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"It's really difficult," says Gegrand Joseph, 44, a Haitian who had hiked across the Darién Gap five years ago, was deported by the Trump administration and is tackling this patch of jungle a second time to get back to the U.S. "But there is no alternative."

"It's sad," Villalón says of all the garbage. "You cannot drink water from the river. Two years ago I was drinking water on this same river you know. This is not a pristine jungle anymore."

But the wilderness is being slowly whittled away. On the Colombian side of the border, I come across a bulldozer carving a road through the jungle. It's illegal but there are no police in sight. The area is controlled by a drug cartel called the Gulf Clan, which also makes a lot of money off the migrants.

The next day, some 700 migrants break camp and hit the jungle trails on foot, leaving behind plastic bottles, empty food tins and dirty diapers. The migrants relieve themselves in the rivers and toss camping gear and clothes into the water.

So far this year more than 100,000 migrants have walked across the Darién Gap, more than triple the previous annual record, according to the International Organization for Migration. Many had been working in South America but lost their jobs during the coronavirus pandemic and figured that, under the Biden administration, they would have a better chance of getting into the U.S.

But Claudio Madaune of the Darién Foundation, a Colombian conservation group, says that the pollution caused by the migrants is negligible compared to damage caused by illegal ranchers and gold miners who have moved into the area. He says the worst change is that the Darién has become far more dangerous. Gunmen frequently rob, rape and kill migrants. Government officials from Panama and Colombia have discussed setting up a boat service across the Caribbean to transport migrants between the two countries. That would reduce the risks and help protect the rainforest.

“It still is one of those like really surreal things where you tell people like, yeah, the town blew up,” said Stephanie Charbonneau, a schoolteacher who was forced to flee her house with her family. “Who knows what’s going to happen at the end of all of this? What is Wheatley going to look like?”

In the 1890s, gas wells were dug to supply heat and power to homes and businesses in and around Wheatley, which is in southwestern Ontario on Lake Erie. Over time, the wells became obsolete and buildings were constructed directly on top of them; the wells’ locations were loosely, if at all, documented.

Before the blast, Wheatley was mostly known for its Lake Erie fishery; a shipyard; and a lakeside provincial park. Few people in the community knew about the gas wells, or that an explosion had leveled a meeting hall in 1936.

About 300 people are still not allowed to return to their homes, and 38 of Wheatley’s businesses remain closed. There’s no estimate for when, or if, everyone will be allowed to return home permanently — or whether the destroyed buildings can even be rebuilt. Mr. Shropshire said it may prove impossible to ever safely reopen the area around the blast.

Sensors were then installed and quickly began detecting hazardous gases, leading firefighters to evacuate the area around the building twice more during the summer.

“Well, here we go again,” Mr. Ingram recalled saying to his wife that evening. “Sooner or later this place is going to blow up.”

Local officials quickly opened an investigation. Using ground-penetrating radar, they discovered the site of an old well under a paved parking lot behind the explosion site. Closer to the site, the ground continued to burp gas about every 40 days, which hinted at the source of the gas leak, and also spurred fears of another explosion.

“I’m reasonably confident that they’re going to find the source of the gas,” Mr. Shropshire said. “Whether or not it can be mitigated — that’s an entirely different question.”

The first sign of trouble was on June 2, when Whit Thiele, a local business owner, went to investigate a foul odor in the basement of a downtown commercial building he owned. There, he saw water pouring through cracks in the foundation and through a drain in the floor before pooling into a fizzing mass.

The province has committed about $3.96 million in assistance, but several shop owners said they have yet to see any of that money. They believe individual payments will be far short of what they will need to restart business.

At a heated public meeting in November, local officials acknowledged the frustration and anger. But they also emphasized the complexity of the problem and said it will take time to solve it.

“I can’t imagine anybody building a building there and feeling safe,” he said.

“I don’t want anyone to guess what the problem is, dump concrete on it and 60 years from now my grandkids who could be living in Wheatley have the same darn problem again,” Melissa Harrigan, a member of the town council, said at the meeting. “I am so sorry that it is disrupting your lives in so many ways I can’t imagine, I truly can’t, but I can say we’re trying.”

Ms. Declerck said she was concerned that the blast may have left her shop’s building structurally unsound. Like many people in Wheatley, she’s skeptical that a permanent fix for the leaking gas will ever be found.

