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global warming represents the collapse of such complex systems at such an extreme scale that it overrides our emotional capacity

it is darkly inverted on the Instagram account @afffirmations, where new-age positive thinking buckles under the weight of generational despair, and serene stock photography collides with mantras like “I am not climate change psychosis” and “Humanity is not doomed.”

Often the features of our dystopia are itemized, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty center, which is the destruction of the Earth through man-made global warming.

This creates its own perverse flavor of climate denial: We acknowledge the science but do not truly accept it, at least not enough to urgently act.

This paralysis itself is almost too horrible to contemplate. As global warming cooks the Earth, it melts our brains, fries our nerves and explodes the narratives that we like to tell about humankind — even the apocalyptic ones.

This “end of the world” does not resemble the ends of religious prophecies or disaster films, in which the human experiment culminates in dramatic final spectacles

Instead we persist in an oxymoronic state, inhabiting an end that has already begun but may never actually end.

World Health Organization data published in September showed there were twice as many cholera cases in 2022 than in 2021. Outbreaks were recorded in countries where cholera had been under control for years, including Yemen and Lebanon.

2. Mosquitoes on the march

Rising temperatures and frequent floods also unlock new places where disease-carrying insects thrive. The mosquitoes that carry the viruses that cause dengue fever and mala

Nor is the disease confined to developing countries. There are fears that it is spreading in southern Europe, partly owing to the warm weather. More than 8 billion people could be at risk of malaria and dengue fever by 2080, scientists have warned.

3. Human-animal contact

Many existing diseases will get more dangerous, but new illnesses could also emerge as people are increasingly forced into areas where there is wildlife. Diseases can jump from animals to humans. These diseases, such as Ebola, avian flu and Sars, are called “zoonoses” and they make up the majority of new illnesses.

Scientists have found that the climate crisis is helping to circulate diseases between species that previously did not encounter each other. As the planet heats up, many animal species are forced to move into new areas to find suitable conditions.

It has been estimated that zoonoses are responsible for as many as 2.5bn cases of human illness and 2.7m human deaths worldwide each year, and that animals have played a major part in nearly every major disease outbreak since 1970.

4. Severe weather events

Although governments are getting better at preparing for severe weather events, nine out of 10 deaths linked to weather disasters since 1970 happened in small island nations and developing countries in Africa, Asia and South America.

5. The air that we breathe

Outside air pollution has been linked to numerous cancers and diseases and is estimated to be responsible for more than 4m premature deaths globally each year.

Changing weather patterns are expected to make this already bad situation worse as more dust, rain and wildfire smoke are added to the mix. Children are especially likely to get sick from air pollution because their brains, lungs and other organs are still developing.

6. The psychological cost

Environmental deterioration has a knock-on effect on the economic and social systems that keep society productive and happy, setting in motion a downward spiral of psychological hardship.

If crops are destroyed during extreme weather events, children may get less nutritious food, the consumption of which is linked to psychological conditions such as anxiety and depression.

When people can’t get the help they need, they may self-medicate with alcohol or drugs, which in turn makes them more likely to engage in risky behaviour (such as unprotected sex) that could result in infections such as HIV, or illnesses that can result from spending time in crowded places, such as tuberculosis.

In 2021, scientists studying evidence of a potential link between heat exposure and mental health found a 2.2% increase in mental health-related mortality per 1C rise in temperature.

7. Salty water and perilous pregnancies

Drinking water is becoming saltier. One reason for this is that sea levels are rising, so there is more sea water flowing into rivers and other sources of fresh water during floods and tropical storms.

Taking in too much salt can lead to high blood pressure (hypertension). Over time, this condition damages the body’s veins, arteries and major organs (including the brain, heart, kidneys and eyes) since they’re working so much harder overall.

Hypertension is doubly dangerous for pregnant women and their babies

8. Food insecurity

More frequent and severe droughts and floods make it harder to grow the grains, fruit and vegetables that people need to eat to stay healthy. Small island states in the Caribbean, Atlantic, Pacific and Indian Ocean bear the brunt of the effects of the crisis, in part because most people live close to sea level.

As a result, people who live in one of the 39 small island nations are the most likely to die from one of the four main NCDs: cancer, diabetes, heart disease and lung disease.

9. The stress of extreme heat

The scorching temperatures this year broke records in Europe, China and North America. Heat is one of the most dangerous effects of the climate crisis and the top cause of weather-related deaths in the U

When it gets too hot, the body’s temperature rises faster than it can cool itself down, less blood flows to other organs, and the kidneys have to work harder. This puts strain on the heart and can lead to organ failure. Heatstroke is the most serious heat-related illness.

In particular, people whose jobs require long hours of physical labour in the sun face an increased risk of kidney disease as temperatures rise, research suggests. Repeated instances of heat stress can lead to permanent damage and chronic kidney disease.

In June, the Guardian revealed how young migrant workers were returning to Nepal with chronic kidney disease after working in extreme heat conditions in the Gulf and Malaysia. “One factor highlighted again and again is heat. Prolonged exposure to h

10. Millions on the move

It’s hard to predict exactly how many people will be on the move because of the climate crisis, but extreme weather events are likely to make conditions worse for the more than 100 million displaced people around the world.

If nothing changes, the number of people who need humanitarian aid to recover from floods, storms and droughts could double by 2050,

That means more than 200 million people will need aid annually. The displacement of millions of people also means cramped and often unsanitary living. For example, more than 900,000 Rohingya refugees live in makeshift shelters in Bangladesh, often built on unstable ground that’s prone to landslides.

