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The ordinary fixes—the kind that draw on people’s will, and require eating less and moving more—rarely have a large or lasting effect. Indeed, America itself has suffered through a long, maddening history of failed attempts to change its habits on a national scale: a yo-yo diet of well-intentioned treatments, policies, and other social interventions that only ever lead us back to where we started

Through it all, obesity rates keep going up; the diabetes epidemic keeps worsening.

The most recent miracle, for Barb as well as for the nation, has come in the form of injectable drugs. In early 2021, the Danish pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk published a clinical trial showing remarkable results for semaglutide, now sold under the trade names Wegovy and Ozempic.

Patients in the study who’d had injections of the drug lost, on average, close to 15 percent of their body weight—more than had ever been achieved with any other drug in a study of that size. Wadden knew immediately that this would be “an incredible revolution in the treatment of obesity.”

Many more drugs are now racing through development: survodutide, pemvidutide, retatrutide. (Among specialists, that last one has produced the most excitement: An early trial found an average weight loss of 24 percent in one group of participants.

In the United States, an estimated 189 million adults are classified as having obesity or being overweight

The drugs don’t work for everyone. Their major side effects—nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea—can be too intense for many patients. Others don’t end up losing any weight

For the time being, just 25 percent of private insurers offer the relevant coverage, and the cost of treatment—about $1,000 a month—has been prohibitive for many Americans.

The drugs have already been approved not just for people with diabetes or obesity, but for anyone who has a BMI of more than 27 and an associated health condition, such as high blood pressure or cholesterol. By those criteria, more than 140 million American adults already qualify

if this story goes the way it’s gone for other “risk factor” drugs such as statins and antihypertensives, then the threshold for prescriptions will be lowered over time, inching further toward the weight range we now describe as “normal.”

How you view that prospect will depend on your attitudes about obesity, and your tolerance for risk

The first GLP-1 drug to receive FDA approval, exenatide, has been used as a diabetes treatment for more than 20 years. No long-term harms have been identified—but then again, that drug’s long-term effects have been studied carefully only across a span of seven years

the data so far look very good. “These are now being used, literally, in hundreds of thousands of people across the world,” she told me, and although some studies have suggested that GLP-1 drugs may cause inflammation of the pancreas, or even tumor growth, these concerns have not borne out.

adolescents are injecting newer versions of these drugs, and may continue to do so every week for 50 years or more. What might happen over all that time?

“All of us, in the back of our minds, always wonder, Will something show up?  ” Although no serious problems have yet emerged, she said, “you wonder, and you worry.”

in light of what we’ve been through, it’s hard to see what other choices still remain. For 40 years, we’ve tried to curb the spread of obesity and its related ailments, and for 40 years, we’ve failed. We don’t know how to fix the problem. We don’t even understand what’s really causing it. Now, again, we have a new approach. This time around, the fix had better work.

The fen-phen revolution arrived at a crucial turning point for Wadden’s field, and indeed for his career. By then he’d spent almost 15 years at the leading edge of research into dietary interventions, seeing how much weight a person might lose through careful cutting of their calories.

But that sort of diet science—and the diet culture that it helped support—had lately come into a state of ruin. Americans were fatter than they’d ever been, and they were giving up on losing weight. According to one industry group, the total number of dieters in the country declined by more than 25 percent from 1986 to 1991.

Rejecting diet culture became something of a feminist cause. “A growing number of women are joining in an anti-diet movement,” The New York Times reported in 1992. “They are forming support groups and ceasing to diet with a resolve similar to that of secretaries who 20 years ago stopped getting coffee for their bosses.

Now Wadden and other obesity researchers were reaching a consensus that behavioral interventions might produce in the very best scenario an average lasting weight loss of just 5 to 10 percent

National surveys completed in 1994 showed that the adult obesity rate had surged by more than half since 1980, while the proportion of children classified as overweight had doubled. The need for weight control in America had never seemed so great, even as the chances of achieving it were never perceived to be so small.

Wadden wasn’t terribly concerned, because no one in his study had reported any heart symptoms. But ultrasounds revealed that nearly one-third of them had some degree of leakage in their heart valves. His “cure for obesity” was in fact a source of harm.

In December 1994, the Times ran an editorial on what was understood to be a pivotal discovery: A genetic basis for obesity had finally been found. Researchers at Rockefeller University were investigating a molecule, later named leptin, that gets secreted from fat cells and travels to the brain, and that causes feelings of satiety. Lab mice with mutations in the leptin gene—importantly, a gene also found in humans—overeat until they’re three times the size of other mice. “The finding holds out the dazzling hope,”

In April 1996, the doctors recommended yes: Dexfenfluramine was approved—and became an instant blockbuster. Patients received prescriptions by the hundreds of thousands every month. Sketchy wellness clinics—call toll-free, 1-888-4FEN-FEN—helped meet demand. Then, as now, experts voiced concerns about access. Then, as now, they worried that people who didn’t really need the drugs were lining up to take them. By the end of the year, sales of “fen” alone had surpassed $300 million.

It was nothing less than an awakening, for doctors and their patients alike. Now a patient could be treated for excess weight in the same way they might be treated for diabetes or hypertension—with a drug they’d have to take for the rest of their life.

the article heralded a “new understanding of obesity as a chronic disease rather than a failure of willpower.”

News had just come out that, at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, two dozen women taking fen-phen—including six who were, like Barb, in their 30s—had developed cardiac conditions. A few had needed surgery, and on the operating table, doctors discovered that their heart valves were covered with a waxy plaque.

Americans had been prescribed regular fenfluramine since 1973, and the newer drug, dexfenfluramine, had been available in France since 1985. Experts took comfort in this history. Using language that is familiar from today’s assurances regarding semaglutide and other GLP-1 drugs, they pointed out that millions were already on the medication. “It is highly unlikely that there is anything significant in toxicity to the drug that hasn’t been picked up with this kind of experience,” an FDA official named James Bilstad would later say in a Time cover story headlined “The Hot New Diet Pill.

“I know I can’t get any more,” she told Williams. “I have to use up what I have. And then I don’t know what I’m going to do after that. That’s the problem—and that is what scares me to death.” Telling people to lose weight the “natural way,” she told another guest, who was suggesting that people with obesity need only go on low-carb diets, is like “asking a person with a thyroid condition to just stop their medication.”

She’d gone off the fen-phen and had rapidly regained weight. “The voices returned and came back in a furor I’d never heard before,” Barb later wrote on her blog. “It was as if they were so angry at being silenced for so long, they were going to tell me 19 months’ worth of what they wanted me to hear. I was forced to listen. And I ate. And I ate. And ate.”

For Barb, rapid weight loss has brought on a different metaphysical confusion. When she looks in the mirror, she sometimes sees her shape as it was two years ago. In certain corners of the internet, this is known as “phantom fat syndrome,” but Barb dislikes that term. She thinks it should be called “body integration syndrome,” stemming from a disconnect between your “larger-body memory” and “smaller-body reality.

