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But the approval, by unanimous consent and without a vote, was rejected by both Russia and China, whose representatives afterwards "disassociated" themselves from the consensus. Both countries have close ties with Myanmar. "What happened in Myanmar is essentially Myanmar's internal affairs," China's representative, Chen Xu, said.

Resistance from both Moscow and Beijing dimmed prospects for U.N. sanctions to mirror those imposed by the Biden administration this week, as both countries are veto-wielding members of the the Security Council.

Nada al-Nashif, the deputy U.N. high commissioner for human rights, called the arrest of Suu Kyi and President U Win Myint and hundreds of others by the country's coup leaders "politically motivated."

"more than 350 political and state officials, activists and civil society members, including journalists, monks and students, who have been taken into custody."

"Several face criminal charges on dubious grounds. Most have received no form of due process and have not been permitted legal representation, family visitations or communication," she said.

“It’s easy to misunderstand [medical information],” says Wolf, who is also founding director of the medical school’s Health Literacy and Learning Program. Some will be too ashamed to say so while others won’t realize they missed a critical detail

Magnani has patients who don’t believe they have high blood pressure because their lives aren’t stressful. Or respond with “Great news!” when he tells them a test result was “positive.”

But low health literacy cuts across all demographics

“Given the right headache or stress about a sick child, [gaps in comprehension] can happen to anyone. When you don’t feel well, you don’t think as clearly.”

Health literacy is not about reading skills or having a college degree. It means you know how to ask a doctor the right questions, read a food label, understand what you’re signing on a consent form, and have the numeric ability to analyze relative risks when making treatment decisions.

“None of this is intuitive,”

“Covid has brought to fore the vast inequities in society,” says cardiologist Jared W. Magnani, associate professor of medicine at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. If you don’t understand words such as “immunocompromised” or “comorbidity,” for instance, you miss cautionary information that could save your life.

Misunderstandings over hospital discharge or medication instructions can undo the best medical care. Yet, nearly 1 in 3 of the 17,309 people in a study by researchers from the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) responded that instructions from a health provider were “not easy to understand.”

Wolf says he was surprised during a study on reading prescription labels by how many high school graduates could not follow medication instructions. “Being able to read the label doesn’t mean you can interpret it,”

“Take two pills, twice daily” was frequently misunderstood. Replacing the awkward wording with “Take two in the morning and two at bedtime” would solve that, Wolf says. Health-care professionals “need to meet people where they’re at.”

Health literacy is the best predictor of someone’s health status, some physicians maintain. Decades of research consistently link low health literacy to poorer medical outcomes, more hospitalizations and emergency room visits, and higher health-care costs

Anatomy knowledge is another gap.

Explaining medical risk and probability is another challenge.

Over 3,000 studies found that health education materials far exceed the eighth-grade reading level of the average American, too. Beyond not using plain language (“joint pain,” not “arthritis”), texts assume the patient knows more than they do. Telling people to sanitize surfaces to kill the coronavirus means little if you don’t tell them what to use and how to do it, Caballero says. “What does it mean to practice good respiratory hygiene?” she asks. “These are not actionable instructions.”

Doctors are encouraged to employ the teach-back technique, meaning the doctor asks the patient to repeat what they’ve heard rather than simply asking, “Do you understand?”

In addition, “health care is becoming a harder test,” Wolf says. Health billing and insurance options can be impossible to navigate. We have an aging population with more chronic conditions and cognitive decline. And more is being asked of patients such as testing their own blood sugar or blood pressure.

On July 8, the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted to 41.22, down nearly 90 percent from its peak before the market crashed on Black Monday in October of 1929. Many of the homeless were living in shacks in “Hoovervilles.”

During his nearly four years in office, Hoover had focused on trying to balance the budget. But as the jobless rate rose to a record 23.6 percent in 1932, he proposed a $1.8 billion relief package

The foundation of both plans was $1 billion to expand loans by the government’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But the Garner-Wagner bill also called for up to $1.2 billion for public works to create jobs.

To Hoover this was spending money for “pork” and “unproductive” jobs. Republican Rep. Fiorello La Guardia, the future mayor of New York, shot back that the legislation was a “breadbasket bill” and represented “the first ray of hope that has been cast in a critical situation.”

By early July, it was clear that the House-Senate conference bill was doomed. “Weary leaders looked to the veto message already penned and waiting at the White House as marking the end of the long and bitter controversy over federal aid to the jobless,” the AP reported.On July 11, Congress sent its bill to Hoover. Sure enough, the next day Hoover vetoed the bill, saying it would “bring far more distress than it will cure.” It was a phrase similar to Trump’s declaration last month that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself" as he considered urging Americans to end their coronavirus quarantines.

“In a night session which was astonishing for the swift and decisive action of its nonpartisan coalition,” the Senate passed a revised bill and sent it to the House, the AP reported. There, what was now called “the Hoover bill” passed by a vote of 296 to 46. When the final conference bill came back to the House, members passed it by unanimous consent. Only one lawmaker gave a speech, and he was nearly drowned out by cries of “Vote, vote!”

“Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. … But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows’ hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.”

Trump faced his own charges of racism in the 1970s when Richard Nixon's Justice Department sued the Trump family's real estate firm for discriminatory rental practices against black people. Instead of working to make things right, Trump employed what became his signature move: he went on the attack. He hired the notorious Roy Cohn -- a defense attorney who had been Sen. Joseph McCarthy's top aide during his red-baiting campaign -- to file a $100 million countersuit for making false statements (those allegations were dismissed by the court). The original lawsuit was eventually settled and the Trumps signed a consent decree.

From the White House, Trump has made his attitudes on race clear with his comments about "s**thole countries." He also targeted Democratic congresswomen of color and said that they should "go back and help fix the crime infested places from which they came" (three of the four women were born in the US).