A big portion. There now are 29 special funds, with the largest among them allowed to borrow and spend over multiyear periods up to €869 billion, all of it backstopped by taxpayers but none of it folded into the general budget, where it would be subject to the debt brake

Before the court ruling, special-fund net borrowing in 2023 was expected to reach €147 billion, compared with on-balance-sheet borrowing of €45.6 billion. The constitutional court finally has caught on.

At a stroke, €60 billion has vanished from the budget. And that might not be the only disappearing cash. Finance Minister Christian Lindner—never enthusiastic about any of this spending anyway—believes a separate pot of money slated for energy-price subsidies also may run afoul of the newly articulated constitutional requirement. The size of that fund: €200 billion

Industry is fleeing Germany. The new green jobs the net-zero left promised require enormous subsidies. And Berlin must offer generous handouts, probably permanent, to individual households to shield them from the crippling energy-price consequences of decades of accumulated policy errors.

Ameliorating all of this was meant to be paid for on the sly via borrowing concealed in various Sondervermögen. No longer

Germany long ago perfected the art of green virtue signaling. Now it will have to conduct a substantive debate about whether the negligible global benefits of Germany’s slashing carbon emissions are worth the costs, especially if money must be diverted from other policy priorities such as social welfare.

Critics on the left will argue this all could be solved easily if only those hidebound Teutons weren’t so neurotic about budget balance. This crowd will note that Berlin could simply borrow more on the general budget, which it still can do relatively cheaply, and use the proceeds to sustain the net-zero transition and much other spending. Politico was quick off the mark, calling this a “make-believe debt crisis.”

Mr. Scholz is in political trouble because it was never clear how his center-left Social Democrats could govern in a coalition with Mr. Lindner’s free-market Free Democratic Party and the eco-leftist Greens. The special-budget trick was politically essential because it allowed all three parties to skirt the budget bargaining that would expose their deep ideological differences.

Those splits are out in the open now. Berlin is going to have to cut spending (on what?) or raise revenue (from where?) or borrow (how much?) to fill the net-zero funding gap—or, not impossible, conclude Germans don’t care that much about net zero after all

The key point is that Berlin’s budget process is no more dysfunctional than any other Western government’s. It’s merely more honest, at least now that the court has stepped in.

If OnlyFans’s creator earnings were taken as a whole, the company would rank around No. 90 on Forbes’s list of the biggest private companies in America by revenue, ahead of Twitter (now called X), Neiman Marcus Group, New Balance, Hard Rock International and Hallmark Cards.

Many creators now operate like independent media companies, with support staffs, growth strategies and promotional budgets, and work to apply the cold quantification and data analytics of online marketing to the creation of a fantasy life.

The subscription site has often been laughed off as a tabloid punchline, a bawdy corner of the internet where young, underpaid women (teachers, nurses, cops) sell nude photos, get found out and lose their jobs.

pressures to perform for a global audience; an internet that never forgets. “There is simply no room for naivety,” one said in a guide posted to Reddit’s r/CreatorsAdvice.

America’s social media giants for years have held up online virality as the ultimate goal, doling out measurements of followers, reactions and hearts with an unspoken promise: that internet love can translate into sponsorships and endorsement deals

But OnlyFans represents the creator economy at its most blatantly transactional — a place where viewers pay upfront for creators’ labor, and intimacy is just another unit of content to monetize.

The fast ascent of OnlyFans further spotlights how the internet has helped foster a new style of modern gig work that creators see as safe, remote and self-directed,

Creators’ nonchalance about the digital sex trade has fueled a broader debate about whether the site’s promotion of feminist autonomy is a facade: just a new class of techno-capitalism, selling the same patriarchal dream.

But OnlyFans increasingly has become the model for how a new generation of online creators gets paid. Influencers popular on mainstream sites use it to capitalize on the audiences they’ve spent years building. And OnlyFans creators have turned going viral on the big social networks into a marketing strategy, using Facebook, Twitter and TikTok as sales funnels for getting new viewers to subscribe.

many creators, she added, still find it uniquely alluring — a rational choice in an often-irrational environment for gender, work and power. “Why would I spend my day doing dirty, degrading, minimum-wage labor when I can do something that brings more money in and that I have a lot more control over?”

it is targeting major “growth regions” in Latin America, Europe and Australia. (The Mexican diver Diego Balleza said he is using his $15-a-month account to save up for next year’s Paris Olympics.)

“Does an accountant always enjoy their work? No. All work has pleasure and pain, and a lot of it is boring and annoying. Does that mean they’re being exploited?”

Adams’s operation is registered in state business records as a limited liability company and offers quarterly employee performance reviews and catered lunch. It also runs with factory-like efficiency, thanks largely to a system designed in-house to track millions of data points on customers and content and ensure every video is rigorously planned and optimized.

Since sending her first photo in 2021, Adams’s OnlyFans accounts have earned $16.5 million in sales, more than 1.4 million fans and more than 11 million “likes.” She now makes about $30,000 a day — more than most American small businesses — from subscriptions, video sales, messages and tips, half of which is pure profit

Adams’s team sees its business as one of harmless, destigmatized gratification, in which both sides get what they want. The buyers are swiped over in dating apps, widowed, divorced or bored, eager to pay for the illusion of intimacy with an otherwise unattainable match. And the sellers see themselves as not all that different from the influencers they watched growing up on YouTube, charging for parts of their lives they’d otherwise share for free.

“This is normal for my generation, you know?

“I can go on TikTok right now and see ten girls wearing the bare minimum of clothing just to get people to join their page. Why not go the extra step to make money off it?”

the job can be financially precarious and mentally taxing, demanding not just the technical labor of recording, editing, managing and marketing but also the physical and emotional labor of adopting a persona to keep clients feeling special and eager to spend.

enix International Limited, is based, the company said its sales grew from $238 million in 2019 to more than $5.5 billion last year.