In 2003, the U.S. surgeon general declared obesity “the terror within, a threat that is every bit as real to America as the weapons of mass destruction”; a few months later, Eric Finkelstein, an economist who studies the social costs of obesity, put out an influential paper finding that excess weight was associated with up to $79 billion in health-care spending in 1998, of which roughly half was paid by Medicare and Medicaid. (Later he’d conclude that the number had nearly doubled in a decade.

In 2004, Finkelstein attended an Action on Obesity summit hosted by the Mayo Clinic, at which numerous social interventions were proposed, including calorie labeling in workplace cafeterias and mandatory gym class for children of all grades.

he message at their core, that soda was a form of poison like tobacco, spread. In San Francisco and New York, public-service campaigns showed images of soda bottles pouring out a stream of glistening, blood-streaked fat. Michelle Obama led an effort to depict water—plain old water—as something “cool” to drink.

Soon, the federal government took up many of the ideas that Brownell had helped popularize. Barack Obama had promised while campaigning for president that if America’s obesity trends could be reversed, the Medicare system alone would save “a trillion dollars.” By fighting fat, he implied, his ambitious plan for health-care reform would pay for itself. Once he was in office, his administration pulled every policy lever it could.

Michelle Obama helped guide these efforts, working with marketing experts to develop ways of nudging kids toward better diets and pledging to eliminate “food deserts,” or neighborhoods that lacked convenient access to healthy, affordable food. She was relentless in her public messaging; she planted an organic garden at the White House and promoted her signature “Let’s Move!” campaign around the country.

An all-out war on soda would come to stand in for these broad efforts. Nutrition studies found that half of all Americans were drinking sugar-sweetened beverages every day, and that consumption of these accounted for one-third of the added sugar in adults’ diets. Studies turned up links between people’s soft-drink consumption and their risks for type 2 diabetes and obesity. A new strand of research hinted that “liquid calories” in particular were dangerous to health.

when their field lost faith in low-calorie diets as a source of lasting weight loss, the two friends went in opposite directions. Wadden looked for ways to fix a person’s chemistry, so he turned to pharmaceuticals. Brownell had come to see obesity as a product of our toxic food environment: He meant to fix the world to which a person’s chemistry responded, so he started getting into policy.

The social engineering worked. Slowly but surely, Americans’ lamented lifestyle began to shift. From 2001 to 2018, added-sugar intake dropped by about one-fifth among children, teens, and young adults. From the late 1970s through the early 2000s, the obesity rate among American children had roughly tripled; then, suddenly, it flattened out.

although the obesity rate among adults was still increasing, its climb seemed slower than before. Americans’ long-standing tendency to eat ever-bigger portions also seemed to be abating.

sugary drinks—liquid candy, pretty much—were always going to be a soft target for the nanny state. Fixing the food environment in deeper ways proved much harder. “The tobacco playbook pretty much only works for soda, because that’s the closest analogy we have as a food item,

that tobacco playbook doesn’t work to increase consumption of fruits and vegetables, he said. It doesn’t work to increase consumption of beans. It doesn’t work to make people eat more nuts or seeds or extra-virgin olive oil.

Careful research in the past decade has shown that many of the Obama-era social fixes did little to alter behavior or improve our health. Putting calorie labels on menus seemed to prompt at most a small decline in the amount of food people ate. Employer-based wellness programs (which are still offered by 80 percent of large companies) were shown to have zero tangible effects. Health-care spending, in general, kept going up.

From the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s, the proportion of adults who said they’d experienced discrimination on account of their height or weight increased by two-thirds, going up to 12 percent. Puhl and others started citing evidence that this form of discrimination wasn’t merely a source of psychic harm, but also of obesity itself. Studies found that the experience of weight discrimination is associated with overeating, and with the risk of weight gain over time.

obesity rates resumed their ascent. Today, 20 percent of American children have obesity. For all the policy nudges and the sensible revisions to nutrition standards, food companies remain as unfettered as they were in the 1990s, Kelly Brownell told me. “Is there anything the industry can’t do now that it was doing then?” he asked. “The answer really is no. And so we have a very predictable set of outcomes.”

she started to rebound. The openings into her gastric pouch—the section of her stomach that wasn’t bypassed—stretched back to something like their former size. And Barb found ways to “eat around” the surgery, as doctors say, by taking food throughout the day in smaller portions

Bariatric surgeries can be highly effective for some people and nearly useless for others. Long-term studies have found that 30 percent of those who receive the same procedure Barb did regain at least one-quarter of what they lost within two years of reaching their weight nadir; more than half regain that much within five years.

if the effects of Barb’s surgery were quickly wearing off, its side effects were not: She now had iron, calcium, and B12 deficiencies resulting from the changes to her gut. She looked into getting a revision of the surgery—a redo, more or less—but insurance wouldn’t cover it

She found that every health concern she brought to doctors might be taken as a referendum, in some way, on her body size. “If I stubbed my toe or whatever, they’d just say ‘Lose weight.’ ” She began to notice all the times she’d be in a waiting room and find that every chair had arms. She realized that if she was having a surgical procedure, she’d need to buy herself a plus-size gown—or else submit to being covered with a bedsheet when the nurses realized that nothing else would fit.

Barb grew angrier and more direct about her needs—You’ll have to find me a different chair, she started saying to receptionists. Many others shared her rage. Activists had long decried the cruel treatment of people with obesity: The National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance had existed, for example, in one form or another, since 1969; the Council on Size & Weight Discrimination had been incorporated in 1991. But in the early 2000s, the ideas behind this movement began to wend their way deeper into academia, and they soon gained some purchase with the public.

“Our public-health efforts to address obesity have failed,” Eric Finkelstein, the economist, told me.

Others attacked the very premise of a “healthy weight”: People do not have any fundamental need, they argued, morally or medically, to strive for smaller bodies as an end in itself. They called for resistance to the ideology of anti-fatness, with its profit-making arms in health care and consumer goods. The Association for Size Diversity and Health formed in 2003; a year later, dozens of scholars working on weight-related topics joined together to create the academic field of fat studies.

As the size-diversity movement grew, its values were taken up—or co-opted—by Big Business. Dove had recently launched its “Campaign for Real Beauty,” which included plus-size women. (Ad Age later named it the best ad campaign of the 21st century.) People started talking about “fat shaming” as something to avoid

By 2001, Bacon, who uses they/them pronouns, had received their Ph.D. and finished a rough draft of a book, Health at Every Size, which drew inspiration from a broader movement by that name among health-care practitioners

But something shifted in the ensuing years. In 2007, Bacon got a different response, and the book was published. Health at Every Size became a point of entry for a generation of young activists and, for a time, helped shape Americans’ understanding of obesity.

