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But while the goal of Correos España was to "shine a light on racial inequality and promote diversity, inclusion and equal rights," critics are accusing the company of having a tin ear for racial issues and misreading the sentiment of Black people in Spain.

Any racially aware person would have identified what was wrong with the campaign, it said, adding that the blunder proved the need for more racially aware people in decision-making positions at companies.

The main thrust of the public criticism was that the darker stamps have a lower value, giving the impression that a light skin color is worth more.

The postal service's initiative has divided Spanish anti-racism activists. While the national SOS Racism Federation backed it, the organization's Madrid section poured scorn on the effort.

"At the end of the day, an anti-racism campaign has put out a clearly racist message," Gerehou told the Associated Press on Friday.

The campaign was launched during European Diversity Month in collaboration with Spain's national SOS Racism Federation,

He put the controversy in the context of what he sees as structural racism in Spain, which often goes unacknowledged but can be detected in such aspects as commercial advertising, the Spanish language and in access to housing.

trade with China and the rise of robots are to blame for millions of the missing jobs.

Other popular scapegoats, such as immigration, food stamps and Obamacare, did not even move the needle.

The era of vanishing jobs happened alongside one of the most unusual, disruptive eras in modern economic history — China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 and its subsequent rise to the top of the global export market.

this competition cost the economy about 2.65 million jobs over the period.

Automation also seems to have cost more jobs than it created. Guided by research showing that each robot takes the jobs of about 5.6 workers and that 250,475 robots had been added since 1999, the duo estimated that robots cost the economy another 1.4 million workers.

Abraham and Kearney used previous research into how teens and adults respond to rising wages to produce a high-end estimate of the impact of minimum wages over this period. Other recent research has found either a small effect or no effect. In the end, they combined those figures to find that about 0.49 million workers were lost.

the labor force shrank by about 0.36 million as an increasing number of workers drew disability benefits.

The economists estimated that roughly 0.15 million people were not working because of the expansion of a disability insurance program run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.

There were about 6.5 million former prisoners in the United States between the ages of 18 and 64 in 2014, according to the best available data. Assume that 60 percent of them served time as a result of policies implemented since the 1990s, account for their ages, time served, and pre-prison earnings, and you get a conservative estimate of 0.32 million lost jobs.

What did not reduce employment

Immigration Most research indicates that immigration does not reduce native employment rates.

Food stamps (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) SNAP benefits average about $4.11 per person per day. Able-bodied adults are generally cut off from benefits unless they are working.

The Affordable Care Act Obamacare went into effect in 2014 and has not had a noticeable impact on jobs to date.

Working spouses who allow men to stay home While this is a popular theory, the share of men who are not in the labor force but had a working spouse actually fell slightly between 1999 and 2015

other explanations are out there, pushing and pulling the estimates in either direction.

The paper’s most striking finding is not, however, speculation on idle American youths. It is that many of the topics that dominate political discourse about the labor market — such as immigration, food stamps and Obamacare — are unlikely to bring back lost jobs.

Instead, policymakers should be focusing on the forces that took those jobs in the first place: import competition, automation, incarceration and disability insurance.

Many of these scholars, he correctly notes, adopted the German model of the research university—but, he claims, only for evil purposes. “As racist ideas jumped off their scholarly pages,” he writes, “American scholars were especially enamored with the German ideal of the disinterested, unbiased pursuit of truth through original scholarly studies, and academic freedom to propagandize African inferiority and European superiority [sic].”

just as Kendi argues in Stamped from the Beginning that the racism of some of the founding fathers irrevocably and permanently brands the United States as a racist nation, he claims that these disciplines cannot be taken seriously because of the racism of some of their founders

Kendi complains in the autobiographical sections of How to Be an Antiracist that his parents often talked the same way to him. Nor does it matter to him that the abolitionists bemoaning the condition of black people under slavery were obviously blaming slavery for it. Any negative picture of any group of black people, to him, simply fuels racism.

Two critical ideas emerge from this article. The first is the rejection of the entire western intellectual tradition on the grounds that it is fatally tainted by racism, and the need for a new academic discipline to replace that tradition.

the second—developed at far greater length in Kendi’s other works—is that anyone who finds European and white North American culture to be in any way superior to the culture of black Americans, either slave or free, is a racist, and specifically a cultural racist or an “assimilationist” who believes that black people must become more like white people if they are to progress.

Kendi, in Stamped from the Beginning, designated Phyllis Wheatley, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Sojourner Truth, W. E. B. DuBois, E. Franklin Frazier, Kenneth and Mamie Clark, and other black and white champions of abolition and equal rights as purveyors of racist views. At one time or another, each of them pointed to the backward state of many black people in the United States, either under slavery or in inner-city ghettos, and suggested that they needed literacy and, in some cases, better behavior to advance.

because racism is the only issue that matters to him, he assumes—wrongly—that it was the only issue that mattered to them, and that their disciplines were nothing more than exercises in racist propaganda.

