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“You basically have Republican primary candidates trying to explain to Republican primary voters that they are going to be on their side when it comes to the cultural cold civil war that’s being fought right now,”

Within hours after the Texas shooting, shaken Democrats in Washington vowed to try again to pursue a compromise with Republicans on gun legislation that could move through the divided Senate. But the challenges were immediately evident, and Democratic outrage and frustration were palpable.

How or whether the Texas school shooting, the deadliest since Sandy Hook, will change the midterm election landscape remains unclear.

Ads for Josh Mandel, the former Ohio treasurer who lost the Republican primary for Senate, used the tagline “Pro-God, pro-gun, pro-Trump.”

“Babies, borders, bullets”

In New York, Representative Thomas Suozzi, who is waging a long-shot primary campaign against Gov. Kathy Hochul, is highlighting her support years ago from the National Rifle Association. For her part, a Hochul ad cites her work “cracking down on illegal guns to make our neighborhoods safer.”

On the campaign trail, though, Mr. Fetterman has faced scrutiny over a 2013 incident in which, as mayor of Braddock, Pa., he brandished a shotgun to stop and detain an unarmed Black jogger, telling police he had heard gunshots. He has declined to apologize or say he did anything wrong.

“We are exhausted,” she continued, “because we cannot continue to be the only country in the world where we let this happen again and again and again.”

‘even in a pandemic, the Constitution cannot be put away and forgotten.’"

The original lawsuit was brought by a group of 35 Navy SEALs and other Navy Special Warfare personnel. A lower court had granted a preliminary injunction to block the Pentagon from enforcing its vaccination policy.

he Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives is also assisting on scene, the ATF Dallas Field Division said on Twitter. "What happened today in Tulsa is a senseless act of violence and hatred," Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt wrote on Twitter. "I am grateful for the quick and brave actions of the Tulsa Police Department and other first responders who did their best to contain a terrible situation."

Debra Proctor was in another building on the hospital campus for a doctor's appointment when she heard police sirens ringing out. When she stepped outside, first responders were lined up everywhere, she told CNN. Proctor, who has been a registered nurse for more than four decades, said it was a "shocking" scene."Police were everywhere in the parking lot, up and down the surrounding blocks," Proctor said. "They were still arriving when I was leaving."Kalen Davis, a lifelong Tulsa resident, was waiting in traffic around 5 p.m. local time when she saw multiple police cars responding to the scene.

Police later received information that the shooter may have left a bomb in a residence in Muskogee, Oklahoma, Muskogee police said Wednesday night. The home was searched by a bomb squad and no explosives were found, CBS Tulsa affiliate KOTV reported, citing Muskogee Police. Surrounding homes were either evacuated or residents were told to shelter in place.Muskogee is located about 50 miles southeast of Tulsa.Tulsa police asked family and friends of the victims and survivors to go to Memorial High School, a block from the hospital campus, to wait to learn the fate of the people at the shooting scene, KOTV said.  

Hodges said she was in lockdown for just under two hours.Another employee wondered out loud, "What's going on with the world these days?" A witness observed, "I mean, it's a doctor's office, like, you can't go nowhere no more without something happening. I's just crazy."

who got the future most right? For the truth is that dystopia is now, not in some future date.

Science fiction provides us with a large sample of imagined discontinuities that might not occur if we only looked backwards.

Fahrenheit 451 (published in 1953 but set in 1999) describes an illiberal America where books are banned and the job of firemen is to burn them. (Though the novel is sometimes interpreted as a critique of McCarthyism, Bradbury’s real message was that the preference of ordinary people for the vacuous entertainment of TV and the willingness of religious minorities to demand censorship together posed a creeping threat to the book as a form for serious content.)

In a remarkable letter written in October 1949, Aldous Huxley — who had been Orwell’s French teacher at Eton — warned him that he was capturing his own present rather than the likely future. ‘The philosophy of the ruling minority in Nineteen Eighty-Four,’ Huxley wrote, ‘is a sadism which has been carried to its logical conclusion… Whether in actual fact the policy of the boot-on-the-face can go on indefinitely seems doubtful. My own belief is that the ruling oligarchy will find less arduous and wasteful ways of governing and of satisfying its lust for power, and these ways will resemble those which I described in Brave New World’. Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) is a very different dystopia. Citizens submit to a caste system, conditioned to be content with physical pleasure. Self-medication (‘soma’), constant entertainment (the ‘feelies’), regular holidays and ubiquitous sexual titillation are the basis for mass compliance. Censorship and propaganda play a part, but overt coercion is rarely visible. The West today seems more Huxley than Orwell: a world more of corporate distraction than state brutality.