Some experts were rethinking their advice on food and diet. At UC Davis, a physiologist named Lindo Bacon who had struggled to overcome an eating disorder had been studying the effects of “intuitive eating,” which aims to promote healthy, sustainable behavior without fixating on what you weigh or how you look

The heightened sensitivity started showing up in survey data, too. In 2010, fewer than half of U.S. adults expressed support for giving people with obesity the same legal protections from discrimination offered to people with disabilities. In 2015, that rate had risen to three-quarters.

In Bacon’s view, the 2000s and 2010s were glory years. “People came together and they realized that they’re not alone, and they can start to be critical of the ideas that they’ve been taught,” Bacon told me. “We were on this marvelous path of gaining more credibility for the whole Health at Every Size movement, and more awareness.”

that sense of unity proved short-lived; the movement soon began to splinter. Black women have the highest rates of obesity, and disproportionately high rates of associated health conditions. Yet according to Fatima Cody Stanford, an obesity-medicine physician at Harvard Medical School, Black patients with obesity get lower-quality care than white patients with obesity.

That system was exactly what Bacon and the Health at Every Size movement had set out to reform. The problem, as they saw it, was not so much that Black people lacked access to obesity medicine, but that, as Bacon and the Black sociologist Sabrina Strings argued in a 2020 article, Black women have been “specifically targeted” for weight loss, which Bacon and Strings saw as a form of racism

But members of the fat-acceptance movement pointed out that their own most visible leaders, including Bacon, were overwhelmingly white. “White female dietitians have helped steal and monetize the body positive movement,” Marquisele Mercedes, a Black activist and public-health Ph.D. student, wrote in September 2020. “And I’m sick of it.”

Tensions over who had the standing to speak, and on which topics, boiled over. In 2022, following allegations that Bacon had been exploitative and condescending toward Black colleagues, the Association for Size Diversity and Health expelled them from its ranks and barred them from attending its events.

As the movement succumbed to in-fighting, its momentum with the public stalled. If attitudes about fatness among the general public had changed during the 2000s and 2010s, it was only to a point. The idea that some people can indeed be “fit but fat,” though backed up by research, has always been a tough sell.

Although Americans had become less inclined to say they valued thinness, measures of their implicit attitudes seemed fairly stable. Outside of a few cities such as San Francisco and Madison, Wisconsin, new body-size-discrimination laws were never passed.

In the meantime, thinness was coming back into fashion

In the spring of 2022, Kim Kardashian—whose “curvy” physique has been a media and popular obsession—boasted about crash-dieting in advance of the Met Gala. A year later, the model and influencer Felicity Hayward warned Vogue Business that “plus-size representation has gone backwards.” In March of this year, the singer Lizzo, whose body pride has long been central to her public persona, told The New York Times that she’s been trying to lose weight. “I’m not going to lie and say I love my body every day,” she said.

Among the many other dramatic effects of the GLP-1 drugs, they may well have released a store of pent-up social pressure to lose weight.

If ever there was a time to debate that impulse, and to question its origins and effects, it would be now. But Puhl told me that no one can even agree on which words are inoffensive. The medical field still uses obesity, as a description of a diagnosable disease. But many activists despise that phrase—some spell it with an asterisk in place of the e—and propose instead to reclaim fat.

Everyone seems to agree on the most important, central fact: that we should be doing everything we can to limit weight stigma. But that hasn’t been enough to stop the arguing.

Things feel surreal these days to just about anyone who has spent years thinking about obesity. At 71, after more than four decades in the field, Thomas Wadden now works part-time, seeing patients just a few days a week. But the arrival of the GLP-1 drugs has kept him hanging on for a few more years, he said. “It’s too much of an exciting period to leave obesity research right now.”

When everyone is on semaglutide or tirzepatide, will the soft-drink companies—Brownell’s nemeses for so many years—feel as if a burden has been lifted? “My guess is the food industry is probably really happy to see these drugs come along,” he said. They’ll find a way to reach the people who are taking GLP‑1s, with foods and beverages in smaller portions, maybe. At the same time, the pressures to cut back on where and how they sell their products will abate.

the triumph in obesity treatment only highlights the abiding mystery of why Americans are still getting fatter, even now

Perhaps one can lay the blame on “ultraprocessed” foods, he said. Maybe it’s a related problem with our microbiomes. Or it could be that obesity, once it takes hold within a population, tends to reproduce itself through interactions between a mother and a fetus. Others have pointed to increasing screen time, how much sleep we get, which chemicals are in the products that we use, and which pills we happen to take for our many other maladies.

“The GLP-1s are just a perfect example of how poorly we understand obesity,” Mozaffarian told me. “Any explanation of why they cause weight loss is all post-hoc hand-waving now, because we have no idea. We have no idea why they really work and people are losing weight.”

The new drugs—and the “new understanding of obesity” that they have supposedly occasioned—could end up changing people’s attitudes toward body size. But in what ways

When the American Medical Association declared obesity a disease in 2013, Rebecca Puhl told me, some thought “it might reduce stigma, because it was putting more emphasis on the uncontrollable factors that contribute to obesity.” Others guessed that it would do the opposite, because no one likes to be “diseased.”

why wasn’t there another kind of nagging voice that wouldn’t stop—a sense of worry over what the future holds? And if she wasn’t worried for herself, then what about for Meghann or for Tristan, who are barely in their 40s? Wouldn’t they be on these drugs for another 40 years, or even longer? But Barb said she wasn’t worried—not at all. “The technology is so much better now.” If any problems come up, the scientists will find solutions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The answer was always the same: Figure it out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Researchers call this effect “the liar’s dividend,” and politicians have already tried to cast off unfavorable clips as AI-generated: Last month, Donald Trump falsely claimed that an attack ad had used AI to make him look bad.

“Deepfake” could become the “fake news” of 2024, an infrequent but genuine phenomenon that gets co-opted as a means of discrediting the truth

Steve Bannon’s infamous assertion that the way to discredit the media is to “flood the zone with shit.”

AI is less likely to create new dynamics than to amplify existing ones. Presidential campaigns, with their bottomless coffers and sprawling staff, have long had the ability to target specific groups of voters with tailored messaging

They might have thousands of data points about who you are, obtained by gathering information from public records, social-media profiles, and commercial brokers

“It is now so cheap to engage in this mass personalization,” Laura Edelson, a computer-science professor at Northeastern University who studies misinformation and disinformation, told me. “It’s going to make this content easier to create, cheaper to create, and put more communities within the reach of it.”

That sheer ease could overwhelm democracies’ already-vulnerable election infrastructure. Local- and state-election workers have been under attack since 2020, and AI could make things worse.

Those officials have also expressed the worry, he said, that generative AI will turbocharge the harassment they face, by making the act of writing and sending hate mail virtually effortless. (The consequences may be particularly severe for women.)

past attacks—most notably the Russian hack of John Podesta’s email, in 2016—have wrought utter havoc. But now pretty much anyone—whatever language they speak and whatever their writing ability—can send out hundreds of phishing emails in fluent English prose. “The cybersecurity implications of AI for elections and electoral integrity probably aren’t getting nearly the focus that they should,”

Just last week, AI-generated audio surfaced of one Harlem politician criticizing another. New York City has perhaps the most robust local-news ecosystem of any city in America, but elsewhere, in communities without the media scrutiny and fact-checking apparatuses that exist at the national level, audio like this could cause greater chaos.

In countries that speak languages with less online text for LLMs to gobble up, AI tools may be less sophisticated. But those same countries are likely the ones where tech platforms will pay the least attention to the spread of deepfakes and other disinformation, Edelson told me. India, Russia, the U.S., the EU—this is where platforms will focus. “Everything else”—Namibia, Uzbekistan, Uruguay—“is going to be an afterthought,”

Most of us tend to fret about the potential fake video that deceives half of the nation, not about the flood of FOIA requests already burying election officials. If there is a cost to that way of thinking, the world may pay it this year at the polls.

Dennett’s central mission was to demystify consciousness andbring it within the realm of science  So why do we find it so intuitive to think of ourselves as an inner being, an occupant in our bodies? ‘It’s a sort of metaphor. I like to say it’s a user illusion,’

Imagining an inner person allows us to communicate our motivations to other human beings and in turn communicate them to ourselves

While language allows us to articulate our inner lives, it also divides cultures, right down to the way we process information. Dennett explains it using the example of our perception of colour: ‘Different cultures have different ways of dividing up colour,’ he said. ‘There are a lot of experiments that show that what colours you can distinguish depends a lot on what culture you grew up in.’

westerners process people’s faces differently to non-westerners. The very movement patterns of our eyeballs are dictated by culture.

‘I think that some of the multiculturalism, some of the ardent defences of multiculturalism, are deeply misguided and regressive and I think postmodernism has actually harmed people in many nations

Recognising these cultural differences didn’t lead Dennett into moral relativism. ‘I am relieved not to have to confront some of the virtue-signalling and some of the doctrinaire attitudes that are now running rampant on college campuses,

Take the most obvious cases: the treatment of women in the Islamic world; the horrific reactions to homosexuality in many parts of the world that aren’t western. I think that there are clear reasons for preferring different cultural practices over others.

If we don’t create, endorse and establish some new rules and laws about how to think about this, we’re going to lose the capacity for human trust and that could be the end of civilisation.’

“I could not have done it sooner,” he says. “I don’t think anybody could have done it sooner. Because I was the first one.” 

By the late 1960s, he was managing TI’s integrated-circuit division. Before long, he was running the entire semiconductor group. 

He transferred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he studied mechanical engineering, earned his master’s degree and would have stayed for his Ph.D. if he hadn’t failed the qualifying exam. Instead, he got his first job in semiconductors and moved to Texas Instruments in 1958

he came along as the integrated circuit was being invented, and his timing couldn’t have been any better, as Chang belonged to the first generation of semiconductor geeks. He developed a reputation as a tenacious manager who could wring every possible improvement out of production lines, which put his career on the fast track.

Chang grew up dreaming of being a writer—a novelist, maybe a journalist—and he planned to major in English literature at Harvard University. But after his freshman year, he decided that what he actually wanted was a good job

“They talk about life-work balance,” he says. “That’s a term I didn’t even know when I was their age. Work-life balance. When I was their age, if there was no work, there was no life.” 

These days, TSMC is investing $40 billion to build plants in Arizona, but the project has been stymied by delays, setbacks and labor shortages, and Chang told me that some of TSMC’s young employees in the U.S. have attitudes toward work that he struggles to understand. 

Chang says he wouldn’t have taken the risk of moving to Taiwan if he weren’t financially secure. In fact, he didn’t take that same risk the first time he could have.

“The closer the industry match,” they wrote, “the greater the success rate.” 

By then, Chang knew that he wasn’t long for Texas Instruments. But his stock options hadn’t vested, so he turned down the invitation to Taiwan. “I was not financially secure yet,” he says. “I was never after great wealth. I was only after financial security.” For this corporate executive in the middle of the 1980s, financial security equated to $200,000 a year. “After tax, of course,” he says. 

Chang’s situation had changed by the time Li called again three years later. He’d exercised a few million dollars of stock options and bought tax-exempt municipal bonds that paid enough for him to be financially secure by his living standards. Once he’d achieved that goal, he was ready to pursue another one. 

“There was no certainty at all that Taiwan would give me the chance to build a great semiconductor company, but the possibility existed, and it was the only possibility for me,” Chang says. “That’s why I went to Taiwan.” 

Not long ago, a team of economists investigated whether older entrepreneurs are more successful than younger ones. By scrutinizing Census Bureau records and freshly available Internal Revenue Service data, they were able to identify 2.7 million founders in the U.S. who started companies between 2007 and 2014. Then they looked at their ages.

The average age of those entrepreneurs at the founding of their companies was 41.9. For the fastest-growing companies, that number was 45. The economists also determined that 50-year-old founders were almost twice as likely to achieve major success as 30-year-old founders, while the founders with the lowest chance of success were the ones in their early 20s

“Successful entrepreneurs are middle-aged, not young,” they wrote in their 2020 paper.  

Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists throw money at talented young entrepreneurs in the hopes they will start the next trillion-dollar company. They have plentiful energy, insatiable ambition and the vision to peek around corners and see the future. What they don’t typically have are mortgages, family obligations and other adult responsibilities to distract them or diminish their appetite for risk. Chang himself says that younger people are more innovative when it comes to science and technical subjects. 

But in business, older is better. Entrepreneurs in their 40s and 50s may not have the exuberance to believe they will change the world, but they have the experience to know how they actually can. Some need years of specialized training before they can start a company. In biotechnology, for example, founders are more likely to be college professors than college dropouts. Others require the lessons and connections they accumulate over the course of their careers. 

one more finding from their study of U.S. companies that helps explain the success of a chip maker in Taiwan. It was that prior employment in the area of their startups—both the general sector and specific industry—predicted “a vastly higher probability” of success.

Chang was such a workaholic that he made sales calls on his honeymoon and had no patience for those who didn’t share his drive

Morris Chang had 30 years of experience in his industry when he decided to uproot his life and move to another continent. He knew more about semiconductors than just about anyone on earth—and certainly more than anyone in Taiwan. As soon as he started his job at the Industrial Technology Research Institute, Chang was summoned to K.T. Li’s office and given a second job. “He felt I should start a semiconductor company in Taiwan,”

“I decided right away that this could not be the kind of great company that I wanted to build at either Texas Instruments or General Instrument,”

TI handled every part of chip production, but what worked in Texas would not translate to Taiwan. The only way that he could build a great company in his new home was to make a new sort of company altogether, one with a business model that would exploit the country’s strengths and mitigate its many weaknesses.

Chang determined that Taiwan had precisely one strength in the chip supply chain. The research firm that he was now running had been experimenting with semiconductors for the previous 10 years. When he studied that decade of data, Chang was pleasantly surprised by Taiwan’s yields, the percentage of working chips on silicon wafers. They were almost twice as high in Taiwan as they were in the U.S., he said. 

“People were ingrained in thinking the secret sauce of a successful semiconductor company was in the wafer fab,” Campbell told me. “The transition to the fabless semiconductor model was actually pretty obvious when you thought about it. But it was so against the prevailing wisdom that many people didn’t think about it.” 

Taiwan’s government took a 48% stake, with the rest of the funding coming from the Dutch electronics giant Philips and Taiwan’s private sector, but Chang was the driving force behind the company. The insight to build TSMC around such an unconventional business model was born from his experience, contacts and expertise. He understood his industry deeply enough to disrupt it. 

“TSMC was a business-model innovation,” Chang says. “For innovations of that kind, I think people of a more advanced age are perhaps even more capable than people of a younger age.”

the personal philosophy that he’d developed over the course of his long career. “To be a partner to our customers,” he says. That founding principle from 1987 is the bedrock of the foundry business to this day, as TSMC says the key to its success has always been enabling the success of its customers.  

TSMC manufactures chips in iPhones, iPads and Mac computers for Apple, which manufactures a quarter of TSMC’s net revenue. Nvidia is often called a chip maker, which is curious, because it doesn’t make chips. TSMC does. 

Churning out identical copies of a single chip for an iPhone requires one TSMC fab to produce more than a quintillion transistors—that is, one million trillions—every few months. In a year, the entire semiconductor industry produces “more transistors than the combined quantity of all goods produced by all other companies, in all other industries, in all human history,” Miller writes. 

I asked how he thought about success when he moved to Taiwan. “The highest degree of success in 1985, according to me, was to build a great company. A lower degree of success was at least to do something that I liked to do and I wanted to do,” he says. “I happened to achieve the highest degree of success that I had in mind.” 

“China is clearly alarmed by these developments,” said Jingdong Yuan, director of the China and Asia Security Program at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. “Chinese interpretations would be that the U.S. and its allies have clearly decided that China needs to be contained.”

aside from pointed words and the perfunctory maritime patrol, Beijing’s options to push back against U.S. pressure appear limited, analysts said, especially as China contends with slowing economic growth and mounting trade frictions.

Whether Mr. Biden’s strategy succeeds in deterring China in the long run remains to be seen. Nationalists in China view American alliances as fragile and subject to the whims of each U.S. presidential election. Then there’s Mr. Xi, who perceives the West to be in structural decline, and China’s ascendance as Asia’s dominant power to be inevitable.

“The Americans should not think so highly of themselves. They could not solve Afghanistan or Ukraine,” said Zheng Yongnian, an influential political scientist at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s campus in Shenzhen. He said that China still hoped to resolve its disputes peacefully. “The reason we are not touching the Philippines is not that we are afraid of the United States.”

Beijing’s room to maneuver against Washington is limited by its struggling economy, which has been hit by a property crisis and a cratering of foreign investment. China has been increasing exports, but that has already caused friction with countries concerned about a flood of cheap Chinese goods.

The broader American pressure campaign may also be nudging China to avoid escalating tensions further. Despite its differences with the United States, China is engaging in talks between the countries’ leaders and senior officials. Relations with some neighbors, such as Australia, are slowly thawing. Analysts have noted that Beijing has also avoided escalating its military presence around Taiwan in recent months, despite the island’s election of a leader the Communist Party loathes.

“They are definitely being more cautious and demonstrating a willingness to engage,” Ja Ian Chong, an associate professor of political science at the National University of Singapore, said of Beijing. “They are realizing there are actual risks to letting frictions escalate. We just haven’t seen any substantive compromises yet.”

Bonobos became famous for showing that nature didn’t always have to be red in tooth and claw. “Bonobos are an icon for peace and love, the world’s ‘hippie chimps,’” Sally Coxe, a conservationist, said in 2006.

Because bonobos live in remote, swampy rainforests, it has been much more difficult to observe them in the wild than chimpanzees. More recent research has shown that bonobos live a more aggressive life than their reputation would suggest.

In a study based on thousands of hours of observations in the wild published on Friday, for example, researchers found that male bonobos commit acts of aggression nearly three times as often as male chimpanzees do.

“There is no ‘hippie ape,’”

The researchers called their idea the self-domestication hypothesis. In later years, they speculated that humans may have undergone a self-domestication of their own.

In 2012, a trio of Harvard researchers proposed that bonobos evolved much like dogs did. Less aggressive wolves were not as likely to be killed by humans, which over time led to the emergence of dogs. In a similar fashion, the researchers argued, female bonobos preferred to mate with less aggressive males, giving birth to less aggressive offspring.

As our closest living relatives, bonobos and chimpanzees can offer us clues about the roots of human behavior. We and the two species share a common ancestor that lived about 7 million years ago. About 5 million years later, bonobos split off from chimpanzees.

Dr. Mouginot soon became perplexed, as she saw that male bonobos acted aggressively on a regular basis. Unlike male chimpanzees, who started their days in a mellow mood, the male bonobos seemed to wake up ready for a fight.

She and her colleagues trained field assistants, who made more observations throughout the pandemic. The new analysis, based on 9,300 hours of observations on 12 male bonobos and 14 male chimpanzees, found that bonobos committed aggressive acts 2.8 times as frequently as than the chimpanzees did.

Dr. Mouginot found that the frequent bonobo aggressions almost always involved a single male attacking another male. Chimpanzees, in contrast, often ganged up to attack a victim.

the study set a new standard for comparing aggression in bonobos and chimpanzees.

Dr. Mouginot speculated that male chimpanzees engage in one-on-one aggression less often because it poses bigger dangers: A victim of aggression may not want to go on a border patrol with the perpetrator, for example. Or he may bring back some of his own allies to wreak vengeance.

It may be easier for male bonobos to get away with aggression, Dr. Mouginot said, because in their female-dominated society they don’t face the risks that come with male alliances. “I think that’s why we see more aggression in bonobos — because it’s less risky to act aggressively against other males,”

the apes that carried out the most aggressive acts were also the ones who mated most often.

parts of the self-domestication hypothesis “clearly need refinement.” It may be important to consider the effect that different kinds of aggression have on a species, rather than lumping them altogether, he said.

Still, he argued that the differences between the two species remained significant. “Chimpanzees murder, and bonobos don’t,

That’s because real people — and yes, even professional economists — tend to process the parallel rise of prices and wages in quite different ways.

In brief, researchers have found that we tend to internalize the gains due to inflation and externalize the losses. These different processes yield different emotional responses.

Let’s start with higher prices. Sticker shock hurts. Even as someone who closely studies the inflation statistics, I’m still often surprised by higher prices. They feel unfair. They undermine my spending power, and my sense of control and order.

younger folks — anyone under 60 — had never experienced sustained inflation rates greater than 5 percent in their adult lives. And I think this explains why they’re so angry about today’s inflation.

Even though wages tend to rise hand-in-hand with prices, we tell ourselves a different story, in which the wage rises we get have nothing to do with price rises that cause them.

But then my economist brain took over, and slowly it sunk in that my raise wasn’t a reward for hard work, but rather a cost-of-living adjustment

Internalizing the gain and externalizing the cost of inflation protects you from this deflating realization. But it also distorts your sense of reality.

The reason so many Americans feel that inflation is stealing their purchasing power is that they give themselves unearned credit for the offsetting wage rises that actually restore it.

in reality, higher prices are only the first act of the inflationary play. It’s a play that economists have seen before. In episode after episode, surges in prices have led to — or been preceded by — a proportional surge in wages.

While older Americans understood that the pain of inflation is transitory, younger folks aren’t so sure. Inflation is a lot scarier when you fear that today’s price rises will permanently undermine your ability to make ends meet.

Perhaps this explains why the recent moderate burst of inflation has created seemingly more anxiety than previous inflationary episodes.

More generally, being an economist makes me an optimist. Social media is awash with (false) claims that we’re in a “silent depression,” and those who want to make American great again are certain it was once so much better.

in reality, our economy this year is larger, more productive and will yield higher average incomes than in any prior year on record in American history

And because the United States is the world’s richest major economy, we can now say that we are almost certainly part of the richest large society in its richest year in the history of humanity.

The income of the average American will double approximately every 39 years. And so when my kids are my age, average income will be roughly double what it is today. Far from being fearful for my kids, I’m envious of the extraordinary riches their generation will enjoy.

Psychologists describe anxiety disorders as occurring when the panic you feel is out of proportion to the danger you face. By this definition, we’re in the midst of a macroeconomic anxiety attack.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

the model’s calculations took into account trends in pollution levels, population growth, the amount of natural resources and the overall quality of life on Earth. The model’s predictions for the worsening quality of life and the dwindling natural resources have so far been unnervingly on target.

“At around 2020, the condition of the planet becomes highly critical. If we do nothing about it, the quality of life goes down to zero. Pollution becomes so seriously it will start to kill people, which in turn will cause the population to diminish, lower than it was in the 1900. At this stage, around 2040 to 2050, civilised life as we know it on this planet will cease to exist.”

Alexander King, the then-leader of the Club of Rome, evaluated the program’s results to also mean that nation-states will lose their sovereignty, forecasting a New World Order with corporations managing everything.

“Sovereignty of nations is no longer absolute,” King told ABC. “There is a gradual diminishing of sovereignty, little bit by little bit. Even in the big nations, this will happen.”

Indeed, in the face of these unpredictable rewards, Augustin and Arthur — the rats — persisted. Sometimes, they ignored the sugar even when it did arrive, Mr. Lignier said, and just kept pressing the button anyway.

To Mr. Lignier, the parallel is obvious. “Digital and social media companies use the same concept to keep the attention of the viewer as long as possible,”

Indeed, social media has been described as “a Skinner Box for the modern human,” doling out periodic, unpredictable rewards — a like, a follow, a promising romantic match — that keep us glued to our phones.

Maybe we would rather sit around and push whatever levers are in front of us — even those that might make us feel bad — than sit with ourselves in quiet contemplation.

It turns out that if you give everyone access to the Library of Congress, what they do is watch videos on TikTok

A chatbot is not an oracle; it’s a statistics engine that creates sentences that sound accurate. Right now my sense is that it’s like we’ve just invented transistors. We’ve got a couple of consumer products that people are starting to adopt, like the transistor radio, but we don’t yet know how the transistor will transform society

We’re in the transistor-radio stage of AI. I think a lot of the ferment that’s happening right now in the industry is venture capitalists putting money into business plans, and teams that are rapidly evaluating a whole lot of different things that could be done well. I’m sure that some things are going to emerge that I wouldn’t dare try to predict, because the results of the creative frenzy of millions of people is always more interesting than what a single person can think of.

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.

“People used to talk about politicians trying to control our bodies,” she said. “Now it’s, they have no business getting involved in these medical decisions, these politicians don’t have medical expertise, they’re making these laws, and they’re not basing it on health care or science.”

Seventy-three percent of independents who support abortion rights said stories about women almost dying because of bans would affect how they vote.

“Now it’s about pregnancy, and everybody knows someone who had a baby or wants to have a baby or might get pregnant,” she said. “It’s profoundly personal to a majority of the public.”

Anti-abortion groups have responded by trying to carve out a difference between “elective abortion” for unwanted pregnancies — which they want banned — and “maternal fetal separation” in medical emergencies. (The medical procedure is the same.)

Opponents have long stigmatized abortion as something irresponsible women use as birth control or because they care more about their careers than having children. “When the focus shifts to the dangers that abortion bans inflict on pregnant people,” said Reva Siegel, a constitutional law professor at Yale who has written extensively about the country’s abortion conflict, “it’s easier for Americans to talk about.”

Technology and criminal law have flipped the script, she said.

Before Roe legalized abortion nationally in 1973, the law allowed more leeway for what were considered “therapeutic abortions.” Doctors, often solo practitioners, could use their good faith judgment to provide them. Even the Southern Baptist Convention supported abortions in cases of fetal deformity or when a woman’s physical or mental health was at risk.

Now, the threat of prosecution, $100,000 fines and loss of their medical licenses have chilled doctors and hospital systems in treating women with pregnancy complications. More often than not in some states, lawyers are making the decisions.

In Georgia, she said, more people opposed the state’s ban on abortion after six weeks of pregnancy once they were told that this meant two weeks after the average woman misses her period — not, as her own partner believed, six weeks after conception. Some voters, she said, believed that six weeks meant six weeks after women found out they were pregnant.

LF: You made an interesting point about political scientists. They do have a problem in that once you start expanding from your narrow area to take in other areas there are just too many variables. There are too many things to track

Do you think this gives historians an advantage over political scientists because while they may not be scientifically robust they can explain things better?

And, to my mind, doing great violence both to this history, which is far more complex, and to the current set of circumstances which may or may not be relevant to whatever that past tells us

But. and I'm being just a tiny bit flip here, 90 percent of IR theory comes down to three historical questions: What caused the First World War? Was Hitler unique? And how did nuclear weapons affect international politics? Those are all historical questions.

I had the great fortune of being trained by Mark Trachtenberg. You can use some of the advantages that IR theory and political science provide, which is a certain level of precision.

But, taking a historical perspective, you see not just these horizontal connections but also complexity, contingency, chance, circumstances. You become very suspicious of importing historical lessons from the past in total to the present, which you see these days with what people believe to be lessons from the Cold War, the 1930s or Wilhelmine Germany.

I kind of grew up with IR theory. It's an enormously powerful lens to help make sense of the world. It exposes underlying assumptions about research, design, causality and agency.

That problem looked similar to others that we will see coming down the road, be it new emerging technology, the climate crisis, anything involving the ‘Global Commons.’ I was struck that this was a wake-up call

Yet global public health was the low hanging fruit of international political cooperation. We knew this was coming. We knew what to do and we failed miserably.

Russia's behaviour demonstrates that there are other factors involved that drive states to conflict that have not gone away. It's just that a very particular form of war, of unlimited imperial expansion, makes no sense now for states to pursue

Yet, once it eased, our governments and our friends who study these questions went back to normal.

I was disturbed by the fact that the ease with which people began to look at the world through an old lens. With Russia's horrendous invasion of Ukraine there was almost a sense of, well, we know what this is. It looks like World War Two. We have the models to deal with this. This gives us a focus because we have no idea how to deal with these other sets of global problems. The return of great power politics seemed to excuse serious study of these other challenges, which to me were sort of catastrophic.

as a historian I was struck that we use established models to understand international politics without accounting for the profound changes we've gone through, including the doubling of life expectancy. 

That got me into studying and thinking about these issues and inspired me to dive into looking into how a world of scarcity had changed to one of plenty, and how that might change perspectives on how international relations works.

The difference between the world we live in today and the past is that scarcity was an actual physical limit. In the 19th century there was nothing you could do necessarily to produce more food, more fuel, more clean water, more housing. Whereas today we have it completely within our means to solve these scarcity issues.

When those scarcity issues exist it's often the consequence either of some political issue or of us not doing more to alleviate these issues of scarcity. So scarcity today is the result of political circumstances, not a hard physical limit as it was in the past.

In the past, human beings could not get access to the basic resources they need in a consistent way that was predictable. That problem theoretically is now gone. It is not applied universally

If you look at life expectancy curves, the increases pretty much everywhere are extraordinary. In China, which was unimaginably poor, life expectancy has actually surpassed the United States.

The COVID-19 global crisis killed upwards of 20 million people, which is the equivalent of a World War, and was a failure of international cooperation and national domestic responses. Liberal democratic states did poorly; authoritarian states did poorly.

These circumstances were changing underneath in ways that were not recognised. Taming scarcity involved unbelievable increases in agricultural and economic productivity. At the same time there was an unexpected demographic compression where people just stopped having as many kids as expected. This was combined with a variety of other forces including improved governance and massive increases in information about the world. This meant that the historical forces that drove imperial plunder make literally no sense today

European and global politics from the late 19th century to, say, the middle of the 20th century reflected very particular historical circumstances. These drove Imperial conquest. During that period, there was a need for territory to feed populations that were seen as growing geometrically. Those wars of imperial conquest generated many of the disasters both on the European continent and globally

Its hard to imagine now that a geopolitical empire could pull that off. China is actually facing a declining population. People live in cities. They don't need more land.

FG: Even though the problems of plenty were created by developed Western states they hit hard most on states trying to make the transition. So climate change, public health, and inequality affects these states more

The states that have this wealth need people who are drawn in through migration or the efforts to migrate. This is the most divisive political issue globally right now in developed states. The rise of populism in the US and Europe is bound up with the politics of migration, which is a problem of plenty because that generates the magnet that attracts people

In the end, are individual states going to have to work out how to handle these issues in their own ways, or do we need new forms of multilateralism?

FG: I would say it's both. It's a manifesto and I’ve tried to think of some specific policy consequences.

I did a piece for Foreign Policy in which the model I used was of an alien who comes down to Earth every 50 years to assess the situation

Secondly, the problems of plenty, the climate and pandemics, represent the only truly existential threat

The alien would say, why is everyone so sad? I don't have a full explanation but we have deeply bitter, angry politics and some of this has been caused by plenty.

what I say in the essay is that China does terrible things - repression, the Uyghurs, the crackdown on Hong Kong, coercive threats in the South China Sea and Taiwan, its economic policies. It is not a good actor. But what I say is:

in 2024 I'm looking at the numbers, and you live longer. You have this great technology. All the information in the world can be accessed by anyone in this tiny little device for free. On the one hand, under the lingering shadow of our Marxist training, we've done really well. We have great wealth, but we could distribute it better. We've got great technology, but people are miserable. People feel this deep sense of enmity and of anger. That needs to be studied and understood.

if Taiwan were suddenly to be taken over by China, it would not be an existential threat to the United States. It's a very challenging problem, but they need to ask, is this an irredentist problem, that is similar to what happens whenever you have divided two states, whether its the Korean Peninsula, the Middle East, or Kashmi

First, there's one specific threat that can cause World War Three, which is this very difficult challenge of Taiwan. This leads to the question whether China wants Taiwan as an irredentist objective, or is it the beginning of some 1930s like bid for geopolitical hegemony?

We know another pandemic will come and imagine one with more lethality. And don't we have an obligation - both China and the United States - to find some way to work together on these issues even while the other competition persists.

During the Cold War the Soviet Union and the United States were engaged in a far deeper, more bitter ideological and geopolitical political battle that almost ended with a thermonuclear exchange. Yet they worked together to solve two of the greatest problems that plagued humanity. First, the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty, where they came together in 1968 with the UK to limit the spread of nuclear weapons, as a shared responsibility.

At the same time, they worked together at lower levels to eliminate smallpox, a disease that had killed twice as many people as all the wars combined in the 20s century

if these two powers, whose geopolitical and ideological competition was an order of magnitude worse than anything that exists between the United States and China today, could figure out a way to work together why not these two powers now?

If somehow the United States figures out a cure for cancer and at the same time China figures out a cure to the climate crisis would we really not want them to share this with each other and Europe and everyone else?

There's only one existential crisis, which is the climate crisis

And as terrible and tragic as the war in Ukraine is and as threatening and terrifying as Cross Strait relations are between the United States and China, so that they demand attention, neither is existential unless we let them become so.

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t hold these beliefs and never buy fast fashion or a piece of plastic. I hold these beliefs whilst sometimes buying new clothes or out-of-season strawberries in a plastic container. It’s the justification I have a problem with. 

Because I see these arguments constantly. Why should *I* have to do XYZ if a large corporation is doing ABC? Why can’t *I* go on holiday when an insert celebrity is flying their private jet 10x a week? Why should *I* care about this thing when no one cares about this other thing?! 