A survey by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education found that 19 percent of undergraduate-level and 11 percent of graduate-level teaching programs saw a significant drop in enrollment this year.

combined with longstanding frustrations over low pay compared with professions that require similar levels of education.

After months of seeing only her roommates, moving around a classroom brimming with fourth and fifth graders was nerve-racking

“I didn’t want to start despising a career I had a passion for because of the salary,”

while they might have pictured themselves holding students’ hands and forming deep relationships, they’re now finding themselves staring at faces on a Zoom grid instead.

Educators have struggled with recruitment to the profession since long before the pandemic. In recent years, about 8 percent of public schoolteachers were leaving the work force annually, through retirement or attrition.

the secretary of education, recently called for financial help to reopen schools safely, which will allow them to bring on more employees so they can make their classes smaller. The Covid-19 relief package approved by President Biden includes $129 billion in funding for K-12 schools, which can be used to increase staff.

that teaching has historically been a “recession-proof profession” that sometimes attracts more young people in times of crisis.

“Seeing her make her students laugh made me realize how much a teacher can impact someone’s day,” she said. “I was like, whoa, that’s something I want to do.”

They all face the same challenge of needing to hedge their sales of gas and electricity to cover price differences across different markets.

In a statement explaining the decision to provide Uniper with extra financing, Fortum said that European gas prices reached “unprecedented levels” in December.

In Britain, the sudden price rise has led to the collapse of several smaller energy suppliers.

In Germany, the price for energy to heat and power homes in November rose more than 101 percent from a year earlier, the country’s official statistics office, Destatis, said.

Global demand for energy jumped last year, after the world economy reawakened from widespread shutdowns aimed at slowing the spread of the coronavirus pandemic. When many economies started up again last spring, the need for natural gas shot up. Natural gas is crucial for generating electricity, running factories and heating homes across the continent.

European countries normally stock up on gas in the summer, when prices are relatively cheap, but the pandemic and a cold winter last year drew down levels of stored gas, leading to the wild swings in prices.

Prices for natural gas have risen about sixfold, to record levels. The surge means the wholesale price of electricity has reached stratospheric levels, making headlines across Europe as consumers, battered by the pandemic, are now hit by big increases in their home energy bills. Many European countries have tried to buffer the shock to consumers with price caps, subsidies and direct payments.

These high costs are also undermining the economics of companies that make fertilizer, steel, glass and other materials that require a lot of electricity.

According to Kofman, publicly available satellite imagery shows that forces from Russia’s 41st Combined Arms Army, normally based in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk, didn’t return to Siberia after the exercises, and instead linked up with other Russian forces near the Ukrainian border.

Officials in the United States and Europe began noticing the movements particularly in recent weeks, after Russia concluded a massive joint military exercise with Belarus known as Zapad 2021 on its western flank in mid-September.

Relations between Moscow and NATO are especially tense.

Putin and other top Russian officials have said the expansion of NATO activities in Ukraine represents a “red line” for Moscow, whereas previously they cited NATO membership for Ukraine as a move they couldn’t abide, Kofman said.

Since 2015, when the front lines of the conflict more or less froze in place, the buildups haven’t led to a mass territory-gaining offensive by Russia or the separatist forces it backs.

Danilov estimated that the number of Russian troops deployed around the Ukrainian border at 80,000 to 90,000, not including the tens of thousands stationed in Crimea.

Putin outlined that view in an article in July, claiming Ukraine was being functionally controlled by Western nations to foment anti-Russian sentiment.

Dmitry Medvedev, former Russian president and now the deputy head of Russia’s security council, called Ukraine a “vassal state” that is “under direct foreign control”

Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko, an ally of Putin, accused the United States of building NATO military bases in Ukraine using training centers as a cover.

U.S. troops have been training Ukrainian forces in western Ukraine for years, an initiative undertaken by Washington and its NATO allies after Russia annexed Crimea in 2014. Ukrainian forces also have participated in joint exercises with the United States and its NATO allies. The United States has provided Ukraine with Javelin antitank weaponry but has not taken any active role in fighting.

Kofman said Russia this year suddenly invested a large amount of money in developing a ready reserve for its military

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba said Russia is “actively spreading fakes about Ukraine allegedly preparing an offensive or other nonsense.