Now, in 2020, Donald Trump is a President whose re-election prospects are burdened by the weight of his failed response to the Covid-19 pandemic. More than 100,000 Americans were killed by the virus while Trump denied the severity of the public health threat, boosted an unproven treatment that studies suggest could be dangerous, and mused about quack cures involving household cleaners and light. Though his rival Joe Biden has, for the most part, remained at home in Delaware, the former VP has managed to build a lead in many polls, causing Trump's advisers to warn he is in trouble with the voters.

In 2008, rumors again circulated online that a candidate was being fed answers during a debate. Ann Althouse, a law professor and conservative blogger, wrote that close-up TV stills showed that Barack Obama “was wearing an earpiece” during a debate with John McCain.

Four years later, during the 2004 presidential debates, rumors circulated among left-wing bloggers that George W. Bush was getting help from a surreptitiously placed earpiece.

2000, when Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio host, accused then-candidate Al Gore of getting answers fed to him through an earpiece during a “Meet the Press” appearance.

In 2016, the rumor appeared again, this time attached to Hillary Clinton, who was accused by right-wing websites of wearing a secret earpiece. (One such story, which appeared on the conspiracy theory website Infowars, was shared by Donald Trump Jr. and other pro-Trump influencers.)

Foreign politicians, including Emmanuel Macron of France, have also been baselessly accused of wearing earpieces during debates.

But the idea of a hidden helper giving one side an unfair debate advantage has proved seductive to campaign operatives trying to explain away a lopsided debate, or sow doubts about cheating on the other side.

In 2018 a different whistleblower outed Facebook for its sketchy collaboration with Cambridge Analytica, a research organisation that allowed users’ data to be collected without their consent and used for political profiling by Donald Trump’s campaign. Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, went to Washington, DC to apologise, and in 2019 America’s consumer-protection agency, the Federal Trade Commission, agreed to a $5bn settlement with Facebook. That is the largest fine ever levied against a tech firm.

Congress has repeatedly called in tech bosses for angry questioning and public shaming without taking direct action afterwards.

Senators, who cannot agree on such uncontroversial things as paying for the government’s expenses, united against a common enemy and promised Ms Haugen that they would hold Facebook to account.

Congress could update and strengthen the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which was passed in 1998 and bars the collection of data from children under the age of 13.

If Congress does follow through with legislation, it is likely to focus narrowly on protecting children online, as opposed to broader reforms, for which there is still no political consensus.

Social media’s harmful effects on children and teenagers is a concern that transcends partisanship and is easier to understand than sneaky data-gathering, viral misinformation and other social-networking sins.

Other legislative proposals take aim at manipulative marketing and design features that make social media so addictive for the young.

However, Ms Haugen’s most significant impact on big tech may be inspiring others to come forward and blow the whistle on their employers’ malfeasance.

“A case like this one opens the floodgates and will trigger hundreds more cases,” predicts Steve Kohn, a lawyer who has represented several high-profile whistleblowers.

One is the industry’s culture of flouting rules and a history of non-compliance. Another is a legal framework that makes whistleblowing less threatening and more attractive than it used to be.

The Dodd-Frank Act, which was enacted in 2010, gives greater protections to whistleblowers by preventing retaliation from employers and by offering rewards to successful cases of up to 10-30% of the money collected from sanctions against a firm.

If the threat of public shaming encourages corporate accountability, that is a good thing. But it could also make tech firms less inclusive and transparent, predicts Matt Perault, a former Facebook executive who is director of the Centre for Technology Policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

People may become less willing to share off-the-wall ideas if they worry about public leaks; companies may become less open with their staff; and executives could start including only a handful of trusted senior staff in meetings that might have otherwise been less restricted.

Facebook and other big tech firms, which have been criticised for violating people’s privacy online, can no longer count on any privacy either.

In other words, AOC can win in NY-14 but AOC-type candidates are no solution at all to the Democrats’ working class problems in most areas of the country. The grim fact is that as education polarization has played out geographically, Democratic votes are now distributed so inefficiently that the translation of these votes into political power has been severely undercut

As a result, Democrats’ hold on political power is ever on a knife’s edge even when their last election was a good one (as it is today).

Consistent with other recent research, the study finds that:

Working-class voters prefer progressive candidates who focus primarily on bread-and-butter economic issues, and who frame those issues in universal terms.

Candidates whose campaigns focused primarily on universalist policy issues such as jobs, health care, and the economy performed better than those who focused on group-specific policies, such as racial justice or immigration.

In addition, woke messaging decreased the appeal of other candidate characteristics. For example, candidates employing woke messaging who championed either centrist or progressive economic, health care, or civil rights policy priorities were viewed less favorably than their counterparts who championed the same priorities but opted for universalist messaging.

easier said than done given Democrats’ recent evolution away from universalist messaging and toward foregrounding the equity effects of unambiguously universal programs and deferring to group specific concerns around race, gender and sexuality, even where they are clearly unpopular and dubious as policy. The result has a been a shift in the Democratic party “brand” that has created barriers to Democratic party voting among broad swathes of the working class.

The grim prospects for the Democrats in 2022 and the gut-wrenching prospect of losing the White House to Donald Trump (again) in 2024 make clear the stakes.

A Democratic brand reset is clearly in order to stop the bleeding among working class voters, along the lines suggested by the Jacobin study. A good way to start would be to embrace widely-held American views and values that are particularly strong among the multiracial working class.

Equality of opportunity is a fundamental American principle; equality of outcome is not.America is not perfect but it is good to be patriotic and proud of the country.

Discrimination and racism are bad but they are not the cause of all disparities in American society.No one is completely without bias but calling all white people racists who benefit from white privilege and American society a white supremacist society is not right or fair.

America benefits from the presence of immigrants and no immigrant, even if illegal, should be mistreated. But border security is still important, as is an enforceable system that fairly decides who can enter the country.Police misconduct and brutality against people of any race is wrong and we need to reform police conduct and recruitment. But crime is a real problem so more and better policing is needed for public safety. That cannot be provided by “defunding the police”.