Yet none of these authors truly foresaw our networked world, which has combined the rising technological acceleration with a slackening of progress in other areas, such as nuclear energy, and a degeneration of governance. The real prophets are less known figures, like John Brunner, whose Stand on Zanzibar (1968) is set at a time — 2010 — when population pressure has caused social division and political extremism. Despite the threat of terrorism, US corporations are booming, thanks to a supercomputer. China is America’s new rival. Europe has united. Brunner envisaged affirmative action, genetic engineering, Viagra, Detroit’s collapse, satellite TV, in-flight video, gay marriage, laser printing, electric cars, the decriminalisation of marijuana and the decline of tobacco. There’s even a progressive president (albeit of the Africa state of Beninia, not America) named ‘Obomi’

With comparable prescience, William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) anticipates the world wide web and AI. Opening in the dystopian Japanese underworld of Chiba City, it imagines a global computer network in cyberspace called the ‘matrix’. Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), which was especially popular among Facebook employees in the company’s early years, foresaw corporate overreach and virtual reality in an almost anarchic America. The state has withered away in California; everything has been privatised. Most people spend half their time in virtual reality, where their avatars have more fun than they themselves do in the real world. Meanwhile, flotillas of refugees approach via the Pacific. These cyberpunk Americas are much closer to the US in 2021 than the fascist dystopias of Lewis, Atwood or Roth.

Orwell and Huxley — have been outflanked when it comes to making sense of today’s totalitarian countries

Take China, which better resembles Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We: a book written in 1921, but suppressed by the Bolsheviks. It is set in a future ‘One State’ led by ‘the Benefactor’, where the ‘ciphers’ — who have numbers, not names, and wear standardised ‘unifs’ — are under constant surveillance. All apartments are made of glass, with curtains that can be drawn only when one is having state-licensed sex. Faced with insurrection, the omnipotent Benefactor orders the mass lobotomisation of ciphers, as the only way to preserve universal happiness is to abolish the imagination.

Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years (2009) — which is banned in China. In this story, tap water is laced with drugs that render people docile, but at a cost. The month of February 2011 has been removed from public records and popular memory. This was when drastic emergency measures were introduced to stabilise the Chinese economy and assert China’s primacy in east Asia. Chan is one of a number of recent Chinese authors who have envisioned the decline of America, the corollary of China’s rise. The Fat Years is set in an imagined 2013, after a second western financial crisis makes China the world’s no. 1 economy.

Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2006), a Chinese nanotechnology expert and a Beijing cop lead the global defence against an alien invasion that’s the fault of a misanthropic Chinese physicist.

The global financial crisis and the coronavirus pandemic alike deepen the need for the U.S. government to play a more constructive role in the modern economy

My students’ concern is that business leaders, like many economists, are too removed from the lives of people and communities affected by forces of change and companies’ actions

That executives would focus on general business and economic concerns is neither surprising nor bad. But some business leaders come across as proverbial “anywheres”—geographically mobile economic actors untethered to actual people and places—rather than “somewheres,” who are rooted in real communities.

As my Columbia economics colleague Edmund Phelps, another Nobel laureate, has emphasized, the goal of the economic system Smith described is not just higher incomes on average, but mass flourishing.

The Business Roundtable and the Chamber of Commerce should strongly support federally funded basic research that shifts the scientific and technological frontier and applied-research centers that spread the benefits of those advances throughout the economy.

After World War II, American business groups understood that the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe would benefit the United States diplomatically and commercially. They should similarly champion high-impact investment at home now.

the U.S. as a whole should do more to help people compete in the changing economy—by offering block grants to community colleges, creating individualized reemployment accounts to support reentry into work, and enhancing support for lower-wage, entry-level work more generally through an expanded version of the earned-income tax credit.

