can scale up or down, and only a small "corporate core" needs to be physically in the USA.

Trump has said that he hires people from other countries over American citizens and thinks Americans are already overpaid. So, why is he so popular with the angry voters who are living from paycheck to paycheck or were forced to retire? Trump is part of the problem, not the solution. The working class voters need wage insurance or a living wage solution and they need the government to step in and help them. Remember the WPA programs from the 30s? My guess is that Trump's supporters don't want to be the takers after years of thinking they were above that and were the makers. Surprise, we are all in the same boat.

there is a much bigger issue than creating jobs for these people. It is figuring out why so many are incapable of learning at a college level and beyond. I refuse to believe that it is nature dictating such a limitation. My money is on nurture; therefore, my money is on being able to solve that problem too.

Until we as a country stop treating intelligence as a disease and take steps to improve education across the board, this is what the fall-out will be. It was only a matter of time before someone figured out they could get to the White House by courting the angry white people vote.

among high school or less, 40% some college, but 33% among college graduates, and 19% among the post-graduates. In no election did Trump get the vote of the majority of college graduates or postgraduates. The education gap is consistent and steady. The gender gap is equally consistent.

The jobs engine the drove the US to its post war boom was the manufacturing sector. That has been gutted - by US consumer decisions.FDR did not practice racial identity politics.

Racism lurks - always - near the surface for ALL human beings. Don't believe me? Go take Harvard's Project Implicit tests (free) and learn about your own racist proclivities!By nature, all human beings tend toward tribalism; we are *wired* to notice and react to "difference". Civilization is the mass awareness of that proclivity towards shunning or rejecting "the other" and creating laws to stop it from becoming reality.When people become stressed, the veneer of civilization starts to break down - our more primitive, wired behaviors take over. That's what is happening now.We also have a huge propensity - as a species - towards cooperation. We have to somehow keep pursuing that "Better Angel of Our Nature" to keep the tide from turning permanently ugly.

As I read this article I began to confront an uncomfortable reality. We, as a society are to blame for Mr. Trump's support. Apparently we have ignored or overlooked the tragic plight faced by a sizable minority. Imagine the unemployed coal minor in West Virgina. His financial life is probably a shambles and he has no realistic prospect of recovering. He feels hopeless and abandoned. He sees publicized efforts to address problems of ethnic minorities and immigrants, yet he sits cold and jobless without anyone clamoring to address his situation. He starts getting angry and frustrated.Then, out of nowhere someone comes who appears to want to fight for him. Finally, someone who might champion his cause. Bring back jobs. Stop cheap labor from coming in.

Nationally, 23 percent of the 25-to-54-year-old population was not working in March, up from 18 percent in 2000. The areas where Trump is most popular appear to be at the forefront of that trend.

Don't people realize that technology, computers, automation and especially robots have replaced more manufacturing and more factories than all the illegal immigrants ever have? On many factory floors you hardly see any human beings at all. Every product is whisked along conveyor belts and assembled (or cooked), and then inspected, labeled, packaged and shipped with a minimum of human intervention. That's today's world. What are we to do? Protest against computers and robots.Also, American corporations have zero loyalty to the USA. Their loyalty is to their bottom line. They take advantage of every tax loophole they can; and if their product is labor intensive they would much rather pay 5000 workers a dollar a day with no benefits rather than stay in America and have to pay someone $18 an hour will vacation time, holiday time off, Soc Sec taxes and Medicare taxes.

This is the Party of Stupid the Republican carefully constructed through painstaking racism, defunding of public education, defunding of infrastructure, hate radio, Fox-Henhouse News and trickle-down poverty.Donald Trump's supporters are the direct result of the Republican's decades-long efforts at dumbing down a large swath of Americans.The Republican Party needs to take a giant proud bow as their electorate walks down the runway of nationally-assisted-suicide.