The U.S. Embassy in Kyiv warned Friday that Russia had repeatedly deployed howitzer artillery and drones against Ukrainian forces “in direct violation” of a July 2020 cease-fire agreement.

Satellite images and field tests show that 13 percent of the land has already lost its fertility, while nearly the rest of the region is at risk.

Brazil’s northeast, the world’s most densely populated drylands, with roughly 53 million people, is among the most at risk.

Instead, higher temperatures and less rain combine with deforestation and overfarming to leave the soil parched, lifeless and nearly devoid of nutrients, unable to support crops or even grass to feed livestock.

Increasing deforestation in Brazil has alarmed officials around the world because it threatens the Amazon rain forest’s ability to pull carbon from the atmosphere.

Those entrepreneurs began paying landowners for their mud, and in a few years, dozens of ceramics plants employed hundreds of people.

At his small plant recently, a few dozen laborers laid out thousands of tiles to dry in the midday sun.

Factories make the tiles by mixing water with clay, and then firing the result in a wood-burning oven. All those ingredients — water, wood and clay — are in short supply here.

The operation consumes 60 to 75 cubic meters of wood a week, or enough to fill five large dump trucks.

That can have a devastating effect. The soil and clay they extract is crucial for retaining a proper balance of nutrients and moisture in the surrounding land.

In 2010, during another difficult dry season, Mr. Dantas said his family almost ran out of money. To feed themselves and their cattle, they decided to cash in on their mud.

But in 2010, instead of planting, the family watched four men with shovels excavate and haul away the soil. It took them three months. They paid about $3,500 for the clay.

That playbook is how Washington typically tries to punish objectionable regimes. But the result has been catastrophic for civilians.

Isolation was fast and easy to do: It cost no money or political capital and satisfied the imperative of expressing disapproval.

Funding for emergency aid delivered by the United Nations and humanitarian organizations has grown, with Washington providing the largest share, nearly $474 million in 2021. The U.S. government also has gradually broadened humanitarian carve-outs from its sanctions and has taken the lead in getting the Security Council to issue exemptions from U.N. sanctions, making it easier for those delivering aid to carry out their work without legal risk.

But these steps are insufficient.

The United States should draw a distinction between the Taliban as former insurgents and the state they now control.

It will help curb growing migration from the country and rising illicit narcotics production by Afghans desperate for income. It could also produce at least limited opportunity for getting the Taliban to cooperate with the United States to suppress terrorist threats from the Islamic State affiliate in Afghanistan and other groups.

And appearing to turn a blind eye to the Taliban’s past and current human rights violations is deeply unappealing.

But I’ve seen over the past two decades how Western powers have consistently overestimated their ability to get Afghan authorities — whoever they are — to acquiesce to their demands. Governments that were utterly dependent on U.S. security and financial support brushed off pressure to adopt Washington’s preferred peacemaking, war-fighting and anti-corruption strategies.

The Taliban are never going to have a policy on women’s rights that accords with Western values. They show no signs of embracing even limited forms of democratic governance.

But the alternative is worse, foremost for the Afghans who have no choice but to live under Taliban rule and who need livelihoods.

he has shut down almost the entire independent media, threatened journalists with up to 15 years in jail if they do not parrot official falsehoods, and had anti-war protesters arrested in their thousands.

Having failed to win a quick victory, Russia is trying to sow panic by starving Ukrainian cities and pounding them blindly.

If Mr Putin is committing war crimes against the fellow Slavs he eulogised in his writings, he is ready to inflict slaughter at home.

even if the war drags on for months, it is hard to see Mr Putin as the victor.

Mr Putin’s puppet could not rule without an occupation, but Russia does not have the money or the troops to garrison even half of Ukraine.

by attacking Ukraine, Mr Putin has committed a catastrophic error. He has wrecked the reputation of Russia’s supposedly formidable armed forces, which have proved tactically inept against a smaller, worse-armed but motivated opponent.

Russia has lost mountains of equipment and endured thousands of casualties, almost as many in two weeks as America has suffered in Iraq since it invaded in 2003.

Western tech firms are wrong to shut their operations in Russia, because they are handing the regime total control over the flow of information.

The central bank does not have access to the hard currency it needs to support the banking system and stabilise the rouble.