These proposals are not cheap, but they are much less costly and more tightly focused on helping individuals adapt than the social-spending increases being championed in Biden’s Build Back Better legislation

It is action in service of change, not information in service of outrage.

“The people thinking strategically about how to win the 2022 election are the ones doing the most for democracy,” said Daniel Ziblatt, a political scientist at Harvard and one of the authors of “How Democracies Die.”

“I’ve heard people saying bridges don’t save democracy — voting rights do. But for Democrats to be in a position to protect democracy, they need bigger majorities.”

There are people working on a Plan B

He spends his days obsessing over mayoral races in 20,000-person towns, because those mayors appoint the city clerks who decide whether to pull the drop boxes for mail-in ballots and small changes to electoral administration could be the difference between winning Senator Ron Johnson’s seat in 2022 (and having a chance at democracy reform) and losing the race and the Senate. Wikler is organizing volunteers to staff phone banks to recruit people who believe in democracy to serve as municipal poll workers, because Steve Bannon has made it his mission to recruit people who don’t believe in democracy t

The difference between those organizing at the local level to shape democracy and those raging ineffectually about democratic backsliding — myself included — reminds me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.

“We do not have one federal election,” said Amanda Litman, a co-founder of Run for Something, which helps first-time candidates learn about the offices they can contest and helps them mount their campaigns. “We have 50 state elections and then thousands of county elections. And each of those ladder up to give us results.

While Congress can write, in some ways, rules or boundaries for how elections are administered, state legislatures are making decisions about who can and can’t vote. Counties and towns are making decisions about how much money they’re spending, what technology they’re using, the rules around which candidates can participate.”

Protecting democracy by supporting county supervisors or small-town mayors — particularly ones who fit the politics of more conservative communities — can feel like being diagnosed with heart failure and being told the best thing to do is to double-check your tax returns and those of all your neighbors.

These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20 percent. That means people who actually engage have a superpower. You, as a single dedicated volunteer, might be able to call and knock on the doors of enough voters to win a local election.”

“One thing I was really struck by when I first started getting involved in politics is how much power there is in just showing up to things,” she said. “If you love libraries, libraries have board meetings. Go to the public meeting. See where they’re spending their money. We’re supposed to be participating. If you want to get involved, there’s always a way.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If Russia's military escalates the crisis, diplomats and foreign policy analysts say diplomacy and action at the United Nations is likely to mirror what happened in 2014 after Russia annexed Ukraine's Crimea region.

So far, Western diplomacy at the United Nations during the latest military build-up has largely focused on trying to rally support - should they need it - among U.N. members by accusing Russia of undermining the U.N. Charter.

The wisdom of many is better than the wisdom of megalomaniacs. In any system, one essential trait is: How does information flow? In democracies, policymaking is usually done more or less in public, and there are thousands of experts offering facts and opinions

People want their biggest life. Human beings these days want to have full, rich lives and make the most of their potential. The liberal ideal is that people should be left as free as possible to construct their own ideal. Autocracies restrict freedom for the sake of order.

To me, the lesson is that even when we’re confronting so-far successful autocracies like China, we should learn to be patient and trust our liberal democratic system.

They don’t hire the smartest and best people. Such people might be threatening. They hire the dimmest and the most mediocre. You get a government of third-raters.

Ethnonationalism self-inebriates. Everybody worships something. In a liberal democracy, worship of the nation (which is particular) is balanced by the love of liberal ideals (which are universal). With the demise of communism, authoritarianism lost a major source of universal values. National glory is pursued with intoxicating fundamentalism.

Government against the people is a recipe for decline. Democratic leaders, at least in theory, serve their constituents. Autocratic leaders, in practice, serve their own regime and longevity, even if it means neglecting their people.

Organization man turns into gangster man. People rise through autocracies by ruthlessly serving the organization, the bureaucracy. That ruthlessness makes them aware others may be more ruthless and manipulative, so they become paranoid and despotic

When we are confronting imperial aggressors like Putin, we should trust the ways we are responding now. If we steadily, patiently and remorselessly ramp up the economic, technological and political pressure, the weaknesses inherent in the regime will grow and grow.