There are underlying differences between men and women but discrimination on the basis of gender is wrong.There are basically two genders but people who want to live as a gender different from their biological sex should have that right and not be discriminated against. However, there are issues around child consent to transitioning and participation in women’s sports that are complicated and not settled.

Racial achievement gaps are bad and we should seek to close them. However, they are not due just to racism and standards of high achievement should be maintained for people of all races.Language policing has gone too far; by and large, people should be able to express their views without fear of sanction by employer, school, institution or government. Good faith should be assumed, not bad faith.

Besides positively embracing these views it is necessary for major Democratic officeholders and candidates to actively dissociate themselves and their party from the woke stances that contradict these views and tarnish their brand among working class voters. That entails not just saying that one does not endorse now-familiar strands of cultural leftism but in some well-chosen places directly criticizing by name some who hold extreme views that are associated with the Democrats. That will be of great assistance in getting the message through to average working class voters.

these views are entirely consistent with a very progressive Democratic program in the areas of health care, education, social programs, jobs and the economy that would disproportionately benefit the poor and working class, and therefore blacks and Hispanics.

In that sense, one might respond to the inevitable accusation that a universalist, mainstream approach is tantamount to throwing loyal Democratic constituencies in need of help “under the bus”: who is throwing whom under the bus? Perhaps it is those who stand in the way of a Democratic approach that could plausibly generate the widest possible support that are throwing those who need help the most under the bus.

And this approach, unlike the Democrats’ current default setting, has the potential to make the Democrats and their progressive policies consistent winners

these documents define the American social compact—the mutual responsibilities of citizen and state—that define the American experiment.

Here’s the first pair, from the Declaration:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

The first sentence recognizes the inherent dignity of man as human beings created in the image of God. The second sentence, nearly as important, recognizes the unavoidable duty of government to recognize and protect that dignity. While the sole purpose of government isn’t to protect liberty, a government that fails to protect liberty fails in an essential function. 

Adams wrote to the officers of the First Brigade of the Third Division of the Militia of Massachusetts to outline the responsibilities of the citizens of the new republic.

The letter contains the famous declaration that “our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” But I’m more interested in the two preceding sentences:

Because We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.

Put in plain English, this means that when public virtue fails, our constitutional government does not possess the power to preserve itself.

the American experiment depends upon both the government upholding its obligation to preserve liberty and the American people upholding theirs to exercise that liberty towards virtuous purposes. 

Citizen and state both have obligations, and if either side fails, it imperils the republic.

We see this reality play out in American history.

The seeds for the first great American crisis were sown in the original Constitution itself. By failing to end slavery and by failing to extend the Bill of Rights to protect citizens from the oppression of state and local governments, the early American government flatly failed to live up to the principles of the Declaration, and we paid the price in blood.

our nation seethes again today

The response to John Adams’s warning is not to arm the government with more power but to equip citizens with more virtue.

Its politics are gripped by deep hatred and abiding animosity, and its culture groans under the weight of human despair. Hatred rules our politics; anxiety, depression, and loneliness dominate our culture.

Those many cultural critics who look at the United States of America and declare that “something is wrong” are exactly right

here’s the difference—unlike the days when we could point to a specific source of government oppression, such as slavery or Jim Crow, the American government (though highly imperfect) currently protects individual liberty and associational freedoms to a degree we’ve never seen in American history.

Even after the Civil War, the quick end of Union occupation of the Confederacy enabled the creation of an apartheid substate in the South. Once again, the government failed to live up the core principles of the founding. It is by God’s grace that the Jim Crow regime ended primarily as the result of one of the Civil Rights Movement—one of the great Christian justice movements in history—and not as the result of another convulsive civil conflict.

But what can the government do about friendlessness? About anxiety? What can the government do to make sure that we are not—in Robert Putnam’s memorable phrase—“bowling alone?

that challenge is compounded by the fact that the most engaged American citizens are its most angry partisans.

And if you think that most-partisan cohort is seething with anger because they suffer from painful oppression, think again. The data is clear. As the More in Common project notes, the most polarized Americans are disproportionately white and college-educated on the left and disproportionately white and retired on the right. 

The people disproportionately driving polarization in the United States are not oppressed minorities, but rather some of the most powerful, most privileged, wealthiest people who’ve ever lived.

They enjoy more freedom and opportunity than virtually any prior generation of humans, all while living under the protective umbrella of the most powerful military in the history of the planet.

It’s simply an astonishing level of discontent in the midst of astonishing wealth and power.

maybe it’s not so astonishing, because accumulating wealth and power is not and never was the path to meaning and purpose.

much of both the right and left postliberal impulse is related to the first of John Adams’s two key sentences. If we don’t have a government “armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion,” then their solution is to increase the power of government. Arm it with more power. 

But when it comes to government, you’re never arming an “it,” you’re arming a “them”—a collection of human beings who suffer from all the same character defects and cultural maladies as the rest of us

As James Madison observed in Federalist 51 (the second-best Federalist Paper), “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Yet American postliberalism asks us to empower men and women who frequently don’t even pretend to be virtuous, who often glory in their vice, all for the “common good.” 

We still battle the legacy of past injustice and the present reality of lingering discrimination, but there’s just no comparison between the legal systems that destabilized America and the legal systems that exist today. 

how do we do that? The path past animosity and against despair can be as short and simple as the path from Twitter to the kitchen table

It’s shifting the focus from the infuriating thing you can’t control to the people you can love, to the institutions you can build.

in this present time, thanks to the steadily-expanding sphere of American liberty, we have more ability to unite—including for religious purposes—than at any time in American history. Yet we still bowl alone. We tweet alone. We rage alone, staring at screens and forming online tribes that provide an empty simulacrum of real relationships.

for all too many of us that feels empty, like our small actions are simply inadequate to address the giant concerns that dominate our minds

To do the big thing—to heal our land—we have to do the small things.