Western exporters are withholding vital components, leading to factory stoppages. Sanctions on energy—for now, limited—threaten to crimp the foreign exchange Russia needs to pay for its imports.

Mr Putin is destroying the bourgeoisie, the great motor of Russia’s modernisation. Instead of being sent to the gulag, they are fleeing to cities like Istanbul, in Turkey, and Yerevan, in Armenia.

Those who choose to stay are being muzzled by restrictions on free speech and free association.

Not only is he failing to win a war of choice while impoverishing his people: his regime lacks an ideological core. “Putinism”, such as it is, blends nationalism and orthodox religion for a television audience.

Factions in the regime will turn on each other in a spiral of blame. Mr Putin, fearful of a coup, will trust nobody and may have to fight for power. He may also try to change the course of the war by terrifying his Ukrainian foes and driving off their Western backers with chemical weapons, or even a nuclear strike.

Mr Putin will not impose a puppet government—because he cannot—then he will have to compromise with Ukraine in peace talks.

NATO should state that it will not shoot at Russian forces, so long as they do not attack first. It must not give Mr Putin a reason to draw Russia into a wider war by a declaring no-fly zone that would need enforcing militarily.

Mr Putin is isolated and morally dead; Mr Zelensky is a brave Everyman who has rallied his people and the world. He is Mr Putin’s antithesis—and perhaps his nemesis.

The message is not that we should expect to bow to every misdeed or atrocity. It is that the “good guys” — granted the impossibility that we can ever reach global consensus about who these are — cannot and should not intervene militarily whenever they see bad stuff happen.

I am just completing a book on the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of its most important lessons is that while Kennedy played a masterly diplomatic hand, it is most unlikely that America’s will could have prevailed — the Soviet nuclear weapons withdrawn from Cuba — without the underpinning threat of American force.

Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and even his most hawkish generals knew that America possessed an overwhelming superiority, both of conventional weapons in the Caribbean region and nuclear missiles capable of destroying the Soviet Union. US superiority of the latter was on the order of 17 to 1. And thanks to the intelligence officer Colonel Oleg Penkovsky, who slipped his nation’s secrets to the West, the Americans knew that the Soviets recognized their own weakness.

Moreover, the will and solidarity of the US and its allies to confront the Soviets remained strong in the Cold War. American presidents often found themselves having to restrain the eagerness not only of the military brass, but also of some ordinary citizens, to go head to head with “the Russkies.”

The bipolar Cold War planet has been replaced by a multipolar one, in which a tenuous American superiority persists, but is no longer unchallengeable.

If you think this represents appeasement, watch the new Netflix movie “Munich: The Edge of War,” which stars Jeremy Irons as Neville Chamberlain.

A well-briefed military friend of mine believes that the Chinese are not yet quite ready for a showdown over Taiwan, but he thinks they will seek one within a few years, confident of a local victory.

Biden deserves more sympathy than he is currently receiving for his vacillation on Ukraine. The old, moth-eaten allegation of appeasement is being levelled by his foes both at home and abroad. Yet the US cannot be expected to face down Putin alone, far less to go to war with him.

Today we live in an entirely different strategic environment

Thus, the likelihood is that if Putin attacks Ukraine, he can secure the territory he wants without suffering serious military consequences, beyond whatever losses the courageous Ukrainians can inflict on Russian forces.

The real challenge for the West is to summon the will to punish Putin and his friends in the language they understand best — that of money. Economic sanctions against Russia as a country are right, but not remotely sufficient. The only meaningful weapon is an assault upon the fortunes and lifestyles of the Kremlin’s gangster clique, held and invested around the world.

As for the US, the only party to the confrontation that matters, it seems absolutely right to do everything possible to deter Putin, and to punish him if he goes ahead with his cold-blooded plan to kill thousands of people, to score a victory that shores up his unpopular domestic polity. But one should not resort to threats, nor offer promises to the Ukrainians, that there is no intention of fulfilling.

Most of America’s European “allies” — the quotation marks are emphatic — are too fearful that the Kremlin will cut off their gas supplies to provide Washington with meaningful backing. Europe’s attitude to serious foreign policy and security issues is frankly decadent.

by cutting his 1938 deal with Hitler, he bought vital time for Britain to re-arm before the war that he recognized was coming.