In effect, Turkey’s enforcement of Montreux blocks Russia from reinforcing its Black Sea fleet from outside, or from moving warships now in the Black Sea back into the Mediterranean.

“These provisions don’t change much of the balance of power in the Black Sea,” Sinan Ulgen told CNBC. The former Turkish diplomat is now a visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe.

Turkey is attempting to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine and hasn’t imposed sanctions on Russia.

But Turkey is a member of NATO.

“We could witness a scenario,” he said, “where Russia claims that the war is over, but the international community and Turkey not recognize that.”

Though Sweden and Finland want to join their Nordic

neighbors in NATO,

admission

could take many months or be blocked entirely.

that would be on par with what we experience with flu viruses, which scientists estimate hit us about every two to five years, less often in adulthood. It also matches up well with the documented cadence of the four other coronaviruses that seasonally trouble humans, and cause common colds.

For now, every infection, and every subsequent reinfection, remains a toss of the dice. “Really, it’s a gamble,” says Ziyad Al-Aly, a clinical epidemiologist and long-COVID researcher at Washington University in St. Louis. Vaccination and infection-induced immunity may load the dice against landing on severe disease, but that danger will never go away completely, and scientists don’t yet know what happens to people who contract “mild” COVID over and over again

Or maybe not. This virus seems capable of tangling into just about every tissue in the body, affecting organs such as the heart, brain, liver, kidneys, and gut; it has already claimed the lives of millions, while saddling countless others with symptoms that can linger for months or years.

considering our current baseline, “less dangerous” could still be terrible—and it’s not clear exactly where we’re headed. When it comes to reinfection, we “just don’t know enough,”

Perhaps, as several experts have posited since the pandemic’s early days, SARS-CoV-2 will just become the fifth cold-causing coronavirus.

A third or fourth bout might be more muted still; the burden of individual diseases may be headed toward an asymptote of mildness that holds for many years

Future versions of SARS-CoV-2 could continue to shape-shift out of existing antibodies’ reach, as coronaviruses often do. But the body is flush with other fighters that are much tougher to bamboozle—among them, B cells and T cells that can quash a growing infection before it spirals out of control

Those protections tend to build iteratively, as people see pathogens or vaccines more often. People vaccinated three times over, for instance, seem especially well equipped to duke it out with all sorts of SARS-CoV-2 variants, including Omicron and its offshoots.

promising patterns: Second infections and post-vaccination infections “are significantly less severe,” she told me, sometimes to the point where people don’t notice them at all

Bodies, wised up to the virus’s quirks, can now react more quickly, clobbering it with sharper and speedier strikes.

“There are still very good reasons” to keep exposures few and far between, Landon, of the University of Chicago, told me. Putting off reinfection creates fewer opportunities for harm: The dice are less likely to land on severe disease (or chronic illness) when they’re rolled less often overall. It also buys us time to enhance our understanding of the virus, and improve our tools to fight it.

Immunity, though, is neither binary nor permanent. Even if SARS-CoV-2’s assaults are blunted over time, there are no guarantees about the degree to which that happens, or how long it lasts.

A slew of factors could end up weighting the dice toward severe disease—among them, a person’s genetics, age, underlying medical conditions, health-care access, and frequency or magnitude of exposure to the virus.

for everyone else, no amount of viral dampening can totally eliminate the chance, however small it may be, of getting very sick.

Long COVID, too, might remain a possibility with every discrete bout of illness. Or maybe the effects of a slow-but-steady trickle of minor, fast-resolving infections would sum together, and bring about the condition.

Every time the body’s defenses are engaged, it “takes a lot of energy, and causes tissue damage,” Thomas told me. Should that become a near-constant barrage, “that’s probably not great for you.”

Bodies are resilient, especially when they’re offered time to rest, and she doubts that reinfection with a typically ephemeral virus such as SARS-CoV-2 would cause mounting damage. “The cumulative effect is more likely to be protective than detrimental,” she said, because of the immunity that’s laid down each time.

people who have caught the virus twice or thrice may be more likely to become long-haulers than those who have had it just once.