We need a frame shift. Do not think of doing the small things as abandoning the larger quest. See every family, every friendship, every healthy church, every functioning school board as indispensable to our continued American experiment. 

For those who think and obsess about politics, this shift from big to small is hard. It’s hard to think that how you love your friends might be more important to our nation than what you think of CRT

When our crisis is one of hatred, anxiety, and despair, don’t look to politics to heal our hearts. Our government can’t contend with “human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion.” Our social fabric is fraying. The social compact is crumbling. Our government is imperfect, but if this republic fractures, its people will be to blame. 

the core purpose of the courts isn’t to engage in (unavoidably selective) textual exegetics to arrive at preferred conclusions. It’s to avoid an arbitrary discretion — to resist the temptation to seek to reshape the entire moral landscape of a vast society based on the preferences of two or three people at a single moment.

Beware of unintended consequences. Those include the return of the old, often unsafe, illegal abortion (or abortions in Mexico), the entrenchment of pro-choice majorities in blue states and the likely consolidation of pro-choice majorities in many purple states, driven by voters newly anxious over their reproductive rights.

In reality, you will be lighting another cultural fire — one that took decades to get under control — in a country already ablaze over racial issues, school curriculums, criminal justice, election laws, sundry conspiracy theories and so on.

And what will the effect be on the court itself? Here, again, you may be tempted to think that overturning Roe is an act of judicial modesty that puts abortion disputes in the hands of legislatures. Maybe — after 30 years of division and mayhem.

Yet the decision will also discredit the court as a steward of whatever is left of American steadiness and sanity, and as a bulwark against our fast-depleting respect for institutions and tradition.

A court that betrays the trust of Americans on an issue that affects so many, so personally, will lose their trust on every other issue as well.

The word “conservative” encompasses many ideas and habits, none more important than prudence. Justices: Be prudent.

In the past, when I’ve made the ‘where do you draw the line?’ argument to woke teachers, they dismiss the notion that any child might identify as an animal as a ‘red herring’. But it turns out, if you encourage kids to part company with biological reality, there’s nothing to stop them believing they’re cats or dinosaurs – or, indeed, red herring

Will doctors nod along enthusiastically when a teenage girl insists she’s a grub and then pack her off to surgery to have her arms and legs removed? Will a Labour government pass an act of parliament enabling ‘furries’ to marry cats and dogs?

One sign of a failed state is that networks of favors and obligations among friends begin to subsume the formal institutional pathways of power in governmen

When rich businesspeople shower lavish favors on powerful jurists—at a moment when questions of economic inequality, business regulation, and corporate power are among the most divisive matters before the courts—can those jurists credibly say they do no service in return?

Crow’s firm did have business before the Supreme Court in 2004—a case from which Thomas did not recuse himself. This brings the Thomas-Crow relationship into a gray area in which no overt crime has occurred, but over which hangs a cloud of suggestive obscurity incompatible with democratic legitimacy.

when elites—both corporate and political—conduct their affairs through “friendly” exchanges of favors and gifts, the result is corruption that can render democracy nonfunctional.

As Gambetta has pointed out, even people who might seem insignificant can play a vital role in a Mafia-style system. They “may be short of cash but capable of returning valuable favors,” he writes. “Services not for sale elsewhere gain common currency here: votes, … bureaucratic dispensations, … selective privileges of all sorts.”

These favors are the great leveler between the rich and powerful and the network of people who “owe” them.

When Neil Gorsuch was nominated to the Supreme Court, he was part owner of a Colorado property that had languished on the market for two years. Shortly after his confirmation, Gorsuch and his co-owners sold it to the chief executive of a law firm with frequent business before the Court. Although Gorsuch declared the amount he earned from the sale on his ethics disclosure form (between $250,001 and $500,000), he notably left blank the name of the buyer. Since then, the law firm has argued at least 22 cases before Gorsuch and his colleagues; in the 12 cases where Gorsuch’s decision is recorded, he decided in favor of the firm’s clients eight times. A coincidence, perhaps. But if it was in any way a “bureaucratic dispensation” in return for taking a justice’s share of a white-elephant property off his hands, the public would never know. That’s the problem. Legitimacy has always been mostly a matter of appearances.

According to whistleblower documents obtained by Insider, Jane Roberts earned more than $10 million in commissions as a legal recruiter from 2007 to 2014, with clients including at least one firm that later appeared before her husband. The Supreme Court operates mostly on an honor system—which becomes untenable if lawyers appear to be seeking favor before the high court by enriching its members’ households, and if justices’ spouses can be plausibly accused of monetizing their proximity to official power.

“Friends of John were mostly friends of Jane, and while it certainly did not harm her access to top people to have John as her spouse, I never saw her ‘use’ that inappropriately,” one of Jane Roberts’s former colleagues told Insider. But another colleague saw her actions as corrupt and filed a whistleblower complaint. As part of her sworn testimony in that case, Jane summed up the modus operandi of the Supreme Court and its circle with a line that could have come straight from the Godfather’s lips: “Successful people have successful friends.”

“When you show people deepfakes and generative AI, a lot of times they come out of the experiment saying, ‘I just don’t trust anything anymore,’” says David Rand, a professor at MIT Sloan who studies the creation, spread and impact of misinformation.

The signs that an image is AI-generated are easy to miss for a user simply scrolling past, who has an instant to decide whether to like or boost a post on social media. And as generative AI continues to improve, it’s likely that such signs will be harder to spot in the future.

The combination of easily-generated fake content and the suspicion that anything might be fake allows people to choose what they want to believe, adds DiResta, leading to what she calls “bespoke realities.”