Harris makes a good additional point, that Hitler thought himself cheated out of a military assault on Czechoslovakia that he wanted, and expected to get. In other words, appeasement was clever.

As a historian, I do not go all the way with Harris about this. He seems right that Britain could not realistically have fought in 1938.

I still think that Chamberlain was a weak, foolish old man who shrank from unwelcome realities.

His worst contribution to history is that Munich gave appeasement — which some of us would call a recognition of realities — a bad name. My hero among historical and strategic gurus, the Oxford professor Michael Howard, often said, “If you are dealing with foreign leaders less monstrous than was Hitler, appeasement can be a very sensible policy.”

We must reluctantly acknowledge that both Russia’s Putin and China’s President Xi Jinping can commit acts of aggression in their own backyards that we are unable to prevent, and which are not worth a general war.

The 1979-1989 Soviet-Afghan war should have been a valuable lesson, he said. “It also started with an invasion and looked like the Soviets were winning. But after that, the West provided assets like Stinger missiles and then it became evident that the ground war started to fall apart . . . the Soviet Union had to evacuate its forces and was defeated,” Kozyrev said. “That was a heavy blow to Soviet stability. My prediction is the same for Russia now . . . the probably very dramatic outcome, like the Soviet Union, of collapse.”

For Putin to have nuclear intentions, he would need to be suicidal, a prospect that Kozyrev scoffs at. For all his hard-man posturing, the president has family, friends and too much of a liking for beautiful women and fine wine to press the nuclear button, he believes. “He’s just a kind of guy able to be brazen and he has more risk tolerance and that’s the problem with the West.”

such a decline was both predictable and predicted, for example, in prepandemic projections from the Congressional Budget Office.

today’s labor force participation is actually higher than the budget office expected — which is truly remarkable given that Covid did push some workers into early retirement, while long Covid may have left a significant number of workers with persistent disabilities.

One way to look past demographic changes is to focus on labor force participation by Americans in their prime working years, which is higher now than it has been for 20 years.

if you adjust for age and sex, overall U.S. employment is now at its highest level in history — again, despite the lingering effects of the pandemic.

So much, then, for claims that Big Government has made Americans lazy, or even talk of a Great Resignation. Americans are working more than ever.

Where are these additional workers coming from? One answer is that in a tight labor market, employers are more willing to look at marginalized groups, many of whose members turn out to be perfectly capable of productive employment

Americans with disabilities.

We’ve also seen a surge in foreign-born workers. Whatever the likes of Ron DeSantis may think, immigrants are a big plus for the U.S. economy: They tend to be both working-age and highly motivated.

So what does America’s extraordinary success at getting people back to work tell us

One thing it tells us is that the sluggish recovery that followed the 2008 financial crisis — sluggish largely because Very Serious People were obsessed with debt rather than jobs — denied employment to millions of Americans who could and should have been working.

recent job gains also make Bidenomics look a lot better than it did a year ago.

The larger point is that despite what grumpy rich men may say, Americans haven’t become lazy. On the contrary, they’re willing, even eager, to take jobs if they’re available. And while economic policy in recent years has been far from perfect, one thing it did do — to the nation’s great benefit — was give work a chance.

Is this fair?

That’s not a rhetorical question—it’s an unanswerable question. Because nothing is fair.It’s not fair that one kid is born in a mansion in Bel-Air, another kid is born in row house in Northeast Philly, and another kid is born in a slum in Mumbai.

Because in some ways we all are. Life is not fair.

It’s not fair that Bill Lumberg is an idiot, but he makes so much money that he drives a Porsche. It’s also not fair when people in Porsches get hit by drunk drivers.

There’s only one measure by which fairness exists in our world: That we’re all God’s children, with dignity and worth simply because we were loved into being.

And that is, ultimately, what I wanted to say about this college admissions story. Are you, personally, getting the short end of the stick? Look, I don’t know you. But yes. In some way you are. Even if you’re in that top 0.1 percent.

It’s not fair that some kids can get 1510 on their SATs and some kids struggle to break 900. It’s not fair that some kids are born with genetic disorders that cut their lives short long before they even know what the SATs are.

It’s okay to notice unfairness and it’s wise to try to remedy it where possible. But we shouldn’t dwell on it or let it define our worldview.

