Group items matching

in title, tags, annotations or url

Since the spring, the AfD has only gathered momentum. The party has gained at least four points in polls since May, rising to 20 percent support and overtaking the country’s governing center-left Social Democrats to become Germany’s second-strongest party. A more recent poll, released on Sunday, put the AfD at a record high of 22 percent support.

The AfD is now nipping at the heels of Mr. Voigt’s own Christian Democratic Union, or C.D.U., the party of former Chancellor Angela Merkel, which remains the country’s most popular but now sits in opposition.

“Now is the critical juncture,” Mr. Voigt said in an interview. “We have to understand, if we are not showing or portraying ourselves as the real opposition in Germany, people will defect to the Alternative for Germany.”

At a 2014 aerospace event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mr. Musk indicated that he was hesitant to build A.I himself.“I think we need to be very careful about artificial intelligence,” he said while answering audience questions. “With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon.”

That winter, the Future of Life Institute, which explores existential risks to humanity, organized a private conference in Puerto Rico focused on the future of A.I. Mr. Musk gave a speech there, arguing that A.I. could cross into dangerous territory without anyone realizing it and announced that he would help fund the institute. He gave $10 million.

OpenAI was set up as a nonprofit, with Mr. Musk and others pledging $1 billion in donations. The lab vowed to “open source” all its research, meaning it would share its underlying software code with the world. Mr. Musk and Mr. Altman argued that the threat of harmful A.I. would be mitigated if everyone, rather than just tech giants like Google and Facebook, had access to the technology.

Joe Biden built his 2020 presidential campaign around the idea that “we’re in a battle for the soul of America.”

We’re still, he said, “in a battle for the soul of America.

What is a soul? Well, religious people have one answer to that question. But Biden is not using the word in a religious sense, but in a secular one. He is saying that people and nations have a moral essence, a soul.

Without obvious shared goals, arguably all these different prosecutors, officials and individuals are undertaking an inadvertent deterrence project, keeping alive the bad parts of the recent past and applying pressure on the central players.

We talk about a “chilling” effect with abortion laws, regulatory action against corporations and certain speech policies; these “work” by exerting pressure, making people skittish and worried about getting caught up in legal trouble.

post-Jan. 6 prosecutions and the prospect of an indictment in Georgia may be causing people to be less rowdy.

What is a conservative? It’s a hard question to answer, and it gets harder each day.

Since the second half of the 20th century, conservatism as an ideology has been largely synonymous with something called “fusionism,” an alliance between social conservatives and economic libertarians. In the Cold War era, the additional commitment to a strong national defense resulted in what was often called the “th

Under this formulation, the G.O.P. perceived itself as a party united more by ideology than by identity

Germany is more populous than ever — an additional 1.1 million people lived in the country, now of 84.3 million people, at the end of 2022 — thanks to migration

One in four Germans have had at least one of their grandparents born abroad. More than 18 percent of people living in Germany were not born there.

In Frankfurt and a few other major cities, residents with a migration history are the majority. People with non-German sounding names run cities, universities and hospitals. The German couple that invented the Pfizer Covid vaccine have Turkish roots. Cem Ozdemir, a German-born Green politician whose parents came from Turkey, is one of the current government’s most popular minsters. Two of the three governing parties are run by men born in Iran.

What’s the last great book you read?C.V. Wedgwood’s “The Thirty Years War.” It’s sprawling and masterly and has the feel of a great novel

What’s your favorite book no one else has heard of?Rebecca West’s “The Court and the Castle.” It’s this fascinating book of lectures she gave at Yale in the 1950s about the relationship between the individual and authority as read through literature from “Hamlet” up through Kafka

Leslie Fiedler’s sublime cycle of books “Love and Death in the American Novel,” “What Was Literature?” and “Waiting for the End

China’s young people are facing record high unemployment as the country’s recovery from the pandemic is fluttering. They’re struggling professionally and emotionally. Yet the Communist Party and the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, are telling them to stop thinking they are above doing manual work or moving to the countryside. They should learn to “eat bitterness,” Mr. Xi instructed, using a colloquial expression that means to endure hardships.