This problem started, he says, “back in the so-called Age of Enlightenment.” Elsewhere he calls the word “enlightenment” racist because it contrasts the light of Europe with the darkness of Africa and other regions.

In fact, the western intellectual tradition of the eighteenth century—the Enlightenment—developed not as an attempt to establish the superiority of the white race, but rather to replace a whole different set of European ideas based on religious faith, the privilege of certain social orders, and the divine right of kings

many thinkers recognized the contradictions between racism and the principles of the Enlightenment—as well as its contradiction to the principles of the Christian religion—from the late eighteenth century onward. That is how abolitionist movements began and eventually succeeded.

Like the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—which has become practically the alternate national anthem of Japan—those principles are not based upon white supremacy, but rather on a universal idea of common humanity which is our only hope for living together on earth.

The western intellectual tradition is not his only target within modern life; he feels the same way about capitalism, which in his scheme has been inextricably bound together with racism since the early modern period.

“To love capitalism,” he says, “is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism.” He has not explained exactly what kind of economic system he would prefer, and his advocacy for reparations suggests that he would be satisfied simply to redistribute the wealth that capitalism has created.

Last but hardly least, Kendi rejects the political system of the United States and enlightenment ideas of democracy as well.

I am constantly amazed at how few people ever mention his response to a 2019 Politico poll about inequality. Here it is in full.

To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principals: Racial inequity is evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official”

The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequity surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas. The DOA would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas.

In other words, to undo the impact of racism as Kendi understands it, the United States needs a totalitarian government run by unaccountable “formally trained experts in racism”—that is, people like Ibram X. Kendi—who would exercise total power over all levels of government and private enterprise

Kendi evidently realizes that the American people acting through their elected representatives will never accept his antiracist program and equalize all rewards within our society, but he is so committed to that program that he wants to throw the American political system out and create a dictatorial body to implement it.

How did a man pushing all these ideas become so popular? The answer, I am sorry to say, is disarmingly simple. He is not an outlier in the intellectual history of the last half-century—quite the contrary.

The Enlightenment, in retrospect, made a bold claim that was bound to get itself into trouble sooner or later: that the application of reason and the scientific method to human problems could improve human life. That idea was initially so exciting and the results of its application for about two centuries were so spectacular that it attained a kind of intellectual hegemony, not only in Europe, but nearly all over the world.

As the last third of the twentieth century dawned, however, the political and intellectual regime it had created was running into new problems of its own. Science had allowed mankind to increase its population enormously, cure many diseases, and live a far more abundant life on a mass scale.

But it had also led to war on an undreamed-of scale, including the actual and potential use of nuclear weapons

As higher education expanded, the original ideas of the Enlightenment—the ones that had shaped the humanities—had lost their novelty and some of their ability to excite.

last but hardly least, the claimed superiority of reason over emotion had been pushed much too far. The world was bursting with emotions of many kinds that could no longer be kept in check by the claims of scientific rationality.

A huge new generation had grown up in abundance and security.

The Vietnam War, a great symbol of enlightenment gone tragically wrong, led not only to a rebellion against American military overreach but against the whole intellectual and political structure behind it.

The black studies movement on campuses that produced Molefi Kete Asante, who in turn gave us Ibram X. Kendi, was only one aspect of a vast intellectual rebellion

Some began to argue that the Enlightenment was simply a new means of maintaining male supremacy, and that women shared a reality that men could not understand. Just five years ago in her book Sex and Secularism, the distinguished historian Joan Wallach Scott wrote, “In fact, gender inequality was fundamental to the articulation of the separation of church and state that inaugurated Western modernity. . . .Euro-Atlantic modernity entailed a new order of women’s subordination” (emphasis in original). Gay and gender activists increasingly denied that any patterns of sexual behavior could be defined as normal or natural, or even that biology had any direct connection to gender. The average graduate of elite institutions, I believe, has come to regard all those changes as progress, which is why the major media and many large corporations endorse them.

Fundamentalist religion, apparently nearly extinct in the mid-twentieth century, has staged an impressive comeback in recent decades, not only in the Islamic world but in the United States and in Israe

Science has become bureaucratized, corrupted by capitalism, and often self-interested, and has therefore lost a good deal of the citizenry’s confidence.

One aspect of the Enlightenment—Adam Smith’s idea of free markets—has taken over too much of our lives.

in the academy, postmodernism promoted the idea that truth itself is an illusion and that every person has the right to her own morality.