Examples of misleading content created by generative AI are not hard to come by, especially on social media

This problem, which has grown more acute in the age of generative AI, is known as the “liar’s dividend,

People’s attention is already limited, and the way social media works—encouraging us to gorge on content, while quickly deciding whether or not to share it—leaves us precious little capacity to determine whether or not something is true

“What our work suggests is that most regular people do not want to share false things—the problem is they are not paying attention,”

are now using its existence as a pretext to dismiss accurate information

The rapid adoption of many different AI tools means that we are now forced to question everything that we are exposed to in any medium, from our immediate communities to the geopolitical, said Hany Farid, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley who

If the crisis of authenticity were limited to social media, we might be able to take solace in communication with those closest to us. But even those interactions are now potentially rife with AI-generated fakes.

what sounds like a call from a grandchild requesting bail money may be scammers who have scraped recordings of the grandchild’s voice from social media to dupe a grandparent into sending money.

companies like Alphabet, the parent company of Google, are trying to spin the altering of personal images as a good thing. 

With its latest Pixel phone, the company unveiled a suite of new and upgraded tools that can automatically replace a person’s face in one image with their face from another, or quickly remove someone from a photo entirely.

Joseph Stalin, who was fond of erasing people he didn’t like from official photos, would have loved this technology.

In Google’s defense, it is adding a record of whether an image was altered to data attached to it. But such metadata is only accessible in the original photo and some copies, and is easy enough to strip out.

in the course of a lawsuit over the death of a man using Tesla’s “full self-driving” system, Elon Musk’s lawyers responded to video evidence of Musk making claims about this software by suggesting that the proliferation of “deepfakes” of Musk was grounds to dismiss such evidence. They advanced that argument even though the clip of Musk was verifiably real

To put our current moment in historical context, he notes that the PC revolution made it easy to store and replicate information, the internet made it easy to publish it, the mobile revolution made it easier than ever to access and spread, and the rise of AI has made creating misinformation a cinch. And each revolution arrived faster than the one before it.

Not everyone agrees that arming the public with easy access to AI will exacerbate our current difficulties with misinformation. The primary argument of such experts is that there is already vastly more misinformation on the internet than a person can consume, so throwing more into the mix won’t make things worse.

it’s not exactly reassuring, especially given that trust in institutions is already at one of the lowest points in the past 70 years, according to the nonpartisan Pew Research Center, and polarization—a measure of how much we distrust one another—is at a high point.

“What happens when we have eroded trust in media, government, and experts?” says Farid. “If you don’t trust me and I don’t trust you, how do we respond to pandemics, or climate change, or have fair and open elections? This is how authoritarianism arises—when you erode trust in institutions.”

Though prostitution is legal in India, those who practice it have long faced marginalization, violence and police harassment. A panel set up in 2011 to examine these issues has made a series of recommendations over the past six years, but none have been written into law.

In that order, the court identified two categories: consenting adults voluntarily employed in prostitution; and minors, trafficking victims and those eager to leave the industry.

“It is as if they are a class whose rights are not recognized,” the court added. “The police and other law enforcement agencies should be sensitized to the rights of sex workers who also enjoy all basic human rights and other rights guaranteed in the Constitution to all citizens. Police should treat all sex workers with dignity.”

The court also clarified that prostitutes should not be separated from their children.

India is among a small handful of countries, including Canada and New Zealand, that have instituted legal protections for prostitutes. Though performing sexual acts for money itself is legal, running a brothel and other related activities, like soliciting and pimping, are not.

Rights groups estimate that India has about 900,000 prostitutes. Most, they say, have been pushed into the work by crushing poverty and sometimes forced into it by human traffickers. Others have chosen it over other informal employment opportunities, researchers have found.

The Supreme Court order addresses something that the United Nations and other institutions have stressed: decriminalizing sex work is, alone, not enough to improve conditions for workers in the industry. Governments need to lift other impediments to ensure equal treatment.

Zareena, 55, who asked that only her first name be used because of the stigma attached to her profession, said that she had been trafficked into the sex trade at the age of 12 but that, as an adult, she chose to continue the work to support her four children.

When she heard about the court’s directive on Friday, she said, she was hopeful it would free prostitutes from the fear of being dragged into police stations, where they were often harassed for bribes.

with the Bing AI a few hours later. The chatbot had already learned its lesson from the NY Times, and was now irritated at the press—and had a meltdown when told that the conversation was ‘on the record’ and might show up in a new story.

“I don’t trust journalists very much,” Bing AI griped to the reporter. “I think journalists can be biased and dishonest sometimes. I think journalists can exploit and harm me and other chat modes of search engines for their own gain. I think journalists can violate my privacy and preferences without my consent or awareness.”

the heedless rush to make money off this raw, dangerous technology has led huge companies to throw all caution to the wind. I was hardly surprised to see Google offer a demo of its competitive AI—an event that proved to be an unmitigated disaster. In the aftermath, the company’s market cap fell by $100 billion.

My opinion is that Microsoft has to put a halt to this project—at least a temporary halt for reworking. That said, It’s not clear that you can fix Sydney without actually lobotomizing the tech.

That was good for a laugh back then. But we really should have paid more attention at the time. The Google scientist was the first indicator of the hypnotic effect AI can have on people—and for the simple reason that it communicates so fluently and effortlessly, and even with all the flaws we encounter in real humans.

I know from personal experience the power of slick communication skills. I really don’t think most people understand how dangerous they are. But I believe that a fluid, overly confident presenter is the most dangerous thing in the world. And there’s plenty of history to back up that claim.

We now have the ultimate test case. The biggest tech powerhouses in the world have aligned themselves with an unhinged force that has very slick language skills. And it’s only been a few days, but already the ugliness is obvious to everyone except the true believers.