Its international army of creators has also grown from 348,000 in 2019 to more than 3 million today — a tenfold increase.

The company paid its owner, the Ukrainian American venture capitalist Leonid Radvinsky, $338 million in dividends last year.)

portion of its creator base and 70 percent of its annual revenue

When Tim Stokely, a London-based operator of live-cam sex sites, founded OnlyFans with his brother in 2016, he framed it as a simple way to monetize the creators who were becoming the world’s new celebrities — the same online influencers, just with a payment button. In 2019, Stokely told Wired magazine that his site was like “a bolt-on to your existing social media,” in the same way “Uber is a bolt-on to your car.”

Before OnlyFans, pornography on the internet had been largely a top-down enterprise, with agents, producers, studios and other middlemen hoarding the profits of performers’ work. OnlyFans democratized that business model, letting the workers run the show: recording their own content, deciding their prices, selling it however they’d like and reaping the full reward.

The platform bans real-world prostitution, as well as extreme or illegal content, and requires everyone who shows up on camera to verify they’re 18 or older by sending in a video selfie showing them holding a government-issued ID.

OnlyFans operates as a neutral marketplace, with no ads, trending topics or recommendation algorithms, placing few limitations on what creators can sell but also making it necessary for them to market themselves or fade away.

After sending other creators’ agents their money over PayPal, Adams’s ad workers send suggestions over the messaging app Telegram on how Bryce should be marketed, depending on the clientele. OnlyFans models whose fans tend to prefer the “girlfriend experience,” for instance, are told to talk up her authenticity: “Bryce is a real, fit girl who wants to get to know you

Like most platforms, OnlyFans suffers from a problem of incredible pay inequality, with the bulk of the profits concentrated in the bank accounts of the lucky few.

the top 1 percent of accounts made 33 percent of the money, and that most accounts took home less than $145 a month

Watching their partner have sex with someone else sometimes sparked what they called “classic little jealousy issues,” which Adams said they resolved with “more communication, more growing up.” The money was just too good. And over time, they adopted a self-affirming ideology that framed everything as just business. Things that were tough to do but got easier with practice, like shooting a sex scene, they called, in gym terms, “reps.” Things one may not want to do at first, but require some mental work to approach, became “self-limiting beliefs.”

They started hiring workers through friends and family, and what was once just Adams became a team effort, in which everyone was expected to workshop caption and video ideas. The group evaluated content under what Brian, who is 31, called a “triangulation method” that factored their comfort level with a piece of content alongside its engagement potential and “brand match.” Bryce the person gave way to Bryce the brand, a commercialized persona drafted by committee and refined for maximum marketability.

One of the operation’s most subtly critical components is a piece of software known as “the Tool,” which they developed and maintain in-house. The Tool scrapes and compiles every “like” and view on all of Adams’s social network accounts, every OnlyFans “fan action” and transaction, and every text, sext and chat message — more than 20 million lines of text so far.

It houses reams of customer data and a library of preset messages that Adams and her chatters can send to fans, helping to automate their reactions and flirtations — “an 80 percent template for a personalized response,” she said.

And it’s linked to a searchable database, in which hundreds of sex scenes are described in detail — by price, total sales, participants and general theme — and given a unique “stock keeping unit,” or SKU, much like the scannable codes on a grocery store shelf. If a fan says they like a certain sexual scenario, a team member can instantly surface any relevant scenes for an easy upsell. “Classic inventory chain,” Adams said.

The systemized database is especially handy for the young women of Adams’s chat team, known as the “girlfriends,” who work at a bench of laptops in the gym’s upper loft. The Tool helped “supercharge her messaging, which ended up, like, 3X-ing her output,” Brian said, meaning it tripled.

Keeping men talking is especially important because the chat window is where Adams’s team sends out their mass-message sales promotions, and the girlfriends never really know what to expect. One girlfriend said she’s had as many as four different sexting sessions going at once.

Adams employs a small team that helps her pay other OnlyFans creators to give away codes fans can use for free short-term trials. The team tracks redemption rates and promotional effectiveness in a voluminous spreadsheet, looking for guys who double up on discount codes, known as “stackers,” as well as bad bets and outright fraud.

Many OnlyFans creators don’t offer anything explicit, and the site has pushed to spotlight its stable of chefs, comedians and mountain bikers on a streaming channel, OFTV. But erotic content on the platform is inescapable; even some outwardly conventional creators shed their clothes behind the paywall

Creators with a more hardcore fan base, meanwhile, are told to cut to the chase: “300+ sex tapes & counting”; “Bryce doesn’t say no, she’s the most wild, authentic girl you will ever find.”

The $18 an hour she makes on the ad team, however, is increasingly dwarfed by the money Leigh makes from her personal OnlyFans account, where she sells sex scenes with her boyfriend for $10 a month. Leigh made $92,000 in gross sales in July, thanks largely to revenue from new fans who found her through Adams or the bikini videos Leigh posts to her 170,000-follower TikTok account

“This is a real job. You dedicate your time to it every single day. You’re always learning, you’re always doing new things,” she said. “I’d never thought I’d be good at business, but learning all these business tactics really empowers you. I have my own LLC; I don’t know any other 20-year-old right now that has their own LLC.”

The team is meeting all traffic goals, per their internal dashboard, which showed that through the day on a recent Thursday they’d gained 2,221,835 video plays, 19,707 landing-page clicks, 6,372 new OnlyFans subscribers and 9,024 new social-network followers. And to keep in shape, Adams and her boyfriend are abiding by a rigorous daily diet and workout plan

They eat the same Chick-fil-A salad at every lunch, track every calorie and pay a gym assistant to record data on every rep and weight of their exercise.