Some other microbes, when they reinvade us, can fire up the immune system in unhelpful ways, driving bad bouts of inflammation that burn through the body, or duping certain defensive molecules into aiding, rather than blocking, the virus’s siege. Researchers don’t think SARS-CoV-2 will do the same. But this pathogen is “much more formidable than even someone working on coronaviruses would have expected,

Seasonal encounters with pathogens other than SARS-CoV-2 don’t often worry us—but perhaps that’s because we’re still working to understand their toll. “Have we been underestimating long-term consequences from other repeat infections?” Thomas said. “The answer is probably, almost certainly, yes.”

the rhythm of reinfection isn’t just about the durability of immunity or the pace of viral evolution. It’s also about our actions and policies, and whether they allow the pathogen to transmit and evolve. Strategies to avoid infection—to make it as infrequent as possible, for as many people as possible—remain options, in the form of vaccination, masking, ventilation, paid sick leave, and more.

Gordon and Swartz are both hopeful that the slow accumulation of immunity will also slash people’s chances of developing long COVID.

The outlooks of the experts I spoke with spanned the range from optimism to pessimism, though all agreed that uncertainty loomed. Until we know more, none were keen to gamble with the virus—or with their own health. Any reinfection will likely still pose a threat, “even if it’s not the worst-case scenario,” Abdool Karim told me. “I wouldn’t want to put myself in that position.”

ALL THREE REPORTS INCLUDE quintessentially Trumpian scenes, consistent in their depictions of the former president’s methods, and very much in keeping with numerous journalistic accounts of how he sought to manipulate people, rules and institutions.

The three investigations tell different stories, but the misdeeds all run together, more overlapping than sequential

Still, each investigation offers a slightly different theory of Trump. In the Mueller report, Trump and his aides come across as the gang that can’t cheat straight — too haphazard to effectively coordinate with a foreign government, too ignorant of campaign finance laws to purposely violate them, often comically naïve about the gravity of their plight.

The Ukraine report, by contrast, regards Trump as more strategic than chaotic, and it does not wallow in the netherworld between the president’s personal benefit and his public service. “The president placed his own personal and political interests above the national interests of the United States, sought to undermine the integrity of the U.S. presidential election process, and endangered U.S. national security,”

All three reports show Trump deploying the mechanisms of government for political gain.

The Mueller report argues that viewing the president’s “acts collectively can help to illuminate their significance.” The Ukraine report shows that the conversation that Trump described as “a perfect call” was not the ask; it was the confirmation. When Trump said, “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” Zelensky and his aides had already been notified of what was coming. The Ukraine scandal was never about a single call, just as the Jan. 6 report was not about a single day.

The Jan. 6 report takes seriously the admonition to view the president’s actions collectively, not individually; the phrase “multipart plan” appears throughout the report, with Trump as the architect.

Even more so than the Ukraine report, the Jan. 6 report repeatedly emphasizes how Trump knew, well, everything

There is no room here for the plausible deniability that the Mueller report entertained, for the notion that Trump didn’t know better, or that, in the immortal words of Attorney General William P. Barr when he creatively interpreted the Mueller report to exonerate Trump of obstruction of justice, that the president was “frustrated and angered by his sincere belief that the investigation was undermining his presidency.”

This alleged sincerity underscored the president’s “noncorrupt motives,” as Barr put it. In the Jan. 6 report, any case for Trumpian sincerity is eviscerated in a six-page chart in the executive summary, which catalogs the many times the president was informed of the facts of the election yet continued to lie about them. “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen,” Trump told top Department of Justice officials in late December 2020, the report says.

Just announce an investigation into the Bidens. Just say the 2020 election was rigged. Trump’s most corrupt action is always the corruption of reality.

The studious restraint of the Mueller report came in for much criticism once the special counsel failed to deliver a dagger to the heart of the Trump presidency and once the document was so easily miscast by interested parties

for all its diffidence, there is power in the document’s understated prose, in its methodical collection of evidence, in its unwillingness to overstep its bounds while investigating a president who knew few bounds himself.

The Ukraine and Jan. 6 reports came at a time when Trump’s misconduct was better understood, when Mueller-like restraint was less in fashion and when those attempting to hold the chief executive accountable grasped every tool at hand. For all their passion and bluntness, they encountered their own constraints, limits that are probably inherent to the form

While most editors recognize the importance of criticism in helping readers decipher contemporary art, and the multibillion-dollar industry it has created, venues for such writing are shrinking. Over the years, newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Miami Herald have trimmed critics’ jobs.