Maybe your kid got 1510 on her SATs but didn’t get into Brown. Or maybe your kid struggled to graduate high school. Or maybe you were never able to have kids, even though you desperately wanted them.

I don’t know if they teach gratitude and compassion at the Ivy Plus schools, but those are the two most important lessons for all of us.

This is the same question as “Should we notice and object to Jason Aldean’s not-really-veiled incitement—or should we let it slide so that we don’t give him a bigger audience?”

I can see both sides of the coin. But my tentative answer is that it’s better to push back against agitators (and law breakers), even if doing so elevates them.

The logic of the provocateur is the logic of the bully. They act because they believe they will get away with it. Some of them (like Aldean) will. But also, some of them won’t be able to ride the wave to greater prominence. Deterrence is real.

There may be obvious short-term benefits to not elevating bad actors, but there may also be non-obvious long-term costs. For instance: When the rule of law is set aside in one instance, it weakens the rule of law in all instances. Maybe this weakness has no practical consequences. But also, maybe it does.

Most bad actors can be safely ignored, because they will never become dangerous at scale. Only a handful of them have the potential to metastasize and build subterranean movements. But it’s hard to reliably tell these two groups apart.

Having your actions governed by fixed mores is not infallible. But relying exclusively on judgment calls is more fallible. In the long run, we’re probably better off just calling things as we see them, using objective standards, rather than trying to play bank-shots in order to jump to better outcomes. If someone in a prominent position is making noises about shooting people from groups he doesn’t like, for instance, we should say that this is irresponsible and dangerous. If someone is breaking the law, we should want the legal system to operate with due process rather than turning a blind eye to criminality.

Should they pivot further right themselves and risk their centrist identity? Should they continue to try to isolate the AfD? Or, as that becomes increasingly difficult, should they break longstanding norms and work with the AfD instead?

For now, the AfD has the political winds at its back. Germany’s support for Ukraine as it fends off Russia’s invasion — and the energy and refugee crises the war has provoked — has fueled German anxiety and, along with it, support for the AfD.

And whereas Ms. Merkel famously declared “We can do it!” at the peak of Europe’s immigration crisis in 2015, Mr. Merz has adopted a more hawkish tone.

“The C.D.U., its more moderate worldview and its moderate position is not really equipped for the situation of this time, when we are having a war, when we have in the energy crisis, with high costs and now with a government which tries to ideologically influence people’s lives,” Mr. Voigt, the leader of the C.D.U. in Thuringia’s state parliament, said.

Some political experts view the resurgence of the AfD as a rejection of Ms. Merkel’s policies — particularly her immigration and climate-friendly stances. That has created a particularly awkward situation for current members of the party.

Much of the party’s angst has been channeled into pummeling the climate-friendly Greens, a part of Chancellor Scholz’s governing coalition. Conservatives blame the Greens for stoking anti-Berlin sentiment in the more rural, economically depressed areas where the AfD enjoys strong support.

“This together, in my opinion, forces the C.D.U. to answer the question: What is your DNA? What is your different perspective?”

“The refugee crisis is present again, combined with the uneasy feeling that there is always enough money for refugees, but less and less for kindergartens, schools and hospitals,” he wrote in a recent edition of his newsletter, explaining the rise of the AfD.

Jan Redmann, the party leader in Brandenburg, said in an interview that he believed that C.D.U. members had inadvertently allowed the AfD to define their positions on crucial issues like immigration, because they “tried not to be mixed up with” the far-right party.

the weird thing is the way that it infects attitudes on issues that don’t actually involve wokeism but are seen as woke-adjacent.

The now-classic example is the way hostility to mask mandates, which were mainly about protecting others, turned into highly partisan opposition to Covid vaccination, which is mainly about protecting yourself.

The same thing, I’d argue, applies to energy policy. At this point, investing in renewable energy is simply a good business proposition; Texas Republicans have had to abandon their own free-market, anti-regulation ideology in the effort to strangle wind and solar powe

But renewable energy is something environmentalists favor; it’s being promoted by the Biden administration. So in the minds of Texas right-wingers the wind has become woke, and wind power has become something to be fought even if it hurts business and costs the state both money and jobs.

He also disagreed with Friedman’s nemeses, the Keynesians, who worried that nations wouldn’t be able to fine-tune spending and taxing policy for domestic conditions if they had to keep their currencies in sync with the dollar.