But the OnlyFans business is competitive, and it does not always feel to the couple like they’ve done enough. Their new personal challenge, they said, is to go viral on the other platforms as often as possible, largely through jokey TikTok clips and bikini videos that don’t give away too much.

the host told creators this sales-funnel technique was key to helping build the “cult of you”: “Someone’s fascination will become infatuation, which will make you a lot of money.”

Adams’s company has worked to reverse engineer the often-inscrutable art of virality, and Brian now estimates Adams makes about $5,000 in revenue for every million short-form video views she gets on TikTok.

Her team has begun ranking each platform by the amount of money they expect they can get from each viewer there, a metric they call “fan lifetime value.” (Subscribers who click through to her from Facebook tend to spend the most, the data show. Facebook declined to comment.)

The younger workers said they see the couple as mentors, and the two are constantly reminding them that the job of a creator is not a “lottery ticket” and requires a persistent grind. Whenever one complains about their lack of engagement, Brian said he responds, “When’s the last time you posted 60 different videos, 60 days in a row, on your Instagram Reels?”

But some have taken to it quite naturally. Rayna Rose, 19, was working last year at a hair salon, sweeping floors for $12 an hour, when an old high school classmate who worked with Adams asked whether she wanted to try OnlyFans and make $500 a video.

Rose started making videos and working as a chatter for $18 an hour but recently renegotiated her contract with Adams to focus more on her personal OnlyFans account, where she has nearly 30,000 fans, many of whom pay $10 a month.

One recent evening this summer, Adams was in the farm’s gym when her boyfriend told her he was headed to their guest room to record a collab with Rose, who was wearing a blue bikini top and braided pigtails.

“Go have fun,” Adams told them as they walked away. “Make good content.” The 15-minute video has so far sold more than 1,400 copies and accounted for more than $30,000 in sales.

Rose said she has lost friends due to her “lifestyle,” with one messaging her recently, “Can you imagine how successful you would be if you studied regularly and spent your time wisely?”

The message stung but, in Rose’s eyes, they didn’t understand her at all. She feels, for the first time, like she has a sense of purpose: She wants to be a full-time influencer. She expects to clear $200,000 in earnings this year and is now planning to move out of her parents’ house.

“I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. And now I know,” she said. “I want to be big. I want to be, like, mainstream.”

The transformation of social media into mass media is largely because the rise of TikTok has demonstrated to every social-media company on the planet that people still really like things that can re-create the experience of TV

Advertisers also like things that function like TV, of course—after all, people are never more suggestible than when lulled into a sort of anesthetized mindlessness.

In this future, people who are good at making content with high production values will thrive, as audiences and tech company algorithms gravitate toward more professional content.

On these formerly-social platforms, whether content is coming from creators with better equipment and more skills, or Hollywood studios testing the waters, hardly matters. In the end, it will all look remarkably similar to the consumer.

It will look

like flipping through cable channels does, only our thumb on the remote has been replaced by our thumb on the screen of our phone, swiping from one TikTok, YouTube Short, or Instagram Reel to the next.

A telling indicator is the rise of a new kind of entertainment professional—the “creator.”

A creator is anyone who records or makes something that can go viral on the internet

TikTok is now more popular than Netflix among consumers younger than 35,

While YouTube and TikTok have always been about video, just about every other social-media platform that wants to keep people engaged is emphasizing it more than ever, so that’s what creators have to make,

His agency gets involved with creators and musicians at the earliest stages of their careers, helping them plan content, update their style, understand what the algorithms of different platforms demand, and connecting them with potentially lucrative brand deals

. Even more telling: In first place is YouTube, the original online TV analog.

Where attention flows, money—and content—must also. In 2023 brands will spend an estimated $6 billion on marketing through influencers—a subspecies of creators

Globally, the total addressable market for this kind of marketing is currently $250 billion

Then there is a new generation of shows that are going straight to TikTok, bypassing even streaming services

In the wake of the success of YouTube and TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn are all pushing more and more content made by professionals into our feeds,

In order to quantify how TikTok has mastered the art of discerning our interests and feeding us the most compelling possible content, Faltesek, of Oregon State University, conducted a two-year project to study exactly what kind of content TikTok pushes

With a team of students, he created dozens of fresh TikTok user accounts that didn’t like or interact with content in any way—they just let the algorithm play one video after another.

At the end of this exhaustive process of gathering data on TikTok’s algorithm, the conclusion became obvious, says Faltesek. “TikTok is television. It flips channels like TV, it provides a flow like TV.”

By this logic, Instagram’s move to copy TikTok, which is in turn encroaching on the turf of YouTube by allowing longer videos, and the increasing dominance of professional content on all three, means they’re all turning into TV. Even Threads, the new offering from Facebook parent company Meta, is fast becoming a broadcast medium for news, as Twitter was before it.

In every case, the structure of social networks has become one in which a handful of accounts create most of the content that others see, and the role of everyone else on the network is, primarily, to amplify and consume that content,

Some, like Magana, believe we’ll eventually see an ever more complete blending of what were once “social” platforms with the traditional television networks and even film studios.  

aren’t convinced they’ll eat the rest of the entertainment industry. “It’s hard to say this kind of short-form video will be the only kind of TV,” she reflects. “A long time ago, the internet became the new thing, but we still have the other forms on television, and scripted streaming shows. It’s almost like this is just another avenue for that—of watching shows and movies on your phone.”

