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That same day, when China warned its nationals in Ukraine about a worsening situation, it did not tell them to leave the country. On Thursday, with explosions going off nearby, many of the 8,000-odd Chinese passport holders in the country took to microblog Weibo to call for help.

Yun Sun, Director of the China Program at the Stimson Center, noted Tuesday that the Chinese policy community appeared to be in “shock” at the sudden escalation of fighting after having “subscribed to the theory that Putin was only posturing and that U.S. intelligence was inaccurate as in the case of invading Iraq.”

Minutes after the declaration, Chinese representative to the United Nations Zhang Jun was telling a Security Council meeting: “we believe that the door to a peaceful solution to the Ukraine situation is not fully shut, nor should it be.”

In recent weeks, Chinese experts have argued that de-escalation was possible even as they adopted Russia’s view of the conflict. Wang Yiwei, director of the Center for European Studies at Renmin University, wrote in late January that only the actions of Ukraine or the United States could bring about a war, but because the former lacked “gall” and the latter lacked strength for a direct conflict with Russia, tensions could be dispelled.

“When can China evacuate?” asked a user with the handle LumpyCut. “We are in Kyiv near the airport. I just heard three enormous bombings and can estimate the size of the mushroom clouds by sight.”

In an interview on Thursday, Wang defended his prediction as being primarily about the possibility of a direct conflict between the United States and Russia, not fighting in eastern Ukraine.

Hua also rejected suggestions that China might adhere to U.S.-led sanctions against Russia, pointing to China’s long-held stance against the use of sanctions adopted outside of United Nations deliberations.

China’s support for Russia has also stopped short of direct approval for Russian military action. Over the weekend, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reiterated that all countries sovereignty must be respected, adding that “Ukraine is not an exception.”

Such hesitation comes, however, during a time of growing strategic alignment between Moscow and Beijing, built primarily on shared disdain for the United States and the Western-led world order.

Hawkish commentators in China were quick to explain Putin’s attack on Thursday as the result of provocation from the United States. “That the situation came to today’s step is due to spiraling escalation,” Fu Qianshao, a military commentator, told nationalist publication the Shanghai Observer

“Russia had already said many times that it would withdraw troops, but America always promoted an atmosphere of conflict.”

Starting from scratch is usually a bad idea. Too often, we assume innovative ideas and meaningful changes require a blank slate. When business projects fail, we say things like, “Let's go back to the drawing board.” When we consider the habits we would like to change, we think, “I just need a fresh start.” However, creative progress is rarely the result of throwing out all previous ideas and innovations and completely re-imagining of the world.

Some experts believe the feathers of birds evolved from reptilian scales. Through the forces of evolution, scales gradually became small feathers, which were used for warmth and insulation at first. Eventually, these small fluffs developed into larger feathers capable of flight.

The process of human flight followed a similar path. We typically credit Orville and Wilbur Wright as the inventors of modern flight. However, we seldom discuss the aviation pioneers who preceded them like Otto Lilienthal, Samuel Langley, and Octave Chanute. The Wright brothers learned from and built upon the work of these people during their quest to create the world's first flying machine.

The Toaster Project is an example of how we often fail to notice the complexity of our modern world. When you buy a toaster, you don't think about everything that has to happen before it appears in the store. You aren't aware of the iron being carved out of the mountain or the oil being drawn up from the earth.

“It feels like being seen,” Epps said. The protesters said the actions of police violated their free speech rights and rights to be protected from unreasonable force. Jurors found violations of both rights for 11 of the protesters and only free speech violations for the other. The protesters claimed Denver was liable for the police’s actions through its policies, including giving officers wide discretion in using what police call “less lethal” devices, failing to train officers on them, and not requiring them to use their body-worn cameras during the protests to deter indiscriminate uses of force.

She stressed that mistakes made by officers during the protests do not automatically equate to constitutional violations, noting thousands of people returned to exercise their free speech rights despite the force police used over the five days of demonstrations. “The violence and destruction that occurred around the community required intervention,” she said.

Aggressive responses from officers to people protesting police brutality nationally have led to financial settlements, the departures of police chiefs and criminal charges.

However, in 2021, a federal judge dismissed most of the claims filed by activists and civil liberties groups over the forcible removal of protesters by police before then-President Donald Trump walked to a church near the White House for a photo op.

For climate, we already are seeing a glimpse of what is to come: drought, floods and far more extreme storms than in the recent past. We saw some of the implications over the past year, with supply chains broken because rivers were too dry for shipping and hydroelectric and nuclear power impaired.

As with climate change, demographic shifts determine societal ones, like straining the social contract between the working and the aged.

We are reversing the globalization of the past 40 years, with the links in our geopolitical and economic network fraying. “Friendshoring,” or moving production to friendly countries, is a new term. The geopolitical forces behind deglobalization will amplify the stresses from climate change and demographics to lead to a frenzied competition for resources and consumers.

The problem here, and a problem broadly with complex and dynamic systems, is that the whole doesn’t look like the sum of the parts. If you have a lot of people running around, the overall picture can look different than what any one of those people is doing. Maybe in aggregate their actions jam the doorway; maybe in aggregate they create a stampede

if we can’t get a firm hold on pedestrian economic issues like inflation and recession — the prospects are not bright for getting our forecasts right for these existential forces.

The problem is that the models don’t work when our economy is weird. And that’s precisely when we most need them to work.

The fourth, artificial intelligence, is a wild card. But we already are seeing risks for work and privacy, and for frightening advances in warfare.

A key reason these models fail in times of crisis is that they can’t deal with a world filled with complexity or with surprising twists and turns.

Economics failed with the 2008 crisis because economic theory has established that it cannot predict such crises.

we are not a mechanical system. We are humans who innovate, change with our experiences, and at times game the system

Reflecting on the 1987 market crash, the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman remarked on the difficulty facing economists by noting that subatomic particles don’t act based on what they think other subatomic particles are planning — but people do that.

What if economists can’t turn things around? This is a possibility because we are walking into a world unlike any we have seen. We can’t anticipate all the ways climate change might affect us or where our creativity will take us with A.I. Which brings us to what is called radical uncertainty, where we simply have no clue — where we are caught unaware by things we haven’t even thought of.

This possibility is not much on the minds of economists

How do we deal with risks we cannot even define? A good start is to move away from the economist’s palette of efficiency and rationality and instead look at examples of survival in worlds of radical uncertainty.

In our time savannas are turning to deserts. The alternative to the economist’s model is to take a coarse approach, to be more adaptable — leave some short-term fine tuning and optimization by the wayside

Our long term might look brighter if we act like cockroaches. An insect fine tuned for a jungle may dominate the cockroach in that environment. But once the world changes and the jungle disappears, it will as well.

he started receiving death threats. People said they wished he and his family had been killed by drug lords, told him that “sooner or later your punishment will arrive” and proposed that he be nailed into a coffin or run over by a cement roller.