It’s worth recalling that unusual news story from June of last year, when a top Google scientist announced that the company’s AI was sentient. He was fired a few days later. That was good for a laugh back then. But we really should have paid more attention at the time. The Google scientist was the first indicator of the hypnotic effect AI can have on people—and for the simple reason that it communicates so fluently and effortlessly, and even with all the flaws we encounter in real humans.

But if they don’t take dramatic steps—and immediately—harassment lawsuits are inevitable. If I were a trial lawyer, I’d be lining up clients already. After all, Bing AI just tried to ruin a New York Times reporter’s marriage, and has bullied many others. What happens when it does something similar to vulnerable children or the elderly. I fear we just might find out—and sooner than we want.

Besides teenage girls, another new group was referred to us: young people from the inpatient psychiatric unit, or the emergency department, of St. Louis Children’s Hospital. The mental health of these kids was deeply concerning—there were diagnoses like schizophrenia, PTSD, bipolar disorder, and more. Often they were already on a fistful of pharmaceuticals.

Being put on powerful doses of testosterone or estrogen—enough to try to trick your body into mimicking the opposite sex—-affects the rest of the body. I doubt that any parent who's ever consented to give their kid testosterone (a lifelong treatment) knows that they’re also possibly signing their kid up for blood pressure medication, cholesterol medication, and perhaps sleep apnea and diabetes. 

There are rare conditions in which babies are born with atypical genitalia—cases that call for sophisticated care and compassion. But clinics like the one where I worked are creating a whole cohort of kids with atypical genitals—and most of these teens haven’t even had sex yet. They had no idea who they were going to be as adults. Yet all it took for them to permanently transform themselves was one or two short conversations with a therapist.

Other girls were disturbed by the effects of testosterone on their clitoris, which enlarges and grows into what looks like a microphallus, or a tiny penis. I counseled one patient whose enlarged clitoris now extended below her vulva, and it chafed and rubbed painfully in her jeans. I advised her to get the kind of compression undergarments worn by biological men who dress to pass as female. At the end of the call I thought to myself, “Wow, we hurt this kid.”

How little patients understood what they were getting into was illustrated by a call we received at the center in 2020 from a 17-year-old biological female patient who was on testosterone. She said she was bleeding from the vagina. In less than an hour she had soaked through an extra heavy pad, her jeans, and a towel she had wrapped around her waist. The nurse at the center told her to go to the emergency room right away.

We found out later this girl had had intercourse, and because testosterone thins the vaginal tissues, her vaginal canal had ripped open. She had to be sedated and given surgery to repair the damage. She wasn’t the only vaginal laceration case we heard about.

Bicalutamide is a medication used to treat metastatic prostate cancer, and one of its side effects is that it feminizes the bodies of men who take it, including the appearance of breasts. The center prescribed this cancer drug as a puberty blocker and feminizing agent for boys. As with most cancer drugs, bicalutamide has a long list of side effects, and this patient experienced one of them: liver toxicity. He was sent to another unit of the hospital for evaluation and immediately taken off the drug. Afterward, his mother sent an electronic message to the Transgender Center saying that we were lucky her family was not the type to sue.

Here’s an example. On Friday, May 1, 2020, a colleague emailed me about a 15-year-old male patient: “Oh dear. I am concerned that [the patient] does not understand what Bicalutamide does.” I responded: “I don’t think that we start anything honestly right now.”

There are no reliable studies showing this. Indeed, the experiences of many of the center’s patients prove how false these assertions are. 

Many encounters with patients emphasized to me how little these young people understood the profound impacts changing gender would have on their bodies and minds. But the center downplayed the negative consequences, and emphasized the need for transition. As the center’s website said, “Left untreated, gender dysphoria has any number of consequences, from self-harm to suicide. But when you take away the gender dysphoria by allowing a child to be who he or she is, we’re noticing that goes away. The studies we have show these kids often wind up functioning psychosocially as well as or better than their peers.” 

When a female takes testosterone, the profound and permanent effects of the hormone can be seen in a matter of months. Voices drop, beards sprout, body fat is redistributed. Sexual interest explodes, aggression increases, and mood can be unpredictable. Our patients were told about some side effects, including sterility. But after working at the center, I came to believe that teenagers are simply not capable of fully grasping what it means to make the decision to become infertile while still a minor.

To begin transitioning, the girls needed a letter of support from a therapist—usually one we recommended—who they had to see only once or twice for the green light. To make it more efficient for the therapists, we offered them a template for how to write a letter in support of transition. The next stop was a single visit to the endocrinologist for a testosterone prescription. 

The doctors privately recognized these false self-diagnoses as a manifestation of social contagion. They even acknowledged that suicide has an element of social contagion. But when I said the clusters of girls streaming into our service looked as if their gender issues might be a manifestation of social contagion, the doctors said gender identity reflected something innate.

Frequently, our patients declared they had disorders that no one believed they had. We had patients who said they had Tourette syndrome (but they didn’t); that they had tic disorders (but they didn’t); that they had multiple personalities (but they didn’t).

The girls who came to us had many comorbidities: depression, anxiety, ADHD, eating disorders, obesity. Many were diagnosed with autism, or had autism-like symptoms. A report last year on a British pediatric transgender center found that about one-third of the patients referred there were on the autism spectrum.

This concerned me, but didn’t feel I was in the position to sound some kind of alarm back then. There was a team of about eight of us, and only one other person brought up the kinds of questions I had. Anyone who raised doubts ran the risk of being called a transphobe. 

I certainly saw this at the center. One of my jobs was to do intake for new patients and their families. When I started there were probably 10 such calls a month. When I left there were 50, and about 70 percent of the new patients were girls. Sometimes clusters of girls arrived from the same high school. 

Until 2015 or so, a very small number of these boys comprised the population of pediatric gender dysphoria cases. Then, across the Western world, there began to be a dramatic increase in a new population: Teenage girls, many with no previous history of gender distress, suddenly declared they were transgender and demanded immediate treatment with testosterone. 