Yes, that’s right. And the discussion was very precise about details of the verse and how it worked, and how various words interacted with one another or were opposed to one another.

Not that I was able to participate! I wish I could. I took a little Greek 110 years ago and have long since forgotten it, but it was inspiring. These people were thoroughly engaged.

So that itself is an amazing piece of evidence. One might call it a piece of testimony.It seems almost impossible.

How did you know, if it was in Greek?Oh, I could tell that much. There’s a certain kind of gesturing with respect to texts that is known to any of us who have worked with texts for a while.

It’s been my mission, notably unsuccessful, for many years to make people understand that academic work, including in your writing and in your classes, is one thing and political work is another, and that the two should not be confused nor should they be intermingled. You can have any number of political issues brought into the classroom so long as they are brought into the classroom as objects of analysis or description and not as agendas either to be embraced or rejected. That’s what I’ve been arguing, one might even say preaching, for a long time.

I don’t want my classroom, or any classroom in a college or university that I’m teaching in, to be thought of as the vehicle of some program or agenda, no matter how virtuous it might be. Virtue is not the business of the academy

You have a famously minimalist definition of academic freedom — “Academics are not free in any special sense to do anything but their jobs,” as you write in Versions of Academic Freedom. Minimalist and correct.

When I was a dean at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago, I helped implement and inaugurate the first Native American-studies program at the University of Illinois. And I spoke at the inaugural luncheon. What I told them was, “It is without doubt the case that activism of a variety of kinds is what brought you to this point.” There wouldn’t now be a Native American-studies program at UIC if activists of a polemical kind weren’t working toward that end. “Now I want you,” I said, “to forget the history that brought you here, because now that you’re part of a university setting, you’re no longer activists, you’re academics. If you become or continue to be activists, the academics in the university will have a derisory view of you.”

It’s implausible to me that a dissertation student studying with, say, Judith Butler or Fredric Jameson is not, by definition, imbibing methods that are politically normative but also very valuable. A lot of critical traditions, in gender studies or in Marxian literary criticism — or in say, Straussian political theory — are entwined with normative political or ideological commitments. There’s no way to expel those commitments from a vibrant department of the humanities.

Well, you don’t have to expel them. The question you have to ask is, Are they primary in the minds of those who are teaching in the classrooms? If we’re in a community that has a certain set of standards and modes of operation, what we want to do is be faithful to those standards and modes of operation. And if now and then those deeper commitments kind of seep through, well, yes, that’s inevitable. But that’s quite different from having an ideologically centered classroom.

Nor can a university with a commitment to academic freedom prohibit all calls for political violence. That would require it to punish, say, students who express support for the invasion of Gaza knowing that it must result in the deaths of thousands of civilians. Thus Gay was correct in saying that students’ political slogans are not punishable by Harvard’s rules on harassment and bullying unless they cross over into intimidation, personal threats, or direct incitement of violence.

Gay was correct yet again in replying to Stefanik’s insistent demand, “What action has been taken against students who are harassing Jews on campus?” by noting that no action can be taken until an investigation has been completed. Harvard should not mete out summary justice like the Queen of Hearts in “Alice in Wonderland”: Sentence first, verdict afterward.

The real problem with Gay’s testimony was that she could not clearly and credibly invoke those principles because they either have never been explicitly adopted by Harvard or they have been flagrantly flouted in the past (as Stefanik was quick to point out)

Harvard has persecuted scholars who said there are two sexes, or who signed an amicus brief taking the conservative side in a Supreme Court deliberation. It has retracted acceptances from students who were outed by jealous peers for having used racist trash talk on social media when they were teens. Harvard’s subzero FIRE rating reveals many other punishments of politically incorrect peccadillos.

Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer.

In the wake of this debacle, the natural defense mechanism of a modern university is to expand the category of forbidden speech to include antisemitism (and as night follows day, Islamophobia). Bad idea

Deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. Outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn’t want to hear “hate speech.” Even the apparent no-brainer of prohibiting calls for genocide would backfire. Trans activists would say that opponents of transgender women in women’s sports were advocating genocide, and Palestinian activists would use the ban to keep Israeli officials from speaking on campus.

For universities to have a leg to stand on when they try to stand on principle, they must embark on a long-term plan to undo the damage they have inflicted on themselves. This requires five commitments.

Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions.

Since universities are institutions with a mission of research and education, they are also entitled to controls on speech that are necessary to fulfill that mission. These include standards of quality and relevance: You can’t teach anything you want at Harvard, just like you can’t publish anything you want in The Boston Globe. And it includes an environment conducive to learning.

So for the president of Harvard to suddenly come out as a born-again free-speech absolutist, disapproving of what genocidaires say but defending to the death their right to say it, struck onlookers as disingenuous or worse.

The events of this autumn also show that university pronouncements are an invitation to rancor and distraction. Inevitably there will be constituencies who feel a statement is too strong, too weak, too late, or wrongheaded.

Nonviolence.

Universities should not indulge acts of vandalism, trespassing, and extortion. Free speech does not include a heckler’s veto, which blocks the speech of others. These goon tactics also violate the deepest value of a university, which is that opinions are advanced by reason and persuasion, not by force

Viewpoint diversity. Universities have become intellectual and political monocultures. Seventy-seven percent of the professors in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences describe themselves as liberal, and fewer than 3 percent as conservative. Many university programs have been monopolized by extreme ideologies, such as the conspiracy theory that the world’s problems are the deliberate designs of a white heterosexual male colonialist oppressor class.

Vast regions in the landscape of ideas are no-go zones, and dissenting ideas are greeted with incomprehension, outrage, and censorship.

The entrenchment of dogma is a hazard of policies that hire and promote on the say-so of faculty backed by peer evaluations. Though intended to protect departments from outside interference, the policies can devolve into a network of like-minded cronies conferring prestige on each other. Universities should incentivize departments to diversify their ideologies, and they should find ways of opening up their programs to sanity checks from the world outside.

Disempowering DEI. Many of the assaults on academic freedom (not to mention common sense) come from a burgeoning bureaucracy that calls itself diversity, equity, and inclusion while enforcing a uniformity of opinion, a hierarchy of victim groups, and the exclusion of freethinkers. Often hastily appointed by deans as expiation for some gaffe or outrage, these officers stealthily implement policies that were never approved in faculty deliberations or by university leaders willing to take responsibility for them.

An infamous example is the freshman training sessions that terrify students with warnings of all the ways they can be racist (such as asking, “Where are you from?”). Another is the mandatory diversity statements for job applicants, which purge the next generation of scholars of anyone who isn’t a woke ideologue or a skilled liar. And since overt bigotry is in fact rare in elite universities, bureaucrats whose job depends on rooting out instances of it are incentivized to hone their Rorschach skills to discern ever-more-subtle forms of “systemic” or “implicit” bias.

Universities should stanch the flood of DEI officials, expose their policies to the light of day, and repeal the ones that cannot be publicly justified.

A fivefold way of free speech, institutional neutrality, nonviolence, viewpoint diversity, and DEI disempowerment will not be a quick fix for universities. But it’s necessary to reverse their tanking credibility and better than the alternatives of firing the coach or deepening the hole they have dug for themselves.

Things that were long big fun now overwhelm, exhaust and annoy. The holiday season is an extended exercise in excess and loud, often sleazy sweaters.

Which means it is nothing of the sort. This is the drag equivalent of fun and suggests that fun is done.

Adults assiduously record themselves appearing to have something masquerading as “fun,” a fusillade of Coachellic micro social aggressions unleashed on multiple social media platforms. Look at me having so much FUN!

Vacations are overscheduled with too many activities, FOMO on steroids, a paradox of choice-inducing decision fatigue, so much so that people return home exhausted and in need of another one.

Weddings have morphed into multistage stress extravaganzas while doubling as express paths to insolvency: destination proposals for the whole family, destination bachelorette and bachelor blowouts, destination weddings in remote barns with limited lodging, something called a “buddymoon” (bring the gang!) and planners to help facilitate the same custom cocktailsness of it all.

What could be a greater cause for joy or more natural than having a baby? Apparently, not much these days. Impending parenthood is overthought and over-apped, incorporating more savings-draining events that didn’t exist a few decades ago: babymoons and lethal, fire-inducing, gender-reveal gatherings and baby showers so over-the-top as to shame weddings.

Retirements must be purposeful. Also, occasions for an acute identity crisis. You need to have a plan, a mission, a coach, a packed color-coded grid of daily activities in a culture where our jobs are our identities, our worth tied to employment.

“I feel like I should be having more fun than I’m actually having,” says Alyssa Alvarez, a social media marketing manager and DJ in Detroit, expressing a sentiment that many share. “There are expectations of what I want people to believe that my life is like rather than what my life is actually like.”

“The world is so much less about human connection,” says Amanda Richards, 34, who works in casting in Los Angeles and is a graduate of Cudworth’s course. “We do more things virtually. People are more isolated. And there’s all this toxic positivity to convince people of how happy you are.”

For eons, early adulthood was considered an age of peak fun. Now, according to several studies, it’s a protracted state of anxiety and depression.

Because there is now a coach for everything, Alvarez hired the “party coach” Evan Cudworth, taking his $497 course this fall on how to pursue “intentional fun.” (It now costs $555.)

Blame it on an American culture that values work, productivity, power, wealth, status and more work over leisure

Blame it on technological advances that tether us to work without cessation

Blame it on the pandemic, which exacerbated so much while delivering Zoomageddon.

Blame it on 2004, with the advent of Facebook, which led to Twitter (okay, X), Instagram, Threads, TikTok and who-knows-what lurking in the ether.

Blame it again on 2004 and the introduction of FOMO, our dread of missing out, broadcast through multiple social media spigots

“So many people are retreating into their phones, into anxiety,” says Cudworth, 37, from Chicago. “I’m helping people rediscover what fun means to them.”

His mandate is redefining fun: cutting back on bingeing screen time, eradicating envy scrolling, getting outside, moving, dancing. “With technology, we don’t allow ourselves to be present. You’re always thinking ‘something is better around the corner,’” Cudworth says, the now squandered in pursuit of the future.

Instead of this being the most wonderful time of the year, we battle holiday fatigue, relentless beseeching for our money and, if Fox News is to be believed, a war on Christmas that is nearing its third decade.

ow do Americans spend their leisure hours when they might be having fun with others, making those vital in-person connections? Watching television, our favorite free time and “sports activity” (yes, that’s how it’s classified), according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an average of 2.8 hours daily.

“That’s way more television than you really need. We put play on the back burner,” says Pat Rumbaugh, 65, of Takoma Park, Md. She’s “The Play Lady,” who organizes unorganized play for adults

Catherine Price, the author of “The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again,” believes “we’re totally misdoing leisure” and “not leaving any room for spontaneity.”

To Price, True Fun is the confluence of connection (other people, nature), playfulness (lightheartedness, freedom) and flow (being fully engaged, present), which is not as challenging as it sounds. “You can have fun in any context. Playfulness is about an attitude,”

Back in the day, co-workers were friends. (Sometimes, more.) After hours, they gathered for drinks, played softball. Today, because of email, Slack and remote work, offices are half empty and far quieter than libraries.