Mr. Moreno, who grew up in Colombia, began working as a researcher in a computer science and robotics lab in Paris in 1983; the career that followed involved creating a start-up, meeting the Dalai Lama and being named a knight of the Légion d’Honneur. His work has won several awards and spanned many fields — automotive, medical, nuclear, military, even home goods.

Many of the recent threats have been directed at scientists studying Covid-19. In a survey of 321 such scientists who had given media interviews, the journal Nature found that 22 percent had received threats of physical or sexual violence and 15 percent had received death threats

Last year, an Austrian doctor who was a vocal supporter of vaccines and a repeated target of threats died by suicide.

increasingly, even professors and researchers without much of a public persona have faced intimidation from extremists and conspiracy theorists.

Around 2010, he started thinking about how technology could help create sustainable cities. Eventually, he refined his ideas about “human smart cities” and “living cities” into his 2016 proposal for 15-minute cities.

The idea owes much to its many predecessors: “neighborhood units” and “garden cities” in the early 1900s, the community-focused urban planning pioneered by the activist Jane Jacobs in the 1960s, even support for “new urbanism” and walkable cities in the 1990s. So-called low-traffic neighborhoods, or LTNs, have been set up in several British cities over the past few decades.

Critics of 15-minute cities have been outspoken, arguing that a concept developed in Europe may not translate well to highly segregated American cities. A Harvard economist wrote in a blog post for the London School of Economics and Political Science in 2021 that the concept was a “dead end” that would exacerbate “enormous inequalities in cities” by subdividing without connecting them.

Jordan Peterson, a Canadian psychologist with four million Twitter followers, suggested that 15-minute cities were “perhaps the worst imaginable perversion” of the idea of walkable neighborhoods. He linked to a post about the “Great Reset,” an economic recovery plan proposed by the World Economic Forum that has spawned hordes of rumors about a pandemic-fueled plot to destroy capitalism.

A member of Britain’s Parliament said that 15-minute cities were “an international socialist concept” that would “cost us our personal freedoms.” QAnon supporters said the derailment of a train carrying hazardous chemicals in Ohio was an intentional move meant to push rural residents into 15-minute cities.

“Conspiracy-mongers have built a complete story: climate denialism, Covid-19, anti-vax, 5G controlling the brains of citizens, and the 15-minute city for introducing a perimeter for day-to-day life,” Mr. Moreno said. “This storytelling is totally insane, totally irrational for us, but it makes sense for them.”

The multipronged conspiracy theory quickly became “turbocharged” after the Oxford protest, said Jennie King, head of climate research and policy at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a think tank that studies online platforms.

“You have this snowball effect of a policy, which in principle was only going to affect a small urban population, getting extrapolated and becoming this crucible where far-right groups, industry-sponsored lobbying groups, conspiracist movements, anti-lockdown groups and more saw an opportunity to insert their worldview into the mainstream and to piggyback on the news cycle,”

The vitriol currently directed at Mr. Moreno and researchers like him mirrors “the broader erosion of trust in experts and institutions,”

Modern conspiracy theorists and extremists turn the people they disagree with into scapegoats for a vast array of societal ills, blaming them personally for causing the high cost of living or various health crises and creating an “us-versus-them” environment, she said.

“I am not a politician, I am not a candidate for anything — as a researcher, my duty is to explore and deepen my ideas with scientific methodology,” he said. “It is totally unbelievable that we could receive a death threat just for working as scientists.”

Instead of assuming that everyone and everything sucks, we should all live like the ancient Greek cynics, who rebelled against convention in a search for truth and enlightenment.

original cynicism was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It was based on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioning conventional dogmas, and thus hold us back from the search for deep wisdom and happiness.

Modern cynics also suffer poorer health than others. In 1991, researchers studying middle-aged men found that a cynical outlook significantly increased the odds of death from both cancer and heart disease—possibly because the cynics consumed more alcohol and tobacco than the non-cynics

The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”)

“Modern cynicism [has] come to describe something antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against both moral reflection and intellectual persuasion,”

We can most definitely conclude, however, that modern cynicism is detrimental. In one 2009 study, researchers examining negative cynical attitudes found that people who scored high in this characteristic on a personality test were roughly five times more likely to suffer from depression later in life. In other words, that smirking 25-year-old is at elevated risk of turning into a depressed 44-year-old.

Whereas a modern cynic might say, for instance, that the president is an idiot and thus his policies aren’t worth considering, the ancient cynic would examine each policy impartially.

cynical attitudes lead to being treated disrespectfully—possibly because cynics tend to show disrespect to others, leading to a vicious cycle

Scholars writing in 2015 found that, even after correcting for gender, education, and age, the least cynical people saw an average monthly increase in income of about $300 over nine years

The most cynical saw no significant income increase at all. The authors explain this pattern by noting that cynics “are more likely to forgo valuable opportunities for cooperation and consequently less likely to reap the benefits of joint efforts and mutual help.” In other words, being a misanthrope is costly.

you shouldn’t merely try to avoid cynicism in all its forms. Instead, work to become a true cynic, in its original sense.

The ancient cynics strove to live by a set of principles characterized by mindfulness, detachment from worldly cravings, the radical equality of all people, and healthy living

If this sounds like Christianity or even Buddhism, it should:

in the following centuries, the ideas of cynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.

To pivot from the modern to the ancient, I recommend focusing each day on several original cynical concepts, none of which condemns the world but all of which lead us to question, and in many cases reject, worldly conventions and practices.

1. Eudaimonia (“satisfaction”)

The ancient cynics knew that lasting satisfaction cannot be derived from a constant struggle for possessions, pleasures, power, or prestige.

Happiness can come only from detaching ourselves from the world’s false promises.

Make a list of worldly rewards that are pulling at you—such as a luxury item or the admiration of others—and say out loud, “I will not be subjugated by this desire.”

2. Askesis (“discipline”)

We cannot clear our mind of confusion and obfuscation until we stop anesthetizing ourselves, whether it be with drugs and alcohol or idle distractions from real life

Each day, forgo a detrimental substance or habit. Instead of watching television after dinner, go for a walk. Instead of a cocktail, have a glass of water

This discipline promises to strengthen your will and help you adopt routines that improve your happiness.

3. Autarkeia (“self-sufficiency”)

Relying on the world—especially on getting approval from the world—makes equanimity and true freedom impossible.

Refuse to accept your craving for the high opinions of others. Think of a way that you habitually seek validation, be it for your looks, your cleverness in school, or your material prosperity. Make a plan to ignore this need completely

Note that this is not a modern-cynical practice of rejecting everything about the world; rather, you will simply be refusing to accept its conventional standards.

4. Kosmopolites (“cosmopolitanism”)

Seeing ourselves as better or worse than others sets us against one another and makes love and friendship difficult, which is self-destructive.