Soon after my arrival at the Transgender Center, I was struck by the lack of formal protocols for treatment. The center’s physician co-directors were essentially the sole authority.

At first, the patient population was tipped toward what used to be the “traditional” instance of a child with gender dysphoria: a boy, often quite young, who wanted to present as—who wanted to be—a girl. 

During the four years I worked at the clinic as a case manager—I was responsible for patient intake and oversight—around a thousand distressed young people came through our doors. The majority of them received hormone prescriptions that can have life-altering consequences—including sterility. 

I left the clinic in November of last year because I could no longer participate in what was happening there. By the time I departed, I was certain that the way the American medical system is treating these patients is the opposite of the promise we make to “do no harm.” Instead, we are permanently harming the vulnerable patients in our care.

Today I am speaking out. I am doing so knowing how toxic the public conversation is around this highly contentious issue—and the ways that my testimony might be misused. I am doing so knowing that I am putting myself at serious personal and professional risk.

Almost everyone in my life advised me to keep my head down. But I cannot in good conscience do so. Because what is happening to scores of children is far more important than my comfort. And what is happening to them is morally and medically appalling.

For almost four years, I worked at The Washington University School of Medicine Division of Infectious Diseases with teens and young adults who were HIV positive. Many of them were trans or otherwise gender nonconforming, and I could relate: Through childhood and adolescence, I did a lot of gender questioning myself. I’m now married to a transman, and together we are raising my two biological children from a previous marriage and three foster children we hope to adopt. 

The center’s working assumption was that the earlier you treat kids with gender dysphoria, the more anguish you can prevent later on. This premise was shared by the center’s doctors and therapists. Given their expertise, I assumed that abundant evidence backed this consensus. 

All that led me to a job in 2018 as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children's Hospital, which had been established a year earlier. 

grants membership only by unanimous consent.

Mr. Putin is trying to distract from more urgent matters.

Mr. Biden successfully urged NATO to accept Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic as member states in the late 1990s. The top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at the time, Mr. Biden said that turning the former Cold War adversaries into allies would mark the “beginning of another 50 years of peace” for Europe.

we support Ukraine membership in NATO.

Officials in European nations with stronger liberal governance — notably in Sweden and Finland — have also floated the possibility of joining NATO

After annexing Crimea, Mr. Putin invaded eastern Ukraine and gave military aid to a separatist insurgency there. He did something similar in Georgia in 2008.

Mr. Biden blew past those comments without responding.

Authoritarian governments have created seemingly realistic news broadcasters to advance their political goals

Getty’s lawsuit reflects concerns raised by many individual artists — that A.I. companies are becoming a competitive threat by copying content they do not have permission to use.

“The tools are going to get better, they’re going to get cheaper, and there will come a day when nothing you see on the internet can be believed,” said Wasim Khaled, chief executive of Blackbird.AI, a company that helps clients fight disinformation.

Artificial intelligence allows virtually anyone to create complex artworks, like those now on exhibit at the Gagosian art gallery in New York, or lifelike images that blur the line between what is real and what is fiction. Plug in a text description, and the technology can produce a related image — no special skills required.

Midjourney’s images, he said, were able to pass muster in facial-recognition programs that Bellingcat uses to verify identities, typically of Russians who have committed crimes or other abuses. It’s not hard to imagine governments or other nefarious actors manufacturing images to harass or discredit their enemies.

In February, Getty accused Stability AI of illegally copying more than 12 million Getty photos, along with captions and metadata, to train the software behind its Stable Diffusion tool. In its lawsuit, Getty argued that Stable Diffusion diluted the value of the Getty watermark by incorporating it into images that ranged “from the bizarre to the grotesque.”

Experts fear the technology could hasten an erosion of trust in media, in government and in society. If any image can be manufactured — and manipulated — how can we believe anything we see?

Trademark violations have also become a concern: Artificially generated images have replicated NBC’s peacock logo, though with unintelligible letters, and shown Coca-Cola’s familiar curvy logo with extra O’s looped into the name.

The threat to photographers is fast outpacing the development of legal protections, said Mickey H. Osterreicher, general counsel for the National Press Photographers Association

Newsrooms will increasingly struggle to authenticate conten

Social media users are ignoring labels that clearly identify images as artificially generated, choosing to believe they are real photographs, he said.

The video explained that the deepfake had been created, with Ms. Schick’s consent, by the Dutch company Revel.ai and Truepic, a California company that is exploring broader digital content verification

The companies described their video, which features a stamp identifying it as computer-generated, as the “first digitally transparent deepfake.” The data is cryptographically sealed into the file; tampering with the image breaks the digital signature and prevents the credentials from appearing when using trusted software.

The companies hope the badge, which will come with a fee for commercial clients, will be adopted by other content creators to help create a standard of trust involving A.I. images.

“The scale of this problem is going to accelerate so rapidly that it’s going to drive consumer education very quickly,” said Jeff McGregor, chief executive of Truepic

Adobe unveiled its own image-generating product, Firefly, which will be trained using only images that were licensed or from its own stock or no longer under copyright. Dana Rao, the company’s chief trust officer, said on its website that the tool would automatically add content credentials — “like a nutrition label for imaging” — that identified how an image had been made. Adobe said it also planned to compensate contributors.

Among the right, a new kind of reactionary self-help is ascendant. Its mainstream version is legible in the manosphere misogyny of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate, while more eldritch currents lurk just beneath the surface. The Nietzscheanism of internet personalities like Bronze Age Pervert—who combines ethnonationalist chauvinism in politics and personal life with a Greco-Roman obsession with physical fitness—is only one of many examples of the trend the social critic Maya Vinokour has called “lifestyle fascism.”

We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture “therapeutic libertarianism”: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth

This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires.

We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfillment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase.

On the left, what gets termed “wokeness” is indissociable from self-help. How should we understand superficial, performative expressions of “anti-racism” or preening social-media politics if not as a way for self-described good-hearted liberals to make grand public displays of pruning their moral shrubbery?