The irony of all this is that, yes, the world is shifting out from under the feet of the less-educated poor, but none of us face a really BIG or YUGE problem like slavery, Civil War, total war, a Great Depression, or even a gold/silver conflict. Yet Ken Lay and others can seriously muse over the possibility of secession from the union.The goals that so many of T's supporters are crying for are already in the process of being achieved -- the debt is too high but the national deficit has been cut in half under Obama. Millions now have health care that they didn't have before. "Taxed Enough Already" couldn't be more of an inept slogan.I wonder sometimes if the collapse of the USSR was such a good thing. Having a common enemy provided a kind of glue that held us together. Now some of us seem -- recklessly., hysterically, feverishly -- anxious to find an equally powerful enemy in our own ranks.

I can't count the number of my husband's uneducated white southern relations who have taken extensive advantage, repeatedly, of both state and federal programs, including unemployment, food stamps, occasional welfare, and (sometimes specious) "disability." (My husband's mother was one of 11 born to poor sharecroppers, and the only one to leave her subculture

Oh, and about the "myth" that opposition to Islam is only is by simplistic Islamophobes. Let me suggest for those who didn't get to it, this article about about the premier public intellectual of France: "Once Hopeful for Harmony, a Philosopher Voices Discord in France" It said that he has concluded that Islam is not comparable with 'Western enlightenment values."

It's obvious that the changing economy has structurally disadvantaged many less educated people across America. But, it is also true that economically distressed whites enjoy access to exactly the same programs that assist minorities. They just don't "feel" like this is true.

Truth be told, Trump is supported by numerous highly educated people who choose not to support known liars and/or socialists. These same people are tired of candidates who are bought and paid for by secret and evil Super PACs-- Trump is not controlled by these groups. Rubio, Kasich, Cruz and C;inton are.

The counties where Trump is most popular also have the lowest employment participation rates. Ordinarily, those folks would be expected to vote Democratic, which is more likely to continue the government spending that sustains them. Trump followers are willing to support him even though it is probably against their economic interest.So how to explain this? The strong correlation to previous support for George Wallace suggests it's about identity. A certain segment of the population does not accept diversity and change. They cling to white supremacy. The irony, as the article notes, is that these are the same folks who self-identify their heritage as "American," rather than, say "English" or "German." However, to me, they seem very un-American.

If policy hadn't been influenced by campaign funding, perhaps we would be in a better situation. Maybe congress would have paid more attention to improving the education system. It's a shame that most people don't understand that their only true weapon is voting for someone that isn't in debt to an industry. If we don't change our campaign finance system, nothing will change. Our voices will never be heard, our needs will never be met and policy will continue to favor profit, not people.

You are misinterpreting the analysis. This is a correlation analysis and what it says is that there is a moderately strong positive correlation between the % of people in a county that are white and have no high school and the % of people that support Trump. The 61 number is the correlation coefficient. The analysis does NOT show that folks in mobile homes vote for Trump.

There is only one interesting question regarding Trump: can he win Ohio and Florida in the national elections? Otherwise his campaign will turn into a footnote in American history like the campaign of many other unsuccessful candidates (Dukakis someone?). His voters, then, will be forgotten, as they usually are, until the next elections. That's the only time America's, winner takes it all culture, remembers those people exist.

However crude his message, on trade Trump has a legitimate point, which is that the US (not US companies, which don't care about international boundaries, but US workers) has got the short end of trade deals for decades. Whatever benefits the US has gleaned from these deals, they are minuscule compared to their utterly transformative effects on India, Mexico and especially China, which begs the question of why we couldn't have negotiated a better deal, one less devastating to old-line manufacturing. It often seems US negotiators are driven more by a religious belief in and devotion to free-trade principles, than by national self-interest. Trump may be unfit to be president, but I don't doubt he would have driven a harder bargain and come out with a better deal, if only because, unlike US negotiators, he'd be fully prepared to walk away from a deal he didn't like.