Although the United States’ share of global domestic product has shrunk since the aftermath of World War II, the dollar continues to play a dominant role in financial flows. “Around half of all cross-border bank loans and international debt securities are denominated in U.S. dollars,”

the world today is closer to Kindleberger’s vision than he or his intellectual opponents could have imagined

What’s more, the Federal Reserve has become in effect the world’s central bank: When the Fed raises rates aggressively, as it’s doing now, other central banks tend to follow sui

t the British Empire really was an empire; London bankers were happy to extend loans to British companies operating in the colonies because they were subject to British law. That enabled the colonies to develop somewhat, albeit under Britain’s thumb. The United States has less control over borrowers in emerging markets. Kindleberger’s goal was “to get the economic boost of imperialism, but without the political and social downside of actual imperialism,” Mehrling wrote.

Roosevelt worsened and extended the Depression in 1933 by torpedoing central bankers’ efforts to stabilize exchange rates between currencies.

In contrast, Paul Volcker, who chaired the Fed from 1979 to 1987, comes across as a hero in the book for working with other central bankers and finance officials to resume international cooperation after the Nixon shock of 1971.

There’s a concept in economics of the optimal currency area. In theory, the area of a shared currency, such as the euro, should be big enough to encompass a lot of economic activity but not so big that it includes nations that are disparate and require different economic policies. To Kindleberger, no area could be too big. He thought the whole world was an optimal currency area.

In essence, his goal was to duplicate on the world stage what was achieved in the United States by a mentor of his, Henry Parker Willis, who was a designer of the Federal Reserve System that knitted the nation together financially.

Kindleberger was realistic enough to observe that nationalist politics was an obstacle. “While the optimum scale of economic activity is getting larger and larger, the optimum social scale appears to be shrinking,” he once wrote. Elsewhere, he wrote: “Whereas the economic logic of the payment system pushes toward hierarchy and centralization, the political logic of subglobal and subnational groupings pushes toward autarky and pluralism.”

Beady-eyed readers will note that most of this stuff, apart from Terra-Luna, is in the “on top of” category and not actually on-chain tech. DeFi exchanges and lending protocols have continued to whir even as the enterprises more akin to normal businesses have imploded one by one. But the collapse of these enterprises could imperil the underlying tech by taking out chunks of its value, making the chains more exposed to would-be attackers and pushing miners or stakers to switch off their machines

The value of on-chain activity and tokens is self-reinforcing. The more people that use DeFi, the more valuable Ethereum becomes. The higher the price of ether, the higher the hurdle to attack the blockchain and the more confidence people will have that blockchains will endure

This also works in reverse. The more people shy away from crypto out of fear, the less secure it becomes.

The total market cap of cryptocurrencies is currently $820bn. That is 70% below the peak a year ago, but still high compared with most of crypto’s history.

Many more layers—such as a major stablecoin, big businesses or perhaps other on-chain protocols—would have to unravel to take crypto’s value back to the levels at which it traded just three or four years ago

Although fewer people will use crypto as a result of the ftx collapse, it is very hard to imagine the number will be small enough to take its value to zero. ■

To take out crypto entirely would require killing the underlying blockchain layers. They could either give way first, kicking the stool out from underneath everything else. Or the industry could unravel from the top down, layer by layer like a knitted scarf.

how the industry works. At crypto’s base are blockchains, like Bitcoin and Ethereum, which record transactions verified by computers, a process incentivised by the issuance of new tokens. The Ethereum blockchain validates lines of code, which has made it possible for people to issue their own tokens or build applications

Major chains and a handful of Ethereum-based tokens, like stablecoins, account for about 90% of cryptocurrency value. Big businesses have been built on top of this world, including exchanges, investment funds and lending platforms.

The death of ftx, an exchange declared bankrupt on November 11th after a spectacular blow-up, will encourage some people to turn their attention elsewhere. What would have to happen for everyone to give up?

It is not unreasonable to expect that a Musk-owned and controlled Twitter will, in the name of free speech, allow disinformation and misinformation to be tweeted ad infinitum so long as it discredits his political opponents and celebrates and enriches himself and his allies.