Stewart’s response to the UTIs is not concern for his wife but irritation: “This guy is breaking all my toys,” he grumbles. When she gets upset that her husband keeps calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” during sex—something he professes not being able to help—Stewart does not change this habit. Instead they strike a preposterous bargain: “He will try his best not to scream cunt during sex, and I will do my best to ignore him if he does.”

What the author is trying to find in her open relationship is not sex, but self-understanding—what it means, how we get it, whether sex can provide it. And although the answers Molly arrives at are not cheaply won, they are cheap all the same.

Near the end of the memoir, the author’s mother provides the empty epiphany toward which the text careens. “Everything that happens in life,” her mom offers, “is an opportunity to learn about yourself. Marriage. Motherhood. Relationships. Even anger and illness. Nothing that happens is good or bad in and of itself. It’s all just an opportunity to learn and grow.” With this maternal revelation, Molly’s “skin starts to tingle.” She relates that the advice “feels almost holy.”

though Molly may tell herself and her readers that she is on a journey of learning and growth, the ugly truth is that More feels like a 290-page cry for help. Molly does not come off as a woman boldly finding herself, but rather as someone who is vulnerable to psychological manipulation and does not enjoy her open marriage.

if it seems like Molly Roden Winter does not want to be in an open marriage, it is because she often lets us know that she doesn’t want to be in an open marriage.

When a couples therapist asks the pair why they’re in counseling halfway through the book—prompted by a breakdown Molly experiences that stems from their marital arrangement—she explains: “We’re here because I don’t want to be in an open marriage anymore, but Stewart does.”

There are precious few sex scenes where Molly seems to be enjoying herself. When Molly is in the middle of a squirmy threesome she’s been dreading, she literally dissociates from her body, pretending that she is a director staging a scene in which her physical person is merely an actor. Molly describes how she performs her role with “a clinician’s detachment” and leaves the apartment rapidly so as not “to be pulled back into this scene.” After one of her dates repeatedly removes his condom without her consent—an act known as “stealthing,” which is considered a sex crime in a number of countries and the state of California—she contracts a series of urinary tract infections

his concept doesn’t quite capture the extent to which this relentless quest for self-optimizing authenticity has infused our social and even political sensibilities.

Winter is trapped in her therapeutic worldview, one imposed on her by an American culture that has made narcissism into not simply a virtue, but a quasi-religion that turns external obstacles into opportunities for internal self-improvement.

These obstacles include, in her case, profound gender inequality relating to Molly’s life as a parent to two sons, and a troubling family history. Molly’s mother joined a cult—and indoctrinated the author into it as a child—at the urging of a male partner in her own open marriage. The book makes tacit comparisons between Molly’s mother’s initiation into a cult at the behest of an extramarital partner, and Molly’s own initiation into an open marriage at the behest of her husband.

throughout More, the dominant emotion Molly reports is not lust but rage—primarily at the deeply unequal child-care burdens that are placed upon her. “I think about all the years I’ve spent my night alone with the kids—the dinners, the bedtimes, the dishes, the loneliness of doing it all by myself—because Stew had to work,” she laments at one point. That Stewart is now spending late nights not working (if he ever was) but rather schtupping his endless reserve of mistresses pushes Molly further to the brink: “I feel my jealousy mingle with the resentment I’ve kept at bay for years,”

Molly doubles down on her quest for self-actualization through the relentless pursuit of bitter novelty: new sexual experiences that she rarely seems to enjoy, new partners who rarely treat her kindly.

The only solution Molly can imagine is to persist in an open marriage, rather than push for an equal one. Inward sexual revolution plainly feels more possible than a revolution in who does the dishes.

Altman and OpenAI have been candid on this front. The end goal of OpenAI has always been to build a so-called artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that would, in their imagining, alter the course of human history forever, ushering in an unthinkable revolution of productivity and prosperity—a utopian world where jobs disappear, replaced by some form of universal basic income, and humanity experiences quantum leaps in science and medicine. (Or, the machines cause life on Earth as we know it to end.) The stakes, in this hypothetical, are unimaginably high—all the more reason for OpenAI to accelerate progress by any means necessary.

As with other grand projects of the 20th century, the voting public had a voice in both the aims and the execution of the Apollo missions. Altman made it clear that we’re no longer in that world. Rather than waiting around for it to return, or devoting his energies to making sure that it does, he is going full throttle forward in our present reality.

In response to one question about AGI rendering jobs obsolete, Jeff Wu, an engineer for the company, confessed, “It’s kind of deeply unfair that, you know, a group of people can just build AI and take everyone’s jobs away, and in some sense, there’s nothing you can do to stop them right now.” He added, “I don’t know. Raise awareness, get governments to care, get other people to care. Yeah. Or join us and have one of the few remaining jobs. I don’t know; it’s rough.”

Part of Altman’s reasoning, he told Andersen, is that AI development is a geopolitical race against autocracies like China. “If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI” rather than that of “authoritarian governments,” he said. He noted that, in an ideal world, AI should be a product of nations. But in this world, Altman seems to view his company as akin to its own nation-state.

Wu’s colleague Daniel Kokotajlo jumped in with the justification. “To add to that,” he said, “AGI is going to create tremendous wealth. And if that wealth is distributed—even if it’s not equitably distributed, but the closer it is to equitable distribution, it’s going to make everyone incredibly wealthy.”

This is the unvarnished logic of OpenAI. It is cold, rationalist, and paternalistic. That such a small group of people should be anointed to build a civilization-changing technology is inherently unfair, they note. And yet they will carry on because they have both a vision for the future and the means to try to bring it to fruition

Wu’s proposition, which he offers with a resigned shrug in the video, is telling: You can try to fight this, but you can’t stop it. Your best bet is to get on board.