In December, the Penske Media Corporation announced that it had acquired Artforum, a contemporary art journal, and was bringing the title under the same ownership as its two competitors, ARTnews and Art in America. Its sister publication, Bookforum, was not acquired and ceased operations. Through the pandemic, other outlets have shuttered, including popular blogs run by SFMOMA and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis as well as smaller magazines called Astra and Elephant.

(National newspapers with art critics on staff include The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The Washington Post. )

David Velasco, editor in chief of Artforum, said in an interview that he hoped the magazine’s acquisition would improve the publication’s financial picture. The magazine runs nearly 700 reviews a year, Velasco said; about half of those run online and pay $50 for roughly 250 words. “Nobody I know who knows about art does it for the money,” Velasco said, “but I would love to arrive at a point where people could.”

Noah Dillon, who was on the AICA-USA board until he resigned last year, has been reluctant to recommend that anyone follow his path to become a critic. Not that they could. The graduate program in art writing that he attended at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan also closed during the pandemic.

“It’s crazy that the ideal job nowadays is producing catalog essays for galleries, which are basically just sales pitches,” Dillon said in a phone interview. “Critical thinking about art is not valued financially.”

Large galleries — including Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, and Pace Gallery — now produce their own publications with interviews and articles sometimes written by the same freelance critics who simultaneously moonlight as curators and marketers. Within its membership, AICA-USA has a number of writers who belong to all three categories.

According to Lilly Wei, a longtime AICA-USA board member who recently resigned, the group explored different ways of protecting writers in the industry. There were unrealized plans of turning the organization into a union; others hoped to create a permanent emergency fund to keep financially struggling critics afloat. She said the organization has instead canceled initiatives, including an awards program for the best exhibitions across the country.

“It just came down to not having enough money,” said Terence Trouillot, a senior editor at Frieze, a contemporary art magazine . He spent nearly three years on the AICA-USA board, resigning in 2022. He said that initiatives to re-energize the group “were just moving too slowly.”

The organization has yearly dues of $115 and provides free access to many museums. But some members complained that the fee was too expensive for young critics, yet not enough to support significant programming.

Efforts to revive AICA-USA are continuing. In January, Jasmine Amussen joined the organization’s board to help rethink the meaning of criticism for a younger generation.

Amussen, 33, is the editor of Burnaway, which focuses on criticism in the American South and often features young Black artists. (The magazine started in 2008 in response to layoffs at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s culture section and now runs as a nonprofit with four full-time employees and a budget that mostly consists of grants.)

They coexisted in Europe for thousands of years, apparently trading tools and sharing cultures. Some groups survived the Ice Age, while others vanished,

when farmers arrived in Europe about 8,000 years ago, they encountered the descendants of this long history, with light-skinned, dark-eyed people to the east, and possibly dark-skinned and blue-eyed people to the west.

“We lack still an understanding of why these movements were triggered. What happened here, why it happened — it’s strange.”

Modern humans arose in Africa and expanded to other continents about 60,000 years ago

These early Europeans have almost no genetic link to younger remains of hunter-gatherers. It appears that the first modern humans in Europe may have disappeared along with the Neanderthals

he oldest DNA of modern humans in Europe, dating back 45,000 years, undermines such a simple story. It comes from people who belonged to a lost branch of the human family tree. Their ancestors were part of the expansion out of Africa, but they split off on their own before the ancestors of living Europeans and Asians split apart.

About 33,000 years ago, as the climate turned cold, a new culture called the Gravettian arose across Europe. Gravettian hunters made spears to kill woolly mammoths and other big game. They also made so-called Venus figurines that might have represented fertility.

When the glaciers retreated, some descendants of the Fournol continued living in Iberia. But others expanded north as a new population, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called GoyetQ2. “It really seems like a peopling of Europe after the last glacial maximum,

Dr. Posth and his colleagues found DNA in Gravettian remains scattered across Europe. The scientists had expected all of the individuals to have come from the same genetic population, but instead found two distinct groups: one in France and Spain, and another in Italy, the Czech Republic and Germany.