The American academy lost its commitment to Enlightenment values decades ago, and journalism has now followed in its wake. Ju

Another aspect of the controversy hasn’t gotten enough attention either. Kendi is a prodigious fundraiser, and that made him a real catch for Boston University.

No matter what happens to Ibram X. Kendi now, he is not an anomaly in today’s intellectual world. His ideas are quite typical, and others will make brilliant careers out of them as well

We desperately need thinkers of all ages to keep the ideas of the Enlightenment alive, and we need some alternative institutions of higher learning to cultivate them once again. But they will not become mainstream any time soon. The last time that such ideas fell off the radar—at the end of the Roman Empire—it took about one thousand years for their renaissance to begin

We do not as individuals have to give into these new ideas, but it does no good to deny their impact. For the time being, they are here to stay.

The findings suggest that political efforts to cut welfare programs are driven less by conservative principles than by racial anxiety, the authors conclude

Those results show that the push to cut welfare programs is not driven by pure political motives, such as decreasing government spending or shrinking government bureaucracy, Wetts said.

Between 2008 and 2012 in particular, they found, opposition to welfare rose among all Americans -- but far more sharply among whites, who also began scoring higher on racial resentment scales during that period

These trends weren’t necessarily linked, however. So to determine if there was a connection, Wetts and Willer designed two more experiments: one in which they quizzed respondents on their feelings about welfare after seeing a graph about U.S. demographic change, and another in which respondents took a similar quiz after viewing information on average income by race and the demographics of welfare beneficiaries.

White Americans called for deeper cuts to welfare programs after viewing charts that showed they would become a racial minority within 50 years. They also opposed welfare programs more when they were told that people of color benefit most from them.

“My main hope here is that people take a step back, look at what these sorts of programs do for the poor, and think about what’s driving opposition to them.”

“We find evidence that these shifts [in sentiment against welfare programs] are specifically directed at programs people see as benefiting minorities instead of whites,” she added.

Wetts isn’t ruling out the possibility that alternate factors could also be at play, of course. Some researchers have found that people embrace more conservative politics during periods of rapid social change -- not necessarily because they fear their racial status is threatened, but because they fear change is happening too fast

Researchers have also shown that white Americans' racial prejudice affects their views on everything from healthcare policy to the death penalty to dogs

On the same day Wetts' paper published, a separate study in the journal Environmental Politics found that people with high levels of "racial resentment" are more likely to believe that the scientific consensus on climate change is false.

"More and more, white Americans use their racial attitudes to help them decide their positions on political questions such as whom to vote for or what stance to take on important issues including welfare and health care."

The Trump administration has begun allowing states to impose work requirements on Medicaid recipients, and has proposed tripling the rents for the poorest households receiving federal housing assistance. The House is also scheduled to vote again next month on a plan to cut $9 billion from food-stamp benefits over 10 years and require most adults to hold a job  to receive payments.

Figures from the federal government and the Kaiser Family Foundation show that white Americans make up 36 percent of food-stamp recipients, 43 percent of Medicaid recipients and 28 percent of recipients for cash welfare.

the signs of a crisis that looks like the Great Depression are impossible to hide. In Anaheim, Calif., home to Disneyland, cars formed half-mile-long lines in two different directions, waiting to pick up free food. In San Antonio, 10,000 cars waited for hours to receive food from a food bank. Even still, Republicans balk at expanding access to food stamps while hunger is on the rise. Nearly one in five children 12 and younger don’t have enough to eat.

That “way of life” may also begin to look like mass homelessness. Through the first five days of April, 31 percent of tenants nationwide had failed to pay their rent

Forty-three million households rent in the U.S., but there is no public rental assistance for residents who lose the ability to afford their rent.

Many elected officials in the Republican Party have access to Covid-19 testing, quality health care and the ultimate cushion of wealth to protect them. Yet they suggest others take the “risk” of returning to work as an act of patriotism

While the recent stimulus bills doled out trillions of dollars to corporate America and the “financial sector,” the smallest allocations have provided cash, food, rent or health care for citizens. The gaps in the thin membrane of a safety net for ordinary Americans have made it impossible to do anything other than return to work.

This isn’t just malfeasance or incompetence. Part of the “American way of life” for at least some of these elected officials is keeping workers just poor enough to ensure that the “essential” work force stays shows up each day

In place of decent wages, hazard pay, robust distribution of personal protective equipment and the simplest guarantees of health and safety, these lawmakers use the threat of starvation and homelessness to keep the work force intact.

In the case of the meatpacking industry, there is not even a veil of choice, as those jobs are inexplicably labeled essential, as if life cannot go on without meat consumption

The largely immigrant and black meatpacking work force has been treated barely better than the carcasses they process. They are completely expendable. Thousands have tested positive, but the plants chug along, while employers offer the bare minimum by way of safety protections, according to workers. If there were any question about the conditions endured in meatpacking plants, consider that 145 meat inspectors have been diagnosed with Covid-19 and three have died.