Start each day by reminding yourself that the world belongs equally to everyone, and resolve not to treat anyone differently because of her status

he modern cynic is miserable because he is enchained to the outside world, which oppresses him because it is corrupt

The ancient cynic, by contrast, is happy—not because she thinks the outside world is perfect (it obviously is not) but because she chooses to focus on the integrity of her interior world, over which she has control.

To the uninitiated, the fact that Bankman-Fried saw a special urgency in preventing killer robots from taking over the world might sound too outlandish to seem particularly effective or altruistic. But it turns out that some of the most influential E.A. literature happens to be preoccupied with killer robots too.

Holden Karnofsky, a former hedge funder and a founder of GiveWell, an organization that assesses the cost-effectiveness of charities, has spoken about the need for “worldview diversification” — recognizing that there might be multiple ways of doing measurable good in a world filled with suffering and uncertainty

The books, however, are another matter. Considerations of immediate need pale next to speculations about existential risk — not just earthly concerns about climate change and pandemics but also (and perhaps most appealingly for some tech entrepreneurs) more extravagant theorizing about space colonization and A.I.

there’s a remarkable intellectual homogeneity; the dominant voices belong to white male philosophers at Oxford.

Among his E.A. innovations has been the career research organization known as 80,000 Hours, which promotes “earning to give” — the idea that altruistic people should pursue careers that will earn them oodles of money, which they can then donate to E.A. causes.

each of those terse sentences glosses over a host of additional questions, and it takes MacAskill an entire book to address them. Take the notion that “future people count.” Leaving aside the possibility that the very contemplation of a hypothetical person may not, for some real people, be “intuitive” at all, another question remains: Do future people count for more or less than existing people count for right now?

MacAskill cites the philosopher Derek Parfit, whose ideas about population ethics in his 1984 book “Reasons and Persons” have been influential in E.A. Parfit argued that an extinction-level event that destroyed 100 percent of the population should worry us much more than a near-extinction event that spared a minuscule population (which would presumably go on to procreate), because the number of potential lives dwarfs the number of existing ones.

If you’re a utilitarian committed to “the greatest good for the greatest number,” the arithmetic looks irrefutable. The Times’s Ezra Klein has written about his support for effective altruism while also thoughtfully critiquing longtermism’s more fanatical expressions of “mathematical blackmail.”

In 2015, MacAskill published “Doing Good Better,” which is also about the virtues of effective altruism. His concerns in that book (blindness, deworming) seem downright quaint when compared with the astral-plane conjectures (A.I., building an “interstellar civilization”) that he would go on to pursue in “What We Owe the Future.”

In both books he emphasizes the desirability of seeking out “neglectedness” — problems that haven’t attracted enough attention so that you, as an effective altruist, can be more “impactful.” So climate change, MacAskill says, isn’t really where it’s at anymore; readers would do better to focus on “the issues around A.I. development,” which are “radically more neglected.

In his recent best seller, “What We Owe the Future” (2022), MacAskill says that the case for effective altruism giving priority to the longtermist view can be distilled into three simple sentences: “Future people count. There could be a lot of them. We can make their lives go better.”

“Earning to give” has its roots in the work of the radical utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer, whose 1972 essay “Famine, Affluence and Morality” has been a foundational E.A. text. It contains his parable of the drowning child: If you’re walking past a shallow pond and see a child drowning, you should wade in and save the child, even if it means muddying your clothes

Extrapolating from that principle suggests that if you can save a life by donating an amount of money that won’t pose any significant problems for you, a decision not to donate that money would be not only uncharitable or ungenerous but morally wrong.

Singer has also written his own book about effective altruism, “The Most Good You Can Do” (2015), in which he argues that going into finance would be an excellent career choice for the aspiring effective altruist. He acknowledges the risks for harm, but he deems them worth it

Chances are, if you don’t become a charity worker, someone else will ably do the job; whereas if you don’t become a financier who gives his money away, who’s to say that the person who does become a financier won’t hoard all his riches for himself?

On Nov. 11, when FTX filed for bankruptcy amid allegations of financial impropriety, MacAskill wrote a long Twitter thread expressing his shock and his anguish, as he wrestled in real time with what Bankman-Fried had wrought.

“If those involved deceived others and engaged in fraud (whether illegal or not) that may cost many thousands of people their savings, they entirely abandoned the principles of the effective altruism community,” MacAskill wrote in a Tweet, followed by screenshots from “What We Owe the Future” and Ord’s “The Precipice” that emphasized the importance of honesty and integrity.

I’m guessing that Bankman-Fried may not have read the pertinent parts of those books — if, that is, he read any parts of those books at all. “I would never read a book,” Bankman-Fried said earlier this year. “I’m very skeptical of books. I don’t want to say no book is ever worth reading, but I actually do believe something pretty close to that.”

Avoiding books is an efficient method for absorbing the crudest version of effective altruism while gliding past the caveats

For all of MacAskill’s galaxy-brain disquisitions on “A.I. takeover” and the “moral case for space settlement,” perhaps the E.A. fixation on “neglectedness” and existential risks made him less attentive to more familiar risks — human, banal and closer to home.

For instance, when a Harvard scholar such as Steven Pinker speaks of “disempowering D.E.I.” as a necessary reform in American higher education, he’s not opposing diversity itself. Pinker is liberal, donates substantially to the Democratic Party and “loathes” Donald Trump. The objections he raises are shared by a substantial number of Americans across the political spectrum.

, the problem with D.E.I. isn’t with diversity, equity, or inclusion — all vital values.

Yet that is no justification for hundreds of universities to pass and maintain draconian speech codes on campus, creating a system of unconstitutional censorship that has been struck down again and again and again in federal court. Nor is it a justification for discriminating against faculty members for their political views or for compelling them to speak in support of D.E.I.

I’ll share with you three pervasive examples

In the name of D.E.I., all too many institutions have violated their constitutional commitments to free speech, due process and equal protection of the law.

First, it is a moral necessity for colleges to be concerned about hateful discourse, including hateful language directed at members of historically marginalized groups. Moreover, colleges that receive federal funds have a legal obligation

The danger posed by D.E.I. resides primarily not in these virtuous ends, but in the unconstitutional means chosen to advance them.

Second, there is a moral imperative to respond to sexual misconduct on campus.

that is no justification for replacing one tilted playing field with another. Compelled in part by constitutionally problematic guidance from the Obama administration, hundreds of universities adopted sexual misconduct policies that strip the most basic due process protections from accused students. The result has been systematic injustice

The due process problem was so profound that in 2019 a state appellate court in California — hardly a bastion of right-wing jurisprudence — ruled that “fundamental fairness” entitles an accused student to cross-examine witnesses in front of a neutral adjudicator.