It's high time we re-engage in our communities with love and empathy. We need less talk of the theoretical economics underpinning trade deals and the credibility of climate science. It's not because these things are unimportant or irrelevant to governing in a complex world, but because our neighbors are afraid we've forgotten them in all our sophistication. They need to hear and see that we care about them. Our ideas about common efforts to improve their lives need to be less about class and more about community. We need to be clear that even the least among us are important to our common future

So many of the comments on this piece seem to fall into the category of subliminal rationales for long held prejudices that many of us have but don't understand.

this analysis didn’t show a particularly powerful relationship between the racial breakdown of a county and its likelihood of voting for Trump. There are Trump-supporting counties where very high proportions of the population are African-American and others where it was very low, for example.

There's a very powerful stigma associated with being poor in this country. Frankly, it makes it nearly impossible for an elite institution like the Times to write about poor populations without those same people perceiving a condescending tone. At the first mention of trailer parks--even if that is an apt descriptor for a type of housing--the words begin to cut and defenses rise. When spoken by a rich person, those words demean, even if they're not meant to by the speaker

The problem is that "Thug Trump," just so happens to touch on some truths, and existing bi-partisan defects that we ignore. Funny, as different as they are, Ralph Nader made the same point, that the major defects of our country are supported by both parties and thus untouchable. I guess the nature of a revolutionary is part misfit but also sensing the time is ripe for a drastic change. It may be better to look less at the person, and more that the endemic defects that he promises to change. From Huey Long to Norman Thomas, outsiders have had positive effects.

These relatives, who are very pleasant to talk to on a one-to-one basis, are the same people who send us rabid chain emails about how Obama hates America, how we need to "take back our country," etc. "The blacks" are "parasites and takers" and the real reason they invariably vote Republican. They see no relationship between their own "taking" and the "taking" by blacks and Hispanics.

Whether Trump can appeal to enough independent or even blue collar Democrats is problematic absent some sensational catastrophe in the economy or in government. But you never know. Recall the charge of "Rum, Romanism, and rebellion" late in the 1884 election. It changed history

I bought into that "it's the fault of freeloaders" shtick for years, until i was laid off at age 50. Suddenly, I was one of those "freeloaders" with a 30 year impeccable work history and it changed my mind drastically. I've run into people like me from all walks of life; people with degrees and skills who lost jobs and are cut out of returning to the world of employment. I found something eventually, but at half the pay with no benefits. I don't support Trump but he's tapped into the lives of people like me. Globalization has showed us that for those at the very top, the elites, our country and it's workers don't matter much as long as the money keeps flowing. Unfortunately, I can't see that Trump would do much to change that

racism in the US is complicated. Some people who say the right things do the worst things, and vice versa. What gets you in trouble is saying blue-collar stuff like "nappy-headed ho's" White liberals are the most politically correct and the most critical of crude speech. But white liberals often have less contact with blacks than any other whites. Bigotry is not easily identified.

One of the strongest predictors of Trump support is the proportion of the population that is native-born. Relatively few people in the places where Trump is strong are immigrants — and, as their answers on their ancestry reveal, they very much wear Americanness on their sleeve.

The point is that now, the entire middle class and working class have been fleeced by the Repubs AND the Dems, elected representatives who have shirked their duties and spent their time helping their billionaire puppetmasters.

Bernie supporters and Trump supporters have something big in common: their basic grievance, which is that the economy is rigged for the 1%. It's helpful to understand our differences, but then we should be finding common ground, not calling each other names. We're all people; we all deserve dignity and respect.

We are in the early throes of another revolution now, and this one will even more dramatically favor those with superior cognitive abilities and education over those with average or below average cognitive abilities and education. Yet all people at all levels need to eat, have shelter, and pursue lives of dignity and meaning. It remains unclear what kind of society will emerge from the current disruptions, but it is increasingly obvious that the transition will not be pretty.

The donation is the latest in a string of high-value reparations payments from white people who have unearthed ties to racism and slavery in their family history — finding details such as the value assigned to enslaved people in a ledger, and notes identifying a grandmother as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The money brings a significant boost for Change Today, Change Tomorrow, which has grown remarkably since Ryan first started the organization as a way to secure school supplies for teachers. Its programs now range from providing hot meals and snacks for students to public health outreach for new parents and menstruation products for those who need them, as well as making food deliveries — including fresh produce from a Black-owned farm.

The donor's identity has not been revealed, but the nonprofit said the person lives in the South.

Among those receiving reparations is Soul2Soul Sisters, a Colorado group co-founded by the Rev. Dawn Riley Duval. The money helped her organization grow — and like Ryan, Riley Duval says reparations are absolutely necessary, given the ties that have long bound racism and economic inequality in the United States

The donor who wired money to Change Today, Change Tomorrow is calling for other white people to pay reparations, even if their ancestors didn't own enslaved people.

The leaders of Change Today, Change Tomorrow echoed that sentiment. And they acknowledged that, given the sum heading their way, it wasn't until a wire transfer had taken place that it seemed real. Now, they added, they have more work to do.

Referring to the reparations payment, she added, "We don't have the luxury to kind of just sit on it, so it's literally money that's going to go right back into the community."The donor has never lived in Kentucky, Croney said, adding that the person found the organization by searching around on the internet. Louisville has played a prominent role in the national discussion on racism and police violence since last year when police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her home. Activists are still calling for accountability in that case.

Kelly then asked how, in a quarter century, one might determine whether Sale was right.Sale extemporaneously cited three factors: an economic disaster that would render the dollar worthless, causing a depression worse than the one in 1930; a rebellion of the poor against the monied; and a significant number of environmental catastrophes.

“I bet you $1,000 that in the year 2020, we’re not even close to the kind of disaster you describe,” he said.

Twenty-five years later, the once distant deadline is here. We are locked down. Income equality hasn’t been this bad since just before the Great Depression. California and Australia were on fire this year.

When Sale and Kelly made the bet, they had assumed that by 2020 the winner would be obvious. Maybe all it would take was a look around: Is civilization still here, or not? It clearly is still kicking around. But the pandemic, its economic consequences, and the worsening climate crisis have made things interesting. What would Patrick say?

That’s what Patrick had to determine. In early December he began writing up his decision. Despite his wariness toward tech, he had no intention of jumping on the current techlash bandwagon. Instead, the bet was constructed on three clear conditions, and Patrick would consider each one separately, as if judging a boxing match round by round.

Round by round, the outcome would seem to make it a draw. But when making the final call, Patrick stuck to the language of the original bet. In that fateful Greenwich Village encounter, Sale called for a convergence of three disasters. “Kirk must hit the trifecta to win, meaning that all three horses of his apocalypse must come through,” Patrick wrote. “Only one of his predictions was a winner; one came in neck and neck; and one was way back in the pack.”

So on December 31, Patrick declared Kelly the winner in an email to the bettors. “But it’s a squeaker and not much cause for celebration,” he concluded.

What is most galling about this economy is that we are supposed to proffer compliance and complicity as companies profit amorally off of us. Facebook unveils supposedly robust privacy protections on the same day it launches a service to connect you with your “secret crush.”

You’re supposed to pay whatever rent landlords want, whatever bills hospitals charge, whatever price surge the car-share makes up.

From Apple to John Deere, digital-rights-management technology has made us “tenants on our own devices.” The terms of service turn us into the servants. And what recourse do we have? We ask to speak with the manager, vent to Yelp, endure the hold muzak and hack our way to rival bargains. But let’s be honest: We don’t have power.

“How can you treat us like this? Do you think that this is normal?” Hundreds in the line broke into applause. At no point in those 12 hours did a United employee walk up and down the line to see how we were doing, offer blankets or water, or get our customer service session started early, the way they do in long lines at, say, Starbucks.

“What you need to do,” Benilda said, “is buy a new ticket. Because now you’ll just be on standby for the next flight and the next. That could last for days.”