“We go to work and there’s no sense of connection and camaraderie,” says Davis, who was long employed by his city’s department of parks and recreation. “People feel emotionally disconnected. Healthy conversations are the precursor of fun. We’ve lost the art of communication. Our spirit comes home with us. If you don’t communicate at work, what are you coming home with?”

To me, that letter wasn’t just an invitation to a fancy summer program—it was an invitation into an educational world that I thought would change my life.

it wasn’t the differences between us that posed the biggest challenge to our unity; it was the constant reminders from above of those differences, all the ways we were hierarchically organized or comparatively privileged or fundamentally limited in our views. We were challenged to transcend those limitations and build the foundations of a community, but for that you need good faith, which was in short supply.

The other problem was that TASP lacked all the mechanisms of a functioning democracy. We had been cherry-picked to represent diversity, but actually the point was for all of us to arrive at the same conclusions—men talked too much, the world was fraught with microaggressions, dodgeball was bad, and eggs were worse. There was no framework for disagreement, no space for ideological detours, no home for structural challenges to the so-called intentional community we lived in.

Nobody wanted to deal with the key annoyance of democracy—learning to tolerate our differences.

It’s only now that I recognize that the truth of this statement—after all, what 17-year-old knows what’s best for them—served to justify the anti-democratic reality of a space contemptuous of every experience except for those of “oppressed groups,” as determined by the factota. It is equally alarming to see that the so-called leaders of my teenage years are now actively remaking a space once devoted to self-exploration and communal understanding in their own intellectual self-image, as a place where questioning and self-determination are being eliminated in favor of received truth.

In 2022, the Telluride Association announced that they were discontinuing TASP and expanding TASS, the equivalent program for sophomores, into a program with two focus areas—“Critical Black Studies” and “Anti-Oppressive Studies.”

Students would no longer live all together, like we did, according to Nunn’s vision. Instead, the “Critical Black Studies” community would live and study separately, creating an entirely Black space. Afternoons and evenings were no longer reserved for things like Nerf wars or eating entire jars of sprinkles, which were the activities that allowed our diverse group to come together, and which I remember much more vividly than all my seminar readings combined. Instead, the students would participate in anti-racism workshops created by the factota. It was this new program that became the “anti-racist Hell” that Vincent Lloyd lamented in his article.

It was easy for me to sympathize with Lloyd, who spent his summer battling with one factota, Keisha, who found him “triggering” and his readings “insufficiently radical,” was frustrated by his insistence on unspooling complex racial ideas in the slow seminar format rather than holding straightforward lectures, and frequently intervened when his discussions caused TASPers “harm.”

By the end of his tenure, he was summoned into an empty classroom by the students, who read their allegations about his behavior—and demands that he change his teaching—from sheets of paper. Every word coming out of their mouths was clearly pulled from conversations with Keisha. A white girl referred to her factota in her remarks: “Keisha speaks for me. She says everything I think better than I ever could.”

I remember being an eager-to-please high schooler on the first day of TASP, sitting in a circle with big aspirations but very little knowledge of the world, wanting so badly to be accepted in an elite space I assumed would give me all the answers, if I could only absorb the guiding principle: You don’t know what’s best for you.

My mom dropped me off at the local Panera, where the interviewer was already sitting in a booth reading a novel when I arrived. He was an older professor who still conducted interviews because he’d had such a transformative experience at TASP. He explained that he came to the seminar as a committed far-left radical, but he struck up an unlikely friendship with a staunch conservative and William F. Buckley devotee, with whom he disagreed about, and argued fervently over, everything. Proudly, he told me that the two men remained friends to this day.

The final rule was relayed by Carlos. With a stern look on his face, he explained that while these rules might seem daunting, all the factota had done this before, and there was one mantra in particular that guided them through their time. The girl next to me opened a notebook and poised her pen eagerly over the page. “During your six weeks here, you should always remember … you don’t know what’s best for you.” He intoned this mantra with such gravitas that the room briefly fell into silence.

TASPers were tasked with governing ourselves through nightly house meetings, bylaw votes, and a complex web of committees regulating everything from kitchen duty to leisure. Our community would be “semi-monastic,” meaning that we were “strongly, strongly encouraged” to limit our contact with the outside world in favor of “turning inward” and “engaging in communal reflection.” To ensure that we learned as much as possible from our peers, there was a ban on “exclusive relationships” of all platonic shades, which would be enforced through assigned seating, periodic roommate switches, minimum group-outing sizes, and good-old-fashioned cockblocking.

Discerning observers will note that doing what “necessity indicates” is a mandate dependent entirely on the values and whims of its executioners. In the case of TASP, necessity apparently indicated living in accordance with not only the Nunnian ideals but also the standards of our factota, most of whom couldn’t yet legally drink but had absolute moral authority over who could take up space, who could express their politics, and who deserved to be there at all. TASP was their world; we were just figuring out how to live in it.

The factota had various tactics to combat these relationships, from sober one-on-one interventions to interrupting group hangs to, notably, a roommate-switch halfway through the program because people were getting too close. This switch was aimed in no small part at Mark, who had been paired with a fellow sporty private-school guy in a cavernous room on the second floor. They bonded instantly, and their room would house all kinds of semi-exclusive hangs, from playlist-making to the occasional horny game of “Never Have I Ever.”

Accordingly, the factota disapproved of our friendship. Kaitlyn felt strongest about limiting his presence in my life and often pulled me aside to warn me against Mark, deeming his influence to be restrictive. She’d accost me to relay a supposedly insufferable remark he’d made during seminar or shoot me pointed stares whenever someone mentioned male entitlement during a house meeting, ignoring my protests that I found it difficult to distance myself from a naturally occurring friendship, and in fact enjoyed chatting with someone so different from myself. Wasn’t that supposed to be the point of TASP, anyway?