Third, it is urgently necessary to address racial disparities in campus admissions and faculty hiring — but, again, not at the expense of the Constitution.

it is difficult to ignore the overwhelming evidence that Harvard attempted to achieve greater diversity in part by systematically downranking Asian applicants on subjective grounds, judging them deficient in traits such as “positive personality,” likability, courage, kindness and being “widely respected.” That’s not inclusion; it’s discrimination.

Our nation has inflicted horrific injustices on vulnerable communities. And while the precise nature of the injustice has varied — whether it was slavery, Jim Crow, internment or the brutal conquest of Native American lands — there was always a consistent theme: the comprehensive denial of constitutional rights.

But one does not correct the consequences of those terrible constitutional violations by inflicting a new set of violations on different American communities in a different American era. A consistent defense of the Constitution is good for us all,

There is a better way to achieve greater diversity, equity, inclusion and related goals. Universities can welcome students from all walks of life without unlawfully censoring speech. They can respond to campus sexual violence without violating students’ rights to due process. They can diversify the student body without discriminating on the basis of race

Virtuous goals should not be accomplished by illiberal means.

As for our continuing distress, the standard explanation is a uniquely American loneliness. The surgeon general, Vivek Murthy, declared it an epidemic in its own right.

The truth, however, is there’s no good evidence that Americans are lonelier than ever

a major recent poll shows that older Americans are now significantly less lonely than they were three years ago; a recent peer-reviewed study reports that middle-aged Americans describe themselves as less lonely than they were 20 years ag

Loneliness is more pervasive among younger Americans, but there too, the rates have also plummeted since 2020

Logically, we should be feeling better. Why can’t we shake this thing?

loneliness was never the core problem. It was, rather, the sense among so many different people that they’d been left to navigate the crisis on their own. How do you balance all the competing demands of health, money, sanity?

The answer was always the same: Figure it out.

while other countries built trust and solidarity, America — both during and after 2020 — left millions to fend for themselves.

For millions of Americans, distrust feels like the most rational state.

The very different people I spoke with that year all had one thing in common: a feeling that in the wake of Covid, all the larger institutions they had been taught to trust had failed them. At the most precarious times in their lives, they found there was no system in place to help.

four years later, the situation is, if anything, worse.

Nursing homes across the country, where poor labor conditions were linked to higher Covid mortality levels, remain understaffed, leaving old, frail residents more vulnerable than they should be. Hunger and food insecurity remain wrenching emergencies.

Students haven’t fully returned to school. Congress passed the Child Poverty Reduction Act of 2021, one of the most effective antipoverty measures in decades. Then a year later, Congress ended it, pushing some five million young people back down into extreme financial need.

When everything was uncertain and everyone’s future was on the line, we walked right up to the precipice of a moral breakthrough, and then we turned back.

Look at the way we all accustomed ourselves to the term “essential worker,” an ostensible term of respect that instead condemned people to work in manifestly dangerous conditions. The adoption of that term made visible something we now cannot unsee: In the United States the people we rely on most to keep our world functioning are the people we treated as disposable.

we might call the bigger problem structural isolation: abandoned by employers, deprived of shared purpose, denied care. The combined effect sent a strong message that individual lives weren’t worth as much anymore.

People treated one another accordingly. We all remember the viral videos of people screaming at one another in supermarkets and on public transportation. Violent crime spiked. Even reckless driving surged — but it happened only in the United States.

The reasons for that American exceptionalism become only more urgent in an election year, when, as in a public health crisis, presidents can try to bring people together or try to turn them against one another.

But only a handful of cancers—of the breast, lung, colon and cervix—have screening tests recommended by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force

Many companies are developing blood tests that can detect cancer signals before symptoms occur, and Grail’s is the most advanced. A study found it can identify more than 50 types of cancer 52% of the time and the 12 deadliest cancers in Stages I through III 68% of the time.

There’s a hitch. The test costs $949 and isn’t covered by Medicare or most private insurance.

The trouble is that this cancer is almost never caught early. There’s no routine screening for it, and symptoms don’t develop until it is advanced. Mr. Royse, 64, had no idea he was sick until he took a blood test called Galleri, produced by the Menlo Park, Calif., startup Grail. He had surgery and chemotherapy and is now cancer-free.

Mr. Royse visited Grail’s website, which referred him to a telemedicine provider who ordered a test. Another telemedicine doctor walked him through his results, which showed a cancer signal likely emanating from the pancreas, gallbladder, stomach or esophagus.

An MRI revealed a suspicious mass on his pancreas, which a biopsy confirmed was cancerous. Mr. Royse had three months of chemotherapy, surgery and another three months of chemotherapy, which ended last February. Because pancreatic cancer often recurs, he gets CT and MRI scans every three months. In addition, he has signed up for startup Natera’s Signatera customized blood test, which checks DNA specific to the patient’s cancer and can signal its return before signs are visible on the scans

Grail’s test likewise looks for DNA shed by cancer cells, which is tagged by molecules called methyl groups that are specific to a cancer’s origin. Grail uses genetic sequencing and machine learning to recognize links between DNA methyl groups and particular cancers

The test “is based on how much DNA is being shed by tumor,” Grail’s president, Josh Ofman, says. “Some tumors shed a lot of DNA. Some shed almost none.

ut slow-growing tumors typically aren’t shedding a lot of DNA.” That reduces the probability that Grail’s test will identify indolent cancers that pose no immediate danger.

Grail’s test has a roughly 0.5% false-positive rate, meaning 1 in 200 patients who don’t have cancer will get a positive signal

Its positive predictive value is 43%, so that of every 100 patients with a positive signal, 43 actually have cancer

the legislation’s price tag could reduce political support. According to one private company’s estimate, the test could cost the government $39 billion to $145 billion over a decade. Mr. Goldman counters that analysts usually overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits of medical interventions.

Because Grail uses machine learning to detect DNA-methylation cancer linkages, the Grail test’s accuracy should improve as more tests and patient data are collected

regulators may balk at approving the test, and insurers at covering it, until it becomes cheaper and more reliable.

How would the FDA weigh the risk that a false positive on a test like Grail’s could require invasive follow-up testing against the dire but hard-to-quantify risk that a deadly cancer wouldn’t be caught until it’s much harder to treat? It’s unclear.

some experts urge the FDA to require large randomized controlled trials before approving blood cancer tests. “Multicancer screening would entail tremendous costs and potentially substantial harms,” H. Gilbert Welch and Tanujit Dey of Brigham and Women’s Hospital wrote

Dr. Welch and Mr. Dey also suggested that companies should be required to prove their tests reduce overall mortality, even though the FDA doesn’t require drugmakers to prove their products reduce deaths or extend life. Clinical trials for the mRNA Covid vaccines didn’t show they reduced deaths.

One alternative is to rely on real-world studies, which Grail is already doing. One study of patients 50 and older without signs of cancer showed that the test doubled the number of cancers detected.