Discipline in the U.S. has always included low and inconsistent unemployment and welfare combined with stark deprivation. Each has resulted in a hyper-productive work force with few benefits in comparison to America’s peer countries.

if the social distancing and closures were ever going to be successful, it would have meant providing all workers with the means to live in comfort at home while they waited out the disease. Instead, they have been offered the choice of hunger and homelessness or death and disease at work.

The governor of Iowa, Kim Reynolds, made this painfully clear when she announced that not only was Iowa reopening, but that furloughed workers in private or public employment who refused to work out of fear of being infected would lose current unemployment benefits. She described these workers’ choices as a “voluntary quit.”

This is exacerbated by the reluctance of the Trump administration to bail out state governments. That the U.S. government would funnel trillions to corporate America but balk at sending money to state governments also appears to be part of “the American way of life” that resembles the financial sector bailout in 2008.

These are also the bitter fruits of decades of public policies that have denigrated the need for a social safety net while gambling on growth to keep the heads of U.S. workers above water just enough to ward off any real complaints or protests.

During the long and uneven recovery from the Great Recession, the warped distribution of wealth led to protests and labor organizing. The crisis unfolding today is already deeper and much more catastrophic to a wider swath of workers than anything since the 1930s. The status quo is untenable.

“Policymakers need to think as hard about managing the current wave of disruptive innovation as technologists are thinking about turbocharging it.”

But while people do abuse safety nets — and not just poor people (think bank bailouts and special tax treatment of multinational corporations) — I want to see receipt of unemployment insurance, the rolls of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (food stamps), and so on go up in recessions.  In fact, their failure to do so would be a sign that something’s very wrong, like an air bag that failed to deploy in a crash.

There are two reasons that T.A.N.F. was so unresponsive.  First, welfare reform in the mid-1990s significantly increased its work requirements

Second, T.A.N.F. was “block granted,” meaning states receive a fixed amount that is largely insensitive to recessions

this figure provides strong evidence of the effectiveness of the American safety net in the worst recession since the Depression.

The official rate for children goes up over the recession, from 18 percent to 22 percent, but once you include the full force of safety-net (and Recovery Act) measures that kicked in, it holds steady at about 15 percent.

it is a fixture of conservative policy on poverty to apply this same block grant strategy to food stamps and Medicaid.  The numbers and the chart above show this to be a recipe for inelastic response to recession, or, more plainly, a great way to cut some big holes in the safety net.

because the recession is receding, shouldn’t the SNAP rolls be coming down as well?

SNAP rolls remain elevated because their function remains critical in what’s still a tough job market for low-income households. 

the fact is that markets fail, and when they do, income and food supports must rise to protect the most economically vulnerable families.

let’s get this straight: the poor and their advocates were not the ones who tanked the economy.  Nor should they be on the defensive when the safety net expands to offset some of the damage.  The right question at such times is thus not why the SNAP rolls are so high.  It’s whether SNAP, unemployment insurance, T.A.N.F. et al are expanding adequately to meet the needs of the poor.

In practice, or perhaps out of necessity, the Democratic Party in 2006 and 2008 chose the upscale white-downscale minority approach that proved highly successful twice, but failed miserably in 2010, and appears to have a 50-50 chance in 2012.

Calmes and Landler describe how Obama’s re-election campaign plans to deal with the decline in white working class support in Rust Belt states by concentrating on states with high percentages of college educated voters, including Colorado, Virginia and New Hampshire.

“My sense is that if the Democrats stopped fishing there, it is because there are no fish.”

As a practical matter, the Obama campaign and, for the present, the Democratic Party, have laid to rest all consideration of reviving the coalition nurtured and cultivated by Franklin D. Roosevelt. The New Deal Coalition — which included unions, city machines, blue-collar workers, farmers, blacks, people on relief, and generally non-affluent progressive intellectuals — had the advantage of economic coherence. It received support across the board from voters of all races and religions in the bottom half of the income distribution, the very coherence the current Democratic coalition lacks.

A top priority of the less affluent wing of today’s left alliance is the strengthening of the safety net, including health care, food stamps, infant nutrition and unemployment compensation. These voters generally take the brunt of recessions and are most in need of government assistance to survive. According to recent data from the Department of Agriculture, 45.8 million people, nearly 15 percent of the population, depend on the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program to meet their needs for food.The better-off wing, in contrast, puts at the top of its political agenda a cluster of rights related to self-expression, the environment, demilitarization, and, importantly, freedom from repressive norms — governing both sexual behavior and women’s role in society — that are promoted by the conservative movement.

Congress authorized tens of billions of dollars for food stamps and other nