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Faced with the possibility that Democrats could lose control of Congress in November’s midterm elections, the party is now looking to salvage what it can from the $2.2 trillion Build Back Better Act.

That could mean jettisoning many of the child-care, health care and tax-overhaul provisions that are priorities for different segments of the Democratic coalition.

Republicans, including those who accept the scientific consensus that climate change is primarily a result of burning fossil fuels, expressed less urgency.

the NGO scores countries from 0 to 100 based on perceptions of corruption in the public sector, with 100 indicating a squeaky clean record. In the latest ranking, released on January 25th, almost 70% of countries score below 50.

Some high-scoring democracies showed “significant deterioration” over the past year too—so much so that America dropped out of the 25 least corrupt countries for the first time.

t’s a framework that will create millions of jobs, grow the economy, invest in our nation and our people, turn the climate crisis into an opportunity, and put us on a path not only to compete, but to win the economic competition for the 21st century against China and every other major country in the world

Climate has emerged as the single largest category in President Biden’s new framework for a huge spending bill,

bill was pared down from $3.5 trillion to $1.85 trillion,

The local utility’s equipment is so overloaded that there is no place for the electricity produced by the panels to go.

have made it hard for homeowners, local governments and businesses to use solar panels, batteries, electric cars, heat pumps and other devices that can help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Now, homes and businesses are increasingly supplying energy to the grid from their rooftop solar panels.

Emerging from the medieval tradition of agricultural and trade fairs, the Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of All Nations, held in London in 1851, was the first international gathering of this kind, and widely considered the first World’s Fair.

Throughout the rest of the 19th century, countries and companies used World’s Fairs as opportunities to make fairgoers from rapidly industrializing nations more comfortable with and confident in manufactured goods. In some cases, companies even built fully functional small-scale versions of their factories as part of their exhibition.

But the highlight and most eagerly anticipated part of these World’s Fairs was the introduction of new technologies and inventions. This provided fairgoers the chance to see the latest products and developments ahead of the rest of the public, and gave countries, industrialists and inventors an international stage from which to showcase their achievements. And while many of these inventions never caught on (it turns out, there’s not much demand for cigarette-smoking robots), there are others that continue to be used on a daily basis. Here are six examples of everyday inventions that debuted at World’s Fairs.

The London Underground is the oldest subway system in the world, so it might seem an unlikely source of innovation for one of the thorniest problems facing humanity in the 21st century: climate change.

While public transit is usually more environmentally friendly than other methods of travel, the Underground is playing a more direct role in a groundbreaking experiment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from buildings.

The local council for the Borough of Islington in London has developed, planned and installed a way to provide heat and hot water for several hundred homes, a school and two recreation centers, all using otherwise-wasted thermal energy generated mostly by the electric motors and brakes of the Underground’s trains.

As human civilizations flourished, so did infectious disease. Large numbers of people living in close proximity to each other and to animals, often with poor sanitation and nutrition, provided fertile breeding grounds for disease. And new overseas trading routes spread the novel infections far and wide, creating the first global pandemics.

The plague decimated Constantinople and spread like wildfire across Europe, Asia, North Africa and Arabia killing an estimated 30 to 50 million people, perhaps half of the world’s population. “People had no real understanding of how to fight it other than trying to avoid sick people,” says Thomas Mockaitis, a history professor at DePaul University. “As to how the plague ended, the best guess is that the majority of people in a pandemic somehow survive, and those who survive have immunity.”

As for how to stop the disease, people still had no scientific understanding of contagion, says Mockaitis, but they knew that it had something to do with proximity. That’s why forward-thinking officials in Venetian-controlled port city of Ragusa decided to keep newly arrived sailors in isolation until they could prove they weren’t sick.

A recent study by Michelina Pusceddu of the University of Sassari, in Italy, and six colleagues found that honeybees in hives infected by parasites implement their own form of lockdowns.

more bees succumb each year to the ominously named Varroa destructor. A parasitic mite, it attaches itself to bees’ bodies and helps itself to their stored energy resources.

“Let’s dash into renewable energy at lightning speed,” said European Green Deal Commissioner, Frans Timmermans announcing Europe’s plans to reduce its dependency on Russian fossil fuels after the country’s invasion of Ukraine. “Putin’s war in Ukraine demonstrates the urgency of accelerating our clean energy transition.”

The proposal earlier this week aims to make Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels well before 2030, starting with gas, and to reduce EU demand for Russian gas by two thirds before the end of the year.

“Geopolitics and climate transitions are one and the same today,” said Olivia Lazard, a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe.

“It feels like we’re definitively in a new era,” said Benjamin J. Rhodes, a former deputy national security adviser in the Obama White House. “The post-9/11 war on terror period of American hubris, and decline, is now behind us. And we’re not sure what’s next.”

The attack by President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on his neighbor has become a prism through which nearly all American foreign policy decisions will be cast for the foreseeable future, experts and officials said.

In the near term, Russia’s aggression is sure to invigorate Mr. Biden’s global fight for democracy against autocracies like Moscow

The confusion about these boycotts reveals something much larger than an infirm grasp of how the strategy works, and larger, even, than the pain and fear they produced in transgender people and their allies

The Bud Light and Target boycotts have been the most successful American-consumer boycotts in a quarter century. They made two large companies sustain serious material losses. That isn’t cause for more ennui or alienation. It’s a beacon: It can be done. And it should be done

We haven’t left these young people much. Many of them are so terrified about global warming that they believe that bringing a child into this world would be wrong. The retreat from religion has perhaps unburdened many of them from unfounded claims—but what has replaced it? What provides a community of shared belief, social outreach, the sense of living for some larger purpose? Nothing

“And the first question this kid asked me is just … ‘What the heck does good masculinity look like?’”He grimaced.“And I’ll be honest with you: I did not have an answer for that.”

by 1958, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. warned that “the male role has plainly lost its rugged clarity of outline.” Writing in Esquire magazine, he added, “The ways by which American men affirm their masculinity are uncertain and obscure. There are multiplying signs, indeed, that something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s conception of himself.”

today’s problems are real and well documented. Deindustrialization, automation, free trade and peacetime have shifted the labor market dramatically, and not in men’s favor — the need for physical labor has declined, while soft skills and academic credentials are increasingly rewarded

Behind the strikes, inflation numbers and talk of all the difficult decisions politicians have to make are a multitude of trapped people, their choices shrinking. People in bad relationships who cannot leave because rents and mortgages have gone up so being single is no longer viable. People who would like to have a child, or another child, but cannot afford its care, or who would like to return to work after having a child but the sums just don’t work. People in bad jobs with no security or benefits who cannot quit and look for alternatives because they have no savings to buffer rising costs. The end result is a crisis not just of the economy, but of freedom.

With that crisis, an entire liberal ambition becomes thwarted. We talk of liberalism in grand abstract terms, as the noble heart of an ideal political order that promotes human rights, the rule of law, civil liberties and freedom from religious dogma and prejudice

But when economic arrangements themselves become coercive and abusive, then political liberalism can coexist with, and indeed mask, a state of illiberalism and bondage. In the throes of personal challenges, lofty political ideals feel remote and irrelevant. All that people like Jane and others have the time or energy to register is a set of invisible oppressive economic forces that simply must be weathered because they are facts of nature

emember Manuel in Fawlty Towers? “He’s from Barcelona” was Basil’s explanation for his apparent idiocies, which the guests (and the audience) accepted because Spanish workers were the bottom of the pile. Poor and put-upon, they took low-grade jobs in Britain to get away from political instability, poverty and rotten infrastructure.

A holiday in 2022 Spain suggests the tables have turned. The airports are efficient, the roads good and the streets clean. Nobody talks about politics, because the government is sensible and stable.

A Spanish member of our party described a trip to Britain a few weeks ago. Arriving at Heathrow, his suitcase took two and a half hours to come through. There was “garbage everywhere” in London; his trains were delayed or cancelled; when he managed to board one he had to stand for two hours. Departing from Manchester airport, it took two hours to check his suitcase in. “It didn’t feel like a developed country,” he said. Political instability, rising poverty and rotten infrastructure: Manuel would have been at home in 2022 Britain.

Johnson also demanded a more aggressive strategy for combating violent crime — which was delivered by his new police chief, Eddie Garcia, who took over the department in early 2021. Parts of it involved tactics such as deploying “violence interrupters” to resolve street-level conflicts and guide those who need them to social services, and cleaning up blighted areas, such as trash-filled vacant lots and dilapidated buildings, where crime can breed.

The plan that Garcia developed, working with criminologists at the University of Texas at San Antonio, also refocused policing in Dallas on “hot spots.”

They divided the city into 101,000 “microgrids” — areas roughly the size of two football fields side-by-side — and discovered that crime was heavily concentrated in relatively few — an apartment complex here or a nightclub parking lot there. Just 50 of these hot spots accounted for almost 10 percent of violent street crime in Dallas.

Schlögel makes the argument that the Soviet Union is best understood not primarily as the manifestation of rigid Communist ideology, but as an attempt to transform an agrarian peasant society into a fully modern state

“A ‘Marxist theory,’” he writes, “yields very little for an understanding of the processes of change in postrevolutionary Russia. We get somewhat nearer the mark if we explore the scene of a modernization without modernity and of a grandiose civilizing process powered by forces that were anything but civil.” In other words, the interminable debates about whether Lenin was the St. Paul of communism or its Judas Iscariot are beside the point: As a Marxist might put it, the history of the Soviet Union is best explained by material conditions.

the story one pieces together from his chapters goes something like this. In the years between 1917 and 1945, the Russian Empire ceased to be a semi-feudal aristocracy governed by an absolutist monarch whose rule rested on divine right, and became an industrialized state. It dammed rivers, electrified the countryside, built massive factories and refineries, collectivized agriculture, raised literacy rates, set up palaces of culture, created a modern military, and made the Soviet Union one of the most powerful countries in the world. In the course of doing so, it sent some of its best minds into exile, crippled its system of food production, set up a massive network of prison camps, watched millions of its citizens die of hunger, killed hundreds of thousands more through slave labor and forced relocation, and executed a generation of revolutionary leaders. It did all this while surviving one of the most brutal civil wars of the twentieth century and the largest land invasion in history.

Though Annalee Newitz began work on “Four Lost Cities” long before the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s impossible to read it today without periodic is-this-where-we’re-headed? musings. The book functions as a travel guide to places that no longer exist

The chapters on Pompeii, the volcano-buried city in the orbit of ancient Rome, famous for its exquisitely preserved ruins, its brothels and taverns and graffiti, and on Angkor, a metropolis of medieval Cambodia, didn’t fire my imagination so much, perhaps because I already knew something of their histories.

Nine thousand years ago, the people of Catalhoyuk, maybe 10,000 of them, lived in cuboid clay houses packed against one another above the Konya Plain of south-central Turkey. Their dwellings were uniform, suggesting a highly regulated society: one or two rooms, painted in white or with red ocher designs. You exited not via a front door but by climbing a ladder to the roof. Much of life was lived up there: cooking, socializing, ambling along sidewalks that ran across the top of the city.

This is the driving theory of most of the progressive policy agenda, most of the time: give people money or a moneylike voucher they can use to buy something they need or even just want.

The problem is that if you subsidize the cost of something that there isn’t enough of, you’ll raise prices or force rationing. You can see the poisoned fruit of those mistakes in higher education and housing. But it also misses the opportunity to pull the technologies of the future progressives want into the present they inhabit.

The first problem is explored in “Cost Disease Socialism,” a new paper by the center-right Niskanen Center. “We are in an era of spiraling costs for core social goods — health care, housing, education, child care — which has made proposals to socialize those costs enormously compelling for many on the progressive left,”

But none of that is enough, practically speaking, because of one enormous hitch: The world is still using more energy each year, our consumption ticking ever upward, swallowing any gains made by renewable energy. Emissions are still rising—more slowly than they used to but, nonetheless, rising. Instead of getting pushed down, that needle is fitfully jiggling above zero, clawing into the positive digits when it needs to be deeply pitched into the negative. We are, in other words, simply not making a dent.

And so we are now in climate purgatory. In this zone, countries and companies are doing the right things to steer away from the damages of climate change, but are at the very same time making deliberate choices that swamp the effect of those other, better things.

governments in aggregate still plan to increase coal production until 2030, and oil and gas production until at least 2050, global net-zero agreements be damned. In total, countries that hold the world’s oil, gas, and coal deposits still plan to produce 69 percent more fossil fuels than is compatible with keeping warming under 2 degrees Celsius

A classic example of this dynamic is the advent of the chain saw. A person with a chain saw can cut 10 times as many trees in the same time as a person using older methods. Logging companies did not use this invention, however, to shorten the workweek by 90 percent. They used it to cut 10 times more trees than they otherwise would have. “Lashed by the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time,”

The problem, Hickel argues, is explained by the “paradox” first observed by the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons: In a growth system, gains in efficiency do not translate to higher wages, greater equality, more leisure, or lower emissions; they are plowed right back into the growth cycle

Increasing outputs of wind, solar, and other renewables are not leading to a drop in the use of fossil fuels. Instead, renewables and fossil fuels are used to satisfy rising global energy demand. “New fuels aren’t replacing the older ones,” Hickel writes. “They are being added on top of them.”