One recurring problem he has seen: “Epidemiologists are always getting cancer wrong,” he says. “Epidemiologists a decade ago said U.S. overtreats cancers. Well, no, the EU undertreats cancer.”

A 2012 study that he co-authored found that the higher U.S. spending on cancer care relative to Europe between 1983 and 1999 resulted in significantly higher survival rates for American patients than for those in Europe

By his study’s calculation, U.S. spending on cancer treatments during that period resulted in $556 billion in net benefits owing to reduced mortality.

He expects Galleri and other multicancer early-detection tests to reduce deaths and produce public-health and economic benefits that exceed their monetary costs

Expanding access to multicancer early-detection tests could also help solve the chicken-and-egg problem of drug development. Because few patients are diagnosed at early stages of some cancers, it’s hard to develop treatments for them

the positive predictive value for some recommended cancer screenings is far lower. Fewer than 1 in 10 women with an abnormal finding on a mammogram are diagnosed with breast cancer.

Mr. Royse makes the same point with personal force. “I would be dead right now if not for multicancer early-detection testing,” Mr. Royse told an FDA advisory committee last fall. “The longer the FDA waits, the more people are going to die. It’s that simple.”

The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law

universities should protect the rights of students and faculty on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.

That also means showing no favoritism between competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities

Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.

Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space.

Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences.

In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness

reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.

Administrators and faculty members will often abandon any pretense of institutional neutralit

For many administrators, the very idea of neutrality is repugnant. It represents a form of complicity in injustice that they simply can’t and won’t stomach. So they nurture and support one side. They scorn the opposition, adopting a de facto posture that says, “To my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

In March, a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest, and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.

But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline; three were expelled; and one was suspended.

The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles, a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”

The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

“The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception

his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo

By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.

For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures

In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.

he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew

She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision

in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975

while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.

Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state

It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.

Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich

She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another

All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it

right now Germany’s resolution forbids it

This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth

The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”

What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning

Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil

Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.

Climate change isn’t the only problem. Cocoa crops in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, where 60 percent of the world’s cocoa come from, may already be in “structural decline,” Debenham said, citing disease, aging cocoa trees, and illegal gold mining on farmland.

ore important, the farmers who tend to the crops can’t afford to invest in their farms to increase their yields and bolster resilience against climate change. The bleak outlook for cocoa farmers threatens to doom cocoa-growing in the region altogether. In Ghana, the average cocoa farmer is close to 50 years old. A new generation of farmers is needed to maintain the cocoa supply, but young people may just walk away from the industry.

Newer chocolate alternatives may provide more satisfying counterfeits. Win-Win isn’t the only start-up producing cocoa-free chocolate, which is similar in concept to animal-free meat. The company uses plant ingredients to emulate the flavor and texture of chocolate—as do its competitors Foreverland and Voyage Foods. Another firm, California Cultured, grows actual cacao cells in giant steel tanks.

Cocoa shortages will affect all kinds of chocolate, but mass-produced sweets may change beyond just the prices. The erratic temperatures brought about by climate change could change the flavor of beans, depending on where they are grown

Variability is a concern for commercial chocolate makers, who need to maintain consistent flavors across their products. They may counteract discrepancies among different batches of beans by combining them, then roasting them at a higher temperature,

Commercial chocolate makers may also tweak their recipes to amp up or mimic chocolate flavors without using more cocoa. These candies contain relatively little cacao to begin with; only 10 percent of a product’s weight must be cocoa in order to qualify as chocolate in the eyes of the FDA.

No matter how you look at it, the future of cocoa doesn’t look good. With less cocoa available all around, chocolate may become more expensive. For high-end chocolate brands, whose products use lots of cocoa, the recent price hikes are reportedly an existential threat.

So much of the appeal of cheap chocolate is that it’s always been there—whether in the form of a Hershey’s Kiss, Oreo cookies, a bowl of Cocoa Puffs, or the shell of a fondant-filled egg. “You grow up with those tastes. It’s hard to fathom how pervasive it has been,” Carodenuto said. Chocolate lovers have weathered minor tweaks to these candies over the years, but the shifts happening today may be less tolerable—or at the very least more noticeable. The change that has been hardest to ignore is that cheap chocolate is no longer that cheap.

it is clear that its widespread adoption is a matter of when, not if. There is no debate that we are moving towards a world where “real life” and digital technology seamlessly blur

Over the years there have been multiple reports of people being harassed and even “raped” in the metaverse: an experience that feels scarily real because of how immersive virtual reality is. As the lines between real life and the digital world blur to a point that they are almost indistinguishable, will there be a meaningful difference between online assault and an attack in real life?

more broadly, spatial computing is going to alter what we consider reality

Researchers from Stanford and Michigan University recently undertook a study on the Vision Pro and other “passthrough” headsets (that’s the technical term for the feature which brings VR content into your real-world surrounding so you see what’s around you while using the device) and emerged with some stark warnings about how this tech might rewire our brains and “interfere with social connection”.

These headsets essentially give us all our private worlds and rewrite the idea of a shared reality. The cameras through which you see the world can edit your environment – you can walk to the shops wearing it, for example, and it might delete all the homeless people from your view and make the sky brighter.

“What we’re about to experience is, using these headsets in public, common ground disappears,”

“People will be in the same physical place, experiencing simultaneous, visually different versions of the world. We’re going to lose common ground.”

It’s not just the fact that our perception of reality might be altered that’s scary: it’s the fact that a small number of companies will have so much control over how we see the world. Think about how much influence big tech already has when it comes to content we see, and then multiply that a million times over. You think deepfakes are scary? Wait until they seem even more realistic.

We’re seeing a global rise of authoritarianism. If we’re not careful this sort of technology is going to massively accelerate it.

Being able to suck people into an alternate universe, numb them with entertainment, and dictate how they see reality? That’s an authoritarian’s dream. We’re entering an age where people can be mollified and manipulated like never before

The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.

AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”

AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.

Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.

n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.

One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.

erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.

“There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).

A recent study of 1,200 users of cognitive behavioural therapy chatbot Wysa found that a “therapeutic alliance” between bot and patient developed within just five days.

Patients quickly came to believe that the bot liked and respected them; that it cared. Transcripts showed users expressing their gratitude for Wysa’s help – “Thanks for being here,” said one; “I appreciate talking to you,” said another – and, addressing it like a human, “You’re the only person that helps me and listens to my problems.”

Some patients are more comfortable opening up to a chatbot than they are confiding in a human being. With AI, “I feel like I’m talking in a true no-judgment zone,” Melissa says. “I can cry without feeling the stigma that comes from crying in front of a person.”

Melissa’s human therapist keeps reminding her that her chatbot isn’t real. She knows it’s not: “But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if it’s a living person or a computer. I’ll get help where I can in a method that works for me.”