For those of us living hand-to-mouth — which is to say, most of us — it takes years of nothing going wrong to earn your way out of poverty. I had gone wrong: I had slept, awaking back at square one

Maybe a few of us were in dire straits because we were confused or uninformed or lazy or irresponsible, a common argument about why people remain poor. But not all of us. Besides, personal fortitude is no match for structural inequalities.

Fifty-three hours after arriving at the airport in Newark, I landed in San Francisco; I’d scored a standby seat. My trip took almost triple the time it would have in 1933, when the transcontinental Boeing 247 debuted. Driving across the country would have been nine hours faster.

What is strangest and saddest about the broad brokenness of America is that, actually, this is the way it works. Have-not consumers pay to be complicit in our own fleecing. That is the toxic marrow in America’s bones. More than a century after conquering the onetime impossibility of flight, we have yet to master the long-time impossibility of fairness.

an aversion to altering one’s belief on the basis of evidence was more common among conservatives and that this correlated “with beliefs about topics ranging from extrasensory perception, to respect for tradition, to abortion, to God.”

In their forthcoming paper, “On the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence,” the authors develop an eight-item “Actively Open-minded Thinking about Evidence Scale.”

People taking the test are asked their level of agreement or disagreement with a series of statements including:“A person should always consider new possibilities.”“Certain beliefs are just too important to abandon no matter how good a case can be made against them.”“One should disregard evidence that conflicts with your established beliefs.”“No one can talk me out of something I know is right.”“I believe that loyalty to one’s ideals and principles is more important than ‘open-mindedness’.”

One study showed thatthe speeches of liberal US presidents score higher on integrative complexity than those of conservatives, as measured by the presence of “words involved in differentiation (exclusive words, tentative words, negations) as well as integration of different perspectives (conjunctions).”

there is one more item to add to the constantly growing list of factors driving polarization in America: Those on the left and right appear to use substantially different cognitive processes to interpret events in the world around them, large and small.

Baron and Jost also cite studies suggesting that those on the right are more susceptible to authoritarian appeals:Conservatives score higher than liberals on measures of personal needs for order and structure, cognitive closure, intolerance of ambiguity, cognitive or perceptual rigidity, and dogmatism.

Liberals, they write, “perform better than conservatives on objective tests of cognitive ability and intelligence” while conservatives “score higher than liberals on measures of self-deception” and “are more likely than liberals to spread ‘fake news,’ political misinformation, and conspiracy theories throughout their online social networks.”

n a February 2019 paper, “Liberals lecture, conservatives communicate: Analyzing complexity and ideology in 381,609 political speeches,” four political scientists, Martijn Schoonvelde, Anna Brosius, Gijs Schumacher and Bert N. Bakker, argue that “speakers from culturally liberal parties use more complex language than speakers from culturally conservative parties” and that this variance in linguistic complexity isrooted in personality differences among conservative and liberal politicians. The former prefer short, unambiguous statements, and the latter prefer longer compound sentences, expressing multiple points of view.

Pennycook and his co-authors concluded:People who reported believing that beliefs and opinions should change according to evidence were less likely to be religious, less likely to hold paranormal and conspiratorial beliefs, more likely to believe in a variety of scientific claims, and were more politically liberal in terms of overall ideology, partisan affiliation, moral values, and a variety of specific political opinions.

President Trump speaks at the lowest level of all those studied, as measured on the on the Flesch-Kincaid index. As Factbase put it:By any metric to measure vocabulary, using more than a half dozen tests with different methodologies, Donald Trump has the most basic, most simplistically constructed, least diverse vocabulary of any president in the last 90 years.

Some scholars argue that a focus on ideological conflict masks the most salient divisions in the era of Donald Trump: authoritarians versus non-authoritarians.

It’s really critical to help people understand the difference between conservatives and authoritarians. Conservatives are by nature opposed to change and novelty, whereas authoritarians are averse to diversity and complexity. It’s a subtle but absolutely critical distinction.