Mr. Musk is correct that “free speech” must be honored and protected. But is it not time that we, as a people and a nation, engage in a wide-ranging, inclusive public debate on when and how free speech creates “a clear and present danger” — as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a century ago — and whether we need government to find a way, through law or regulation or persuasion, to prevent this from happening?

Elon Musk is a product of his — and our — times. Rather than debate or deride his influence, we must recognize that he is not the self-made genius businessman he plays in the media. Instead, his success was prompted and paid for by taxpayer money and abetted by government officials who have allowed him and other billionaire businessmen to exercise more and more control over our economy and our politics.

What made January 6 so predictable—the willingness of Republican leaders to prey on the insecurities and outright paranoia of these voters—is what makes August 8 so dangerous.

“If they can do it to a former President, imagine what they can do to you,” read a tweet from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee. They followed up: “The IRS is coming for you. The DOJ is coming for you. The FBI is coming for you. No one is safe from political punishment in Joe Biden’s America.”

It won’t stop with Trump—that much is certain. The House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, all but promised retaliation against the Justice Department should his party retake the majority this fall

We don’t know exactly what the FBI was looking for at Mar-a-Lago. We don’t know what was found. What we must acknowledge—even those of us who believe Trump has committed crimes, in some cases brazenly so, and deserves full prosecution under the law—is that bringing him to justice could have some awful consequences.

If Trump wins, he and his hard-line loyalists will set about purging the DOJ, the intelligence community, and other vital government departments of careerists deemed insufficiently loyal. There will be no political cost to him for doing so; a Trump victory will be read as a mandate to prosecute his opponents. Indeed, that seems to be exactly where we’re headed.

It feels lowest-common-denominator lazy, in such uncertain times, to default to speculation of 1860s-style secession and civil war. But it’s clearly on the minds of Americans. Last year, a poll from the University of Virginia showed that a majority of Trump voters (52 percent) and a strong minority of Biden voters (41 percent) strongly or somewhat agreed that America is so fractured, they would favor red and blue states seceding from the union to form their own countries.

Meanwhile, a poll from The Washington Post and the University of Maryland showed that one in three Americans believes violence against the government is justified, and a separate poll by NPR earlier this year showed that one in 10 Americans believes violence is justified “right now.”

Assuming that Trump runs in 2024, the stakes are even higher. If Biden—or another Democrat—defeats him, Republicans will have all the more reason to reject the results, given what they see as the Democrats’ politically motivated investigation of the likely Republican nominee.

Is that justice worth the associated risks? Yesterday, the nation’s top law-enforcement officers decided it was. We can only hope they were correct.

Khanmigo allows students to make queries in the middle of lessons or videos and understands the context of what they’re watching. You can ask, “What is the significance of the green light in ‘The Great Gatsby?’ ” Heck, that one is still over my head. Same with help on factoring polynomials, including recognizing which step a student got wrong, not just knowing the answer is wrong, fixing ChatGPT’s math problem. Sci-fi becomes reality: a scalable super tutor.

Khanmigo saw a limited rollout on March 15, with a few thousand students paying a $20-a-month donation. Plugging into ChatGPT isn’t cheap. A wider rollout is planned for June 15, perhaps under $10 a month, less for those in need. The world has cheap tablets, so it shouldn’t be hard to add an Alexa-like voice and real-time videogame-like animations. Then the Diamond Age will be upon us.

Mr. Khan suggests, “There is no limit to learning. If you ask, ‘Why is the sky blue?’ you’ll get a short answer and then maybe, ‘But let’s get back to the mitochondria lesson.’ ” Mr. Khan thinks “average students can become exceptional students.”

Mr. Khan tells me, “We want to raise the ceiling, but also the floor.” He wants to provide his company’s AI-learning technology to “villages and other places with little or no teachers or tools. We can give everyone a tutor, everyone a writing coach.” That’s when education and society will really change.

Teaching will be transformed. Mr. Khan wants Khanmigo “to provide teachers in the U.S. and around the world an indispensable tool to make their lives better” by administering lessons and increasing communications between teachers and students. I would question any school that doesn’t encourage its use.

With this technology, arguments about classroom size and school choice will eventually fade away. Providing low-cost 21st-century Illustrated Primers to every student around the world will then become a moral obligation

If school boards and teachers unions in the U.S. don’t get in the way, maybe we’ll begin to see better headlines.