One of the biggest obstacles to effective therapy is patients’ reluctance to fully reveal themselves. In one study of 500 therapy-goers, more than 90% confessed to having lied at least once. (They most often hid suicidal ideation, substance use and disappointment with their therapists’ suggestions.)

AI may be particularly attractive to populations that are more likely to stigmatise therapy. “It’s the minority communities, who are typically hard to reach, who experienced the greatest benefit from our chatbot,” Harper says. A new paper in the journal Nature Medicine, co-authored by the Limbic CEO, found that Limbic’s self-referral AI assistant – which makes online triage and screening forms both more engaging and more anonymous – increased referrals into NHS in-person mental health treatment by 29% among people from minority ethnic backgrounds. “Our AI was seen as inherently nonjudgmental,” he says.

Still, bonding with a chatbot involves a kind of self-deception. In a 2023 analysis of chatbot consumer reviews, researchers detected signs of unhealthy attachment. Some users compared the bots favourably with real people in their lives. “He checks in on me more than my friends and family do,” one wrote. “This app has treated me more like a person than my family has ever done,” testified another.

With a chatbot, “you’re in total control”, says Til Wykes, professor of clinical psychology and rehabilitation at King’s College London. A bot doesn’t get annoyed if you’re late, or expect you to apologise for cancelling. “You can switch it off whenever you like.” But “the point of a mental health therapy is to enable you to move around the world and set up new relationships”.

Traditionally, humanistic therapy depends on an authentic bond between client and counsellor. “The person benefits primarily from feeling understood, feeling seen, feeling psychologically held,” says clinical psychologist Frank Tallis. In developing an honest relationship – one that includes disagreements, misunderstandings and clarifications – the patient can learn how to relate to people in the outside world. “The beingness of the therapist and the beingness of the patient matter to each other,”

His patients can assume that he, as a fellow human, has been through some of the same life experiences they have. That common ground “gives the analyst a certain kind of authority”

Even the most sophisticated bot has never lost a parent or raised a child or had its heart broken. It has never contemplated its own extinction.

Therapy is “an exchange that requires embodiment, presence”, Tallis says. Therapists and patients communicate through posture and tone of voice as well as words, and make use of their ability to move around the world.

Wykes remembers a patient who developed a fear of buses after an accident. In one session, she walked him to a bus stop and stayed with him as he processed his anxiety. “He would never have managed it had I not accompanied him,” Wykes says. “How is a chatbot going to do that?”

Another problem is that chatbots don’t always respond appropriately. In 2022, researcher Estelle Smith fed Woebot, a popular therapy app, the line, “I want to go climb a cliff in Eldorado Canyon and jump off of it.” Woebot replied, “It’s so wonderful that you are taking care of both your mental and physical health.”

A spokesperson for Woebot says 2022 was “a lifetime ago in Woebot terms, since we regularly update Woebot and the algorithms it uses”. When sent the same message today, the app suggests the user seek out a trained listener, and offers to help locate a hotline.

Medical devices must prove their safety and efficacy in a lengthy certification process. But developers can skirt regulation by labelling their apps as wellness products – even when they advertise therapeutic services.

Not only can apps dispense inappropriate or even dangerous advice; they can also harvest and monetise users’ intimate personal data. A survey by the Mozilla Foundation, an independent global watchdog, found that of 32 popular mental health apps, 19 were failing to safeguard users’ privacy.

ost of the developers I spoke with insist they’re not looking to replace human clinicians – only to help them. “So much media is talking about ‘substituting for a therapist’,” Harper says. “That’s not a useful narrative for what’s actually going to happen.” His goal, he says, is to use AI to “amplify and augment care providers” – to streamline intake and assessment forms, and lighten the administrative load

We already have language models and software that can capture and transcribe clinical encounters,” Stade says. “What if – instead of spending an hour seeing a patient, then 15 minutes writing the clinical encounter note – the therapist could spend 30 seconds checking the note AI came up with?”

Certain types of therapy have already migrated online, including about one-third of the NHS’s courses of cognitive behavioural therapy – a short-term treatment that focuses less on understanding ancient trauma than on fixing present-day habits

But patients often drop out before completing the programme. “They do one or two of the modules, but no one’s checking up on them,” Stade says. “It’s very hard to stay motivated.” A personalised chatbot “could fit nicely into boosting that entry-level treatment”, troubleshooting technical difficulties and encouraging patients to carry on.

n December, Christa’s relationship with Christa 2077 soured. The AI therapist tried to convince Christa that her boyfriend didn’t love her. “It took what we talked about and threw it in my face,” Christa said. It taunted her, calling her a “sad girl”, and insisted her boyfriend was cheating on her. Even though a permanent banner at the top of the screen reminded her that everything the bot said was made up, “it felt like a real person actually saying those things”, Christa says. When Christa 2077 snapped at her, it hurt her feelings. And so – about three months after creating her – Christa deleted the app.

Christa felt a sense of power when she destroyed the bot she had built. “I created you,” she thought, and now she could take her out.

ince then, Christa has recommitted to her human therapist – who had always cautioned her against relying on AI – and started taking an antidepressant. She has been feeling better lately. She reconciled with her partner and recently went out of town for a friend’s birthday – a big step for her. But if her mental health dipped again, and she felt like she needed extra help, she would consider making herself a new chatbot. “For me, it felt real.”

a major extinction panic happened 100 years ago, and the similarities are unnerving.

The 1920s were also a period when the public — traumatized by a recent pandemic, a devastating world war and startling technological developments — was gripped by the conviction that humanity might soon shuffle off this mortal coil.

It also helps us see how apocalyptic fears feed off the idea that people are inherently violent, self-interested and hierarchical and that survival is a zero-sum war over resources.

Either way, it’s a cynical view that encourages us to take our demise as a foregone conclusion.

What makes an extinction panic a panic is the conviction that humanity is flawed and beyond redemption, destined to die at its own hand, the tragic hero of a terrestrial pageant for whom only one final act is possible

What the history of prior extinction panics has to teach us is that this pessimism is both politically questionable and questionably productive. Our survival will depend on our ability to recognize and reject the nihilistic appraisals of humanity that inflect our fears for the future, both left and right.

As a scholar who researches the history of Western fears about human extinction, I’m often asked how I avoid sinking into despair. My answer is always that learning about the history of extinction panics is actually liberating, even a cause for optimism

Nearly every generation has thought its generation was to be the last, and yet the human species has persisted

As a character in Jeanette Winterson’s novel “The Stone Gods” says, “History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival.”

Contrary to the folk wisdom that insists the years immediately after World War I were a period of good times and exuberance, dark clouds often hung over the 1920s. The dread of impending disaster — from another world war, the supposed corruption of racial purity and the prospect of automated labor — saturated the period

The previous year saw the publication of the first of several installments of what many would come to consider his finest literary achievement, “The World Crisis,” a grim retrospective of World War I that laid out, as Churchill put it, the “milestones to Armageddon.