I’ve become a staunch believer there are few excuses when it comes to actions which directly harm our planet. 

We live in a society where unless you’re very wealthy and VERY time-rich you cannot exist without impacting the planet. Let’s not kid ourselves into believing there is any other reason we live in this way. 

the real question we should be posing is what does giving this stuff up open up for us? How does living in this different way enrich and improve our lives and our wider community’s lives? 

You don’t overconsume because your life is hard and big corporations exist, you overconsume because you live in a society built in a way to funnel you into doing exactly that.1

I wrote ‘the narrative younger people are fed’ because whilst these things are true, I often feel they’re used as a way to keep us down, to keep us depressed and complacent so we don’t rebel.

I think these students believe these narratives to be true, doing so keeps them safe in their current way of living, and allows them to get through the day without as much mental turmoil. 

I’ve been there. I tried to do it all. I tried to be zero-waste-thrift-store-girly, but it drove me crazy. One person can’t live in a completely ‘sustainable’ way, without ever leaving a footprint on this planet, it’s impossible and will only leave you feeling extremely exhausted and extremely guilty. 

The truth is sometimes I buy new socks and plastic contact lenses. Sometimes I want to buy a nice bag and a new pair of shoes and fit in with the wider society and others in my age group. Yes, it plays directly into capitalism’s hands, yes, I am doing what the man wants me to do, I still feel guilty, and I still question all my life choices, but god damn, you gotta live. 

can you blame ‘em? With the narrative younger people are fed these days: you’ll never own a house; the job market is atrocious; good luck building any kind of safety net; another oil and gas line has been approved; one war is brewing and one has broken out; oh look! another recession.

Rather than saying we have to give things up to Save The Earth!, that we have to stop consuming to Live Sustainably!, we need to tell people why living in this alternative way is so rich, so nourishing, so plentiful, so beautiful. 

I’ve quoted before and will quote again from Donella Meadows: “People don’t need enormous cars; they need respect. They don’t need closets full of clothes; they need to feel attractive and they need excitement, variety and beauty. [...] People need identity, community, challenge, acknowledgement, love, joy. To try and fill these needs with material things is to set up an unquenchable appetite for false solutions to real and never-satisfied problems. The resulting psychological emptiness is one of the major forces behind the desire for material growth.”2

Our climate conversations–our climate education–cannot just focus on what we need to give up, instead it must focus on what we get to build and welcome into our lives when we’re not wasting our money, time, and energy on buying or not buying new clothes or plastic-wrapped food.

The majority of my friends growing up did not have hobbies, we found joy and community and connection in consumption. Yes, consuming less is an essential piece of the climate puzzle, but telling people they can no longer consume will not get us there, it will only be taking away many people’s only sense of joy and satisfaction in life. 

We will not empower people by telling them to Be More Sustainable!, we will empower people by inviting them to create a world that finds value and beauty and satisfaction in more human ways, without the dark tint capitalist society has clouded our view with. 

Those of us in the global north are some of the biggest individual contributors to climate change, if we all lived like the average American, we would need 5.1 Earths to sustain us all (sorry, we can’t fob it all off to corporations). 

But, in a way, we are often the ones who are most cut off from any possibility of reactivating older institutions, ones that know how to live in harmony with the environment and the local land and could guide us to a better future.

We’re so dependent on existing systems we don’t even notice they exist–until they break down. Just take away one piece of our modern lifestyles and we are suddenly unable to function. A power cut? No cooking, no heating, no warm showers, not even the ability to boil the kettle for a lukewarm bath.

A food supply chain issue? I don’t know a single person in my local area who grows any type of fruit or vegetables

we also see ourselves as the hero, we’re going to save the world with our unrealistic techno-fixes (that don’t yet exist). We have the self-important sense that if we just had the right technology we could fix all of the world’s problems and then everyone would be happy. 

Westerners are often cast as both the villain and the hero of climate change. We’re the villain because we’ve created so many of these problems with our unquenchable thirst to pillage, develop, and create more and more crap.

I don’t know how we can turn back the wheels of modernised helplessness, but whilst we figure this one out, we need to consider what we want to bring into the new world.

learning new skills for a new future is an act of resilience. Creating a community of individuals who can look after each other is an act of resilience. Building a better way of life for yourself–and those around you–is an act of resilience. 

I can’t yet name the plants I meet on my walks, nor can I name the bird calls I hear outside of my window, but I can learn how to feed my family with food grown in my community garden, support builders and creators using reclaimed materials, and connect with people who live a stone’s throw away from my front door

Anything we learn to do for ourselves–actions that can be taken out of the hands of large corporations in an act of helplessness–is a way of helping our Earth. This is my act of resilience. 

Arguing that “culture war is class warfare,” Mr. Vance has repeatedly encouraged Republicans to use the machinery of government to reclaim institutions that he sees as wholly captured by the left.

In Mr. Vance’s telling, his perspective has been shaped most by his own biography: as a son of Middletown, Ohio; a veteran of a war defined by Washington’s mistakes; an author who was feted by coastal elites whom he came to despise

“You hear European elites and American elites talking in frightened tones about threats to democracy,” he told an interviewer this year. “Isn’t it a greater threat to democracy if people keep voting for less migration but don’t get it?”

He has said that Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist, is a more reputable source of information than Rachel Maddow

Mr. Vance recently contributed an admiring blurb for a book co-written by the far-right activist Jack Posobiec, who promoted the “Pizzagate” hoax. He is also listed as the author of a foreword for an upcoming book by Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and a leader of the Project 2025 initiative

People whom Mr. Vance has cited to explain his worldview or detail who helped shape his thinking include Patrick Deneen, a professor of political science at the University of Notre Dame who has suggested that conservatives must harness the power of the state to counter “liberal totalitarianism”; Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist for whom Mr. Vance worked; and Curtis Yarvin, a prominent voice on the New Right who has argued that American democracy has devolved to the point that the country needs a monarchical leader.

Mr. Vance would not necessarily disagree, those who know him said. He has spent his recent years at the four-way intersection of intellectual debates, campaign rhetoric, outright trolling and actual policy —

Mr. Rufo described Mr. Vance’s intellectual evolution, “somewhat tongue-in-cheek,” as a journey “from the pages of National Review to the fever swamp of right-wing Twitter.”

“In the past, the political right operated under the illusion that institutions could be neutral,” Mr. Rufo said in an interview, “that any use of state power was illegitimate and that the only rightful policy would be to try to roll back or reduce the size of government.”

said the move from a traditionalist like Mr. Pence to Mr. Vance exemplified “how the Republican Party is going to think about power moving forward

Christopher Rufo

He speaks bluntly about what he sees as the limits of America’s reach and resources abroad — “Those days are over,” he has said of the 20th-century “glory years” of American hegemony — and even more forcefully about the prospect of right-wing victories at home if conservatives could only summon the requisite gumption.