A record 11.6 million college graduates are entering the work force this year, and one in five young people are unemployed. China’s leadership is hoping to persuade a generation that gre

up amid mostly rising prosperity to accept a different reality

while talk of the woke mind virus manages to be both sinister and silly, I’d argue that there really is what we might call an anti-woke mind virus — a contagion that spreads not across people but across issues.

Here’s how it works. A significant faction of Americans, which increasingly dominates the Republican Party, hates anything it considers woke — which in this faction’s eyes means both any acknowledgment of social injustice and any suggestion that people should make sacrifices, or even accept mild inconvenience, in the name of the public good.

So there’s rage against the idea that racism was and still is an evil for which society should make some amends; there’s also rage against the idea that people should, say, wear masks during a pandemic to protect others, or cut down on activities that harm the environment.

her photographs capture both the isolation and the beauty of the rural South: the dirt roads without a soul in sight, the creeks and rivers that curve away into even greater isolation, the trees choked by moss and vines, the gravestones and makeshift memorials barely visible through the trees.

The landscapes in these photographs are not so much threatening as bereft of protection. Entering such beautiful spaces is always a risk for a woman alone — not because of anything inherently dangerous about a mist-drenched stream or a bamboo-clotted riverbank or even a rocky waterfall, but because bucolic settings aren’t always as empty as they seem. And nobody would hear you scream if danger has followed you into the woods — or if danger is already there, just waiting for you to arrive.

Our deep woods are lovely, our still waters restful, but the Southern landscape has never been a safe place for a woman alone. It has never been a safe place for a Black man alone. It has never been a safe place for L.G.B.T.Q. people of any race or gender. To enter an isolated place alone has always been to take a risk, and we have known that all our lives.

A.I. is coming for workers in every sector, no matter their academic pedigree or sartorial choices. Now the W.G.A. has delivered a gift to future union negotiators. It’s illuminated an approach to negotiating around technology, and demonstrated the ways in which a white-collar rank-and-file can leverage labor solidarity toward the shared benefit of both management and employees.

Union negotiators can point to this agreement when employers refuse to bargain over technology in good faith. Moreover, the language in this agreement can serve as a model for other workers and employers, union and nonunion, who agree that neither an outright ban nor unchecked use of A.I. would be a sensible way forward. Workers can pressure employers to use technology to augment rather than automate work, asserting that technology does more than just increase the size of labor’s slice. It enlarges the whole pie.

Francis is relying heavily on what Jesuits, the order to which he belongs, call discernment, a deliberately pensive decision-making process that creates the space and time for a spiritual dimension to enter the equation — and perhaps for wider support for important changes to coalesce.

Yegor Gaidar, the wunderkind who shaped the first post-Communist reforms in Russia, mulled on this cyclical pattern in an article in the newspaper Izvestia in 1994, wondering — as did many in Russia and in the West at the time — whether the pattern would repeat itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union. “Russia’s race for a place in the civilized world recalls Achilles’ chase after the tortoise,” Gaidar wrote. “Through superhuman effort, Russia would manage to catch up and overtake, especially in military technology. Yet the world would unnoticeably but steadily move on, and again after disgraceful and tortuous setbacks the country would regroup for a leap and make another lurch, and everything would be repeated.”

Nearly 30 years later, Vladimir Putin’s ruthless efforts to reconstitute a Great Russia by brute force, in the process mauling Ukraine with shocking cruelty and weakening his own country for decades to come, appear to be falling into Gaidar’s pattern

Mr. Putin’s strongest pitch, that “losing” Ukraine represents a humiliating demotion of Russia the superpower, still resonates among people who were raised on the Soviet ethos, in which empire was a far stronger bond than nationalism.

Performative populism has begun to ebb. Twitter doesn’t have the hold on the media class it had two years ago. Peak wokeness has passed. There seem to be fewer cancellations recently, and less intellectual intimidation. I was a skeptic of the Jan. 6 committee at first, but I now recognize it’s played an important cultural role. That committee forced America to look into the abyss, to see the nihilistic violence that lay at the heart of Trumpian populism.

The election of 2022 marked the moment when America began to put performative populism behind us. Though the results are partial, and Trump acolytes could still help Republicans control Congress, this election we saw the emergence of an anti-Trump majority.

According to a national exit poll, nearly 60 percent of voters said they had an unfavorable view of Trump.