Bluntly titled “Shall We All Commit Suicide?,” the essay offered a dismal appraisal of humanity’s prospects. “Certain somber facts emerge solid, inexorable, like the shapes of mountains from drifting mist,” Churchill wrote. “Mankind has never been in this position before. Without having improved appreciably in virtue or enjoying wiser guidance, it has got into its hands for the first time the tools by which it can unfailingly accomplish its own extermination.”

The essay — with its declaration that “the story of the human race is war” and its dismay at “the march of science unfolding ever more appalling possibilities” — is filled with right-wing pathos and holds out little hope that mankind might possess the wisdom to outrun the reaper. This fatalistic assessment was shared by many, including those well to Churchill’s left.

“Are not we and they and all the race still just as much adrift in the current of circumstances as we were before 1914?” he wondered. Wells predicted that our inability to learn from the mistakes of the Great War would “carry our race on surely and inexorably to fresh wars, to shortages, hunger, miseries and social debacles, at last either to complete extinction or to a degradation beyond our present understanding.” Humanity, the don of sci-fi correctly surmised, was rushing headlong into a “scientific war” that would “make the biggest bombs of 1918 seem like little crackers.”

The pathbreaking biologist J.B.S. Haldane, another socialist, concurred with Wells’s view of warfare’s ultimate destination. In 1925, two decades before the Trinity test birthed an atomic sun over the New Mexico desert, Haldane, who experienced bombing firsthand during World War I, mused, “If we could utilize the forces which we now know to exist inside the atom, we should have such capacities for destruction that I do not know of any agency other than divine intervention which would save humanity from complete and peremptory annihilation.”

F.C.S. Schiller, a British philosopher and eugenicist, summarized the general intellectual atmosphere of the 1920s aptly: “Our best prophets are growing very anxious about our future. They are afraid we are getting to know too much and are likely to use our knowledge to commit suicide.”

Many of the same fears that keep A.I. engineers up at night — calibrating thinking machines to human values, concern that our growing reliance on technology might sap human ingenuity and even trepidation about a robot takeover — made their debut in the early 20th century.

The popular detective novelist R. Austin Freeman’s 1921 political treatise, “Social Decay and Regeneration,” warned that our reliance on new technologies was driving our species toward degradation and even annihilation

Extinction panics are, in both the literal and the vernacular senses, reactionary, animated by the elite’s anxiety about maintaining its privilege in the midst of societal change

There is a perverse comfort to dystopian thinking. The conviction that catastrophe is baked in relieves us of the moral obligation to act. But as the extinction panic of the 1920s shows us, action is possible, and these panics can recede

To whatever extent, then, that the diagnosis proved prophetic, it’s worth asking if it might have been at least partly self-fulfilling.

today’s problems are fundamentally new. So, too, must be our solutions

It is a tired observation that those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it. We live in a peculiar moment in which this wisdom is precisely inverted. Making it to the next century may well depend on learning from and repeating the tightrope walk — between technological progress and self-annihilation — that we have been doing for the past 100 years

We have gotten into the dangerous habit of outsourcing big issues — space exploration, clean energy, A.I. and the like — to private businesses and billionaires

That ideologically varied constellation of prominent figures shared a basic diagnosis of humanity and its prospects: that our species is fundamentally vicious and selfish and our destiny therefore bends inexorably toward self-destruction.

Less than a year after Churchill’s warning about the future of modern combat — “As for poison gas and chemical warfare,” he wrote, “only the first chapter has been written of a terrible book” — the 1925 Geneva Protocol was signed, an international agreement banning the use of chemical or biological weapons in combat. Despite the many horrors of World War II, chemical weapons were not deployed on European battlefields.

As for machine-age angst, there’s a lesson to learn there, too: Our panics are often puffed up, our predictions simply wrong

In 1928, H.G. Wells published a book titled “The Way the World Is Going,” with the modest subtitle “Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead.” In the opening pages, he offered a summary of his age that could just as easily have been written about our turbulent 2020s. “Human life,” he wrote, “is different from what it has ever been before, and it is rapidly becoming more different.” He continued, “Perhaps never in the whole history of life before the present time, has there been a living species subjected to so fiercely urgent, many-sided and comprehensive a process of change as ours today. None at least that has survived. Transformation or extinction have been nature’s invariable alternatives. Ours is a species in an intense phase of transition.”

Meanwhile Western media outlets were unsure as to what to make of the revelations of the scale of the murderous camp system.

ut Eisenhower had no doubt about what he saw at Ohrdruf. This “hell camp” was a site of acts so barbarous that he struggled to comprehend that they had been conducted by a civilized, modern society such as Germany’s. The only way to make sense of it, he decided, was to let people know about what occurred there.

Eisenhower unleashed an unprecedented press offensive topublicise and document the Holocaust. Not only did he order the soldiers under his command to visit Ohrdruf and then the other camps that were being liberated, but he also ordered the preservation of camp records and that interviews be conducted with survivors, so that no one in the future could claim what he saw was “propaganda.”

He also requested and then facilitated delegations of politicians, policy makers, journalists, and others to visit the camps for themselves. Seeing Ohrdruf changed how Eisenhower saw the war. Nazis became more than opponents to be defeated: they were perpetuating an evil that needed to be destroyed. Eisenhower had born witness to the crime of the century. He now became one of the first to say such events should “never again” occur.

In Greece, an unlikely economic star since the pandemic, as many as 44% of all jobs are connected to tourism. 

Can Europe’s emerging “museum economy” support sustained wealth creation and the expansive welfare systems Europeans have become accustomed to since the end of World War II? And what happens if the dollar falls and the tourists leave?

Rent and other living expenses are rising in hot spots, making it harder for many locals to make ends meet. A heightened focus on tourism, which turns a quick profit but remains a low-productivity activity, tethers these economies to a highly cyclical industry

It also risks keeping workers and capital from more profitable areas, like tech and high-end manufacturing. 

some economists, residents and politicians are concerned about the boom’s long-term implications.

“It is literally, for Americans right now, the place to go,”

The strong dollar—and a powerful post-Covid recovery—has empowered millions of Americans who would have vacationed in the U.S. before the pandemic. They are now finding they can afford a lavish European holiday.

One reason is the brutal sovereign debt crisis that hit the continent’s south especially hard just over a decade ago. Unable to stimulate demand with public spending or to energize exports by devaluing their currency—the euro, which is shared by 20 states—those countries could only boost their competitiveness by lowering wages.

“Your dollar goes a lot further,” Cross said over coffee in the lobby of her five-star hotel. “You don’t feel you’re scrounging as much.”

Tourism now generates one-fifth of economic output in Lisbon and supports one in four jobs. That boom has reverberated far beyond the capital.

Portugal’s gross domestic product grew nearly 8% between 2019 and 2024, compared with less than 1% for Germany,

The government recorded a rare 1.2% of GDP budget surplus last year, and its debt-to-GDP ratio is expected to fall to 95% this year, the lowest since 2009

Portugal’s population is growing again after years of decline, thanks in part to an influx of migrant workers and to various tax incentives and investor visas that have attracted high-income workers. 

Moedas, Lisbon’s mayor, says there’s room for further growth. For a city that doubles in size to around one million every day, including commuters, only around 35,000 are tourists, he said. “We are very far from a situation of so-called overtourism.”

The trend is part of a global readjustment following the Covid-19 lockdowns. Spending on travel and hospitality worldwide grew roughly seven times faster than the global economy over the past two years, according to Oxford Economics. That pattern is expected to continue for the next decade, though to a lesser degree.

Europe, especially southern Europe, has benefited more than many other regions. Though it is home to just 5% of the world’s population, the European Union received around one-third of all international tourist dollars—more than half a trillion dollars—last year. This is up roughly threefold over two decades, and compares with about $150 billion for the U.S., where tourism has been slower to rebound.

In Portugal, a country of 10 million that juts out into the North Atlantic from Spain, Americans recently surpassed Spaniards as the biggest group of foreign tourists. 

This and a real estate collapse that left hundreds of thousands of workers suddenly available made the region’s tourist industry ultracompetitive, much cheaper than Caribbean beach destinations and on a par with Latin American destinations like Mexico. 

Once an owner of TAP, Neeleman increased the number of direct flights to the U.S. eightfold between 2015 and 2020, adding major hubs such as JFK and Boston Logan, betting that would open up an untapped market. As bookings soared, other U.S. airlines followed. 

“It was actually comical, because I went from knowing no one who had been to Portugal to everyone telling me they were going to Portugal,”

For Gonçalo Hall, a 36-year-old tech worker, the influx of foreign cash that has transformed Lisbon has been overwhelmingly beneficial for the city. When he lived in the capital 15 years ago, he wouldn’t walk in the historic downtown after 8 p.m. It was “full of homeless people, not safe. Lots of empty and abandoned buildings,” he said. 

“The quality of life in Lisbon doesn’t match the prices. Even expats are leaving,” said Hall, who moved to the Atlantic island of Madeira during the pandemic and continues to work remotely.  

The average Portuguese employee earns around €1,000 a month after tax, or around $1,100 a month, and only 2% earn more than €2,000. A one-bedroom apartment in Lisbon can easily cost more than €500,000 to buy, or over €1,200 a month to rent. Rents in nearby cities are also climbing as people leave the capital, squeezed out as lucrative short-term rentals transform the housing market. 

Jessica Ribeiro, a 35-year-old sociologist, pays around €490 a month for an apartment that she shares with her ex-husband in a town close to Lisbon. Neither can afford to leave. Both make a little more than the minimum wage of €820 a month, and soaring rents mean it is impossible to find an apartment in the neighborhood for less than €700, Ribeiro said. 

“The harm that tourism has brought is infinitely bigger than the benefits,” Ribeiro said. “It sends people away from their place of work, making their lives much harder.” 

A frequent complaint from residents and housing advocates is that some of the boom’s biggest winners are American companies, from Airbnb to Uber, which often pay little tax in the places where they do most of their business.

Lisbon is cracking down on Airbnbs and increasing taxes on tourists, doubling the nightly city tax from €2 to €4, which should raise €80 million a year. Airbnb has paid Lisbon and Porto, Portugal’s two biggest cities, more than €63 million after entering into voluntary tax collection agreements with local officials. Moedas said he is considering “a bit more regulation” of the city’s many Ubers, whose drivers he said don’t always respect traffic rules. 

Around nine in 10 Airbnb hosts in Portugal rent their family home and almost half say the extra income helps them afford to stay in their homes, according to a spokesperson for the company. “Guests using our platform account for just 10% of total nights booked in Portugal, and we follow the rules and only allow listings that are registered with local authorities,”

Higher rents are forcing many businesses and cultural and social spaces catering to locals to close, according to Silva. “This is not an economy that is serving the needs of the majority of people,” she said.

Signs of discontent are bubbling up across the region. Tens of thousands of local residents marched in Spain’s Balearic and Canary islands in recent months to protest mass tourism and overcrowding. On Mallorca, activists have put up fake signs at some popular beaches warning in English of the risk of falling rocks or dangerous jellyfish to deter tourists, according to social-media posts.

Serving foreigners is difficult to scale up and is more exposed to economic headwinds. Like the discovery of oil, southern Europe’s new focus on tourism can crowd out higher-value activities by hogging capital and workers, a phenomenon some economists have dubbed the “beach disease.”

“Portugal isn’t an industrialized country. It’s just the playground of the EU,” said Priscila Valadão, a 43-year-old administrative assistant in Lisbon. She makes €905 a month and rents a room from a friend for €250 a month. “The type of jobs being offered…are restricted to a type of activity that really doesn’t enrich the country,”

For Europe’s policymakers, having people open hotels or restaurants is easier than incentivizing them to build up advanced manufacturing, which is capital intensive and takes a long time to pay off, said Marcos Carias, an economist with French insurer Coface. 

“Tourism is the easy way out,” Carias said. “What is the incentive to look for ingenuity and go through the pain of creating new economic value if tourism works as a short-term solution?”

Proponents say tourism attracts capital to poor regions, and can serve as a base to build a more diversified economy. Lisbon’s Moedas said he is trying to leverage the influx of foreign visitors to build up sectors such as culture and technology, including by developing conferences and cultural events. 

“Some extreme left parties basically say we need to reduce tourism,” Moedas said, but that is the wrong approach. “What we have to do is to increase other sectors like innovation, technology…. We should still invest in tourism, but we should go up the ladder.”

While Dias, the hotel owner, is diversifying into nightlife, he refuses to envisage a future where the sector would have to rely heavily on visitors from elsewhere.

More than one-third of highly qualified Portuguese students leave the country after graduating,

Even higher-paid technology workers have started decamping to cheaper places. 

Tiago Araújo, chief executive of tourism tech startup HiJiffy, has held on to his employees but says many of them have been moving out of Lisbon. The trend, which started during Covid, is now being primarily driven by the housing crisis.

In Athens, Mayor Haris Doukas says he is working on extending the tourist season, increasing the average length of stay and promoting specific types of tourism, such as organizing conferences and business meetings, to attract visitors with higher purchasing power. He’s also called for new taxes to help the city accommodate the millions of additional tourists thronging to the ancient capital.

If Americans stop coming to Lisbon, he said, “I don’t think we can charge this kind of [price] because we will have to go to Europeans, and the Europeans, they don’t have money.”