“What we’re facing,” she continued,is an authoritarian revolution — not a conservative revolution, the term is inherently contradictory — which in the U.S. has been creeping up since the 1960s

Authoritarianism, Stenner continued, isclearly distinct from what I call “laissez faire conservatism.” In fact, in cross-national research I consistently find that these two dimensions are actually negatively related. If anything, authoritarians tend to be wary of free markets and more supportive of government intervention and redistribution, perhaps even schemes of equalization and progressive taxation.

Stenner argued that “non-authoritarian conservatives, opposed to change, dedicated to upholding laws, and to the defense of legitimate political and social institutions that underpin societal stability and security” are a crucial pillar of democratic governance.

In the real world, she continued, “it is the authoritarians who are the revolutionaries.”

Because of this authoritarian revolution, here and abroad, Stenner contends thatthe whole of liberal democracy is in grave danger at this moment. But the fault lies with authoritarians on both the right and the left, and the solution is in the hands of non-authoritarians on both sides.

Stenner makes the case that the authoritarian revolution began in the 1960s: “Once the principle of equal treatment under the law was instituted and entrenched by means of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act,” traditional conservatism — “fidelity to the laws of the land and defense of legitimate institutions” — took a back seat to authoritarianism “as a factor driving expressions of racial, moral and political intolerance.”

Stenner takes the analysis of contemporary conflict and polarization full circle back to the fundamental American divide over race, a subject that touches on virtually every issue facing the nation.

That’s what really triggered this war. Putin was never going to let a Slavic Ukraine become a successful free-market democracy in the E.U. next door to his stagnating Slavic Russian kleptocracy. The contrast would have been intolerable for him, and that is why he is trying to erase Ukraine.

It’s easy to take the zipper for granted today, but before it was invented, getting (and staying) dressed involved securing clothing with ropes, ties, buttons or other fasteners.

After years of attempts, Bell achieved his goal of transmitting sound over a wire, and on March 7, 1876, obtained his first U.S. Patent for a device he labeled as “Improvement on Telegraphy”—now better known as the telephone.

The first World’s Fair to take place in the United States was held in Philadelphia in 1876, and also celebrated the 100th anniversary of the country’s founding.

Then, in 1893, inventor Whitcomb L. Judson received a patent for his “clasp locker” shoe fastener, and immediately partnered with businessman Colonel Lewis Walker to launch the Universal Fastener Company and manufacture his invention

Along with the zipper, the Garis-Cochran Dishwashing Machine was also first introduced to the public at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, in a display drawing crowds curious about the contraption capable of thoroughly washing and drying 240 dishes in two minutes. The crowd-pleasing exhibit was more than a decade in the making. In 1883, Ohio entrepreneur Josephine Garis Cochran grew frustrated with the amount of time it took to clean up after dinner parties, reportedly saying, “If nobody else is going to invent a dishwashing machine, I’ll do it myself.” And she did.

One of the biggest challenges that arose during the early days of electricity was getting it from the power source to an individual device. By the 1880s, entire houses were being wired for electricity, but electrical appliances had to be connected to the home’s main power source directly, posing serious safety risks to members of the household.

April 30, 1939, New York City: This is the scene viewed on the television receivers in the metropolitan area, as the National Broadcasting Company inaugurated the first regular television service to the American public telecasting the ceremonies marking the opening of the New York World's Fair. Bettmann via Getty Images

May 1, 1939 saw another television milestone: the launch of a regular television broadcast schedule on the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), which was owned by RCA.

Fairgoers could take what was advertised as “America’s first television tour” (presented by NBC), where they would learn about the history of the medium, as well as the science and engineering that made its broadcast possible.

In the age of smartphones, it’s easy to identify the touchscreen demonstration at the World’s Fair as a significant technological turning point, but according to Jack Neely, executive director of the Knoxville History Project and crowd controller at the World’s Fair, that wasn’t apparent at the time. “It was...one of those things you had to look fast to notice,” Neely told the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon in a 2017 interview.