Instead, she made it a personal project to interrupt our conversations, wedge herself in between us at dinner, and skew our committee assignments so we couldn’t so much as wash dishes at the same time.

As a white guy studying classics at a high school with a five-figure price tag, Mark regularly landed in the crosshairs of our Sunday night conversations, receiving frequent reminders to “check his privilege” when he cited too much rarefied literature in class conversations and to “cede his time” to minorities or women during house discussions.

New listings this week were up 4% from the previous year, a factor that may tip the balance of what has recently been a white hot seller’s market.

Think about the lives lost.Think about the teachers.Think about the children.They were family, friends, and loved ones.And a gun killed them all.It was only last week that we posted a similar prompt in response to the racist massacre in Buffalo. Like all of our student forums, this one will be moderated.

Students might find their own ways to respond, perhaps through writing or art. It may also be helpful to look at how victims of other tragedies have been memorialized, in ways big and small. For example: The 26 playgrounds built to remember the children of Sandy Hook; the memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing, with its “field of chairs,” including 19 smaller ones for the children who lost their lives; and the New York Times Portraits of Grief series, which profiled those lost in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Here are more examples, from the El Paso Times. In what ways can your students or school respond, individually or collectively?

Above all, we want you to know we are listening. If it helps your students to share their thoughts and feelings publicly, we have a space for that. And if teachers or parents have thoughts, ideas, questions, concerns or suggestions, please post them here.

The authors of the 2018 Times article described how the Parkland shooting moved students around the country to become more involved in activism. Do you think something similar will happen in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas? Why or why not? How do you think school shootings are shaping the generation of students who are in school right now?Invite your students to weigh in here.

Democrats moved quickly to clear the way for votes on legislation to strengthen background checks for gun purchasers. Republicans, even as they expressed horror about the shooting, did not signal that they would drop their longstanding opposition to gun safety measures. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas pointed the blame at Uvalde’s lack of mental health care, even though the suspect had no record of problems.

Which efforts might be the most effective? Students might also take a look at the forum on guns we posted during the 2016 election as part of our Civil Conversation Challenge in which we invited teenagers to have productive, respectful conversations on several issues dividing Americans. We received more than 700 responses to the questions we posed about gun rights, the Second Amendment and more.

This article takes on three of the most prominent rumors that have spread via online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit and explains why they are false. What rumors are your students seeing in their feeds, and what steps can they take to find out the truth? From double-checking via sites like Snopes to learning habits like lateral reading, this article (and related lesson plan) has suggestions.

While the town of Uvalde grapples with the aftermath of the shooting, community members, local leaders and organizations have mobilized. Two local funeral homes said in social media posts that they would not charge families of victims for their funeral services. Volunteers have lined up to give blood for the shooting victims.

But in recent years, as the Tel Aviv area has increasingly become a target of rocket attacks, the building has been judged unsafe.

In addition, Israel sits on two seismic faults that in the event of a major earthquake would leave only the lobby of the existing center intact.

The vault, 50 feet down, is cocooned in concrete and steel, and has a separate air supply and filtering system. Moshe Noyovich, the engineer overseeing the project, said the inventory of blood components stored in the vault should suffice for four or five days of war.

a structure that preceded Stonehenge: a stone circle built on the same spot some 500 years earlier, which, according to archaeologists, was a cemetery. It was constructed with large bluestone pillars — each of them transported from Wales, more than 200 miles away

Five centuries later, Stonehenge as we know it was built using some of those existing bluestones, as well as more than 80 towering “sarsen” stones, the monument’s vertical pillars, and horizontal lintels, or capping stones.

Each sarsen stone needed at least 1,000 people to transport it over a distance of 15 miles. The process took generations, and many were killed and maimed as a result, according to the exhibition wall text.

some of the pilgrims who helped build Stonehenge stayed at Durrington Walls, a nearby settlement which, at its peak, contained around 1,000 temporary houses.

Stonehenge was built at a time of drastic population decline and dispersal,

There were few, if any, villages, and society was “trying to create a sense of unity and collaboration among its members,” he explained.

Stonehenge was a “monument of remembrance,” he said, and an “expression of unity” that pulled people together in the pursuit of a common endeavor.

writing did not exist in England until the Romans arrived 2,500 years later — so there is no written history of Stonehenge and the people who put it up,

Nor did the people of prehistoric England leave any representations of human figures, said Wilkin, the curator. They had “an almost secretive attitude towards their religion,” perhaps with the intention of “excluding others from it,” so their spiritual practices are undocumented as well.

Mr Lee’s biggest potential headache is an investigation into allegedly corrupt land deals in Seongnam, a middle-class suburb of Seoul, while he was its mayor. He denies any involvement and has survived a parliamentary audit into the matter.

Two officials who were indicted on corruption charges in the case committed suicide in December. That reduces the chances that the full tale will ever come to light.

The opposition portrays him as a gangster, playing up alleged links to organised crime and berating him for defending men who had killed their partners when he was a lawyer.

prosecutors are investigating claims that, as chief prosecutor, Mr Yoon abetted an underling who allegedly helped the PPP file criminal complaints against Minjoo party lawmakers in the run-up to elections in 2020 (he denies the allegations).

Mr Yoon’s family is an additional liability. His mother-in-law has received a three-year prison sentence for medical fraud. His wife, Kim Keon-hee, has admitted that she forged most of her CV when applying for jobs as an art curator.