“They were very distinct, and this was a very big surprise to us because they practiced the same archaeological culture,”

Dr. Posth and his colleagues named the western population the Fournol people, and found a genetic link between this group and 35,000-year-old Aurignacian remains in Belgium.

They called the eastern group Vestonice, and discovered that they share an ancestry with 34,000-year-old hunter-gatherers who lived in Russia.

That genetic gulf led Dr. Posth and his colleagues to argue that the Fournol and Vestonice belonged to two waves that migrated into Europe separately. After they arrived, they lived for several thousand years sharing the Gravettian culture but remaining genetically distinct.

It’s clear from the new study that they were not isolated entirely from each other. In Belgium, the scientists found 30,000-year-old remains with a mix of Fournol and Vestonice ancestry.

About 26,000 years ago, the two groups faced a new threat to their survival: an advancing wall of glaciers. During the Ice Age, from 26,000 to 19,000 years ago, European hunter-gatherers were shut out of much of the continent, surviving only in southern refuges.

the refuge of the Iberian Peninsula, the region now occupied by Spain and Portugal, by studying DNA in the teeth of a 23,000-year-old man found in a cave in southern Spain. His DNA revealed that he belonged to the Fournol people who lived in Iberia before the Ice Age. The researchers also found genetic markers linking him to a 45,000-year-old skeleton discovered in Bulgaria.

When these groups arrived in Europe, Neanderthals had already been living across the continent for more than 100,000 years. The Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago, perhaps because modern humans outcompeted them with superior tools.

The Vestonice, by contrast, did not survive the Ice Age. When the glaciers were at their most expansive, the Vestonice may have endured for a time in Italy. But Dr. Posth and his colleagues found no Vestonice ancestry in Europeans after the Ice Age. Instead, they discovered a population of hunter-gatherers that appeared to have expanded from the Balkans, known as the Villabruna. They moved into Italy and replaced the Vestonice.

For several thousand years, the Villabruna were limited to southern Europe. Then, 14,000 years ago, they crossed the Alps and encountered the GoyetQ2 people to the north. A new population emerged, its ancestry three parts Villabruna to one part GoyetQ2.

This new people, which Dr. Posth and his colleagues called Oberkassel, expanded across much of Europe, replacing the old GoyetQ2 population.

another climate shift could explain this new wave. About 14,000 years ago, a pulse of strong warming produced forests across much of Europe. The Oberkassel people may have been better at hunting in forests, whereas the GoyetQ2 retreated with the shrinking steppes.

To the east, the Oberkassel ran into a new group of hunter-gatherers, who probably arrived from Russia. The scientists named this group’s descendants, who lived in Ukraine and surrounding regions, the Sidelkino.

in Iberia, there were no great sweeps of newcomers replacing older peoples. The Iberians after the Ice Age still carried a great deal of ancestry from the Fournol people who had arrived there thousands of years before the glaciers advanced. The Villabruna people moved into northern Spain, but added their DNA to the mix rather than replacing those who were there before.

When the first farmers arrived in Europe from Turkey about 8,000 years ago, three large groups of hunter-gatherers thrived across Europe: the Iberians, the Oberkassel and the Sidelkino. Living Europeans carry some of their gene

The Sidelkino people in the east had genes associated with dark eyes and light skin. The Oberkassel in the west, in contrast, probably had blue eyes and may have had dark skin

These three groups of hunter-gatherers remained isolated from each other for about 6,000 years, until the farmers from Turkey arrived. After this advent of agriculture, the three groups began mixing, the scientists found. It’s possible that the spread of farmland forced them to move to the margins of Europe to survive. But over time, they were absorbed into the agricultural communities that surrounded them.

every continent will likely have its own history of hunter-gatherer migrations.

it is now possible to extract human DNA from cave sediments rather than searching for bones and teeth.

He had expected his eating habits to change once he began taking the medication — he became less interested in fatty, sugary foods and found himself eating smaller meals — but he didn’t anticipate the aversion to alcohol.“That’s what surprised me,” he said. “It makes you want to do all the things doctors have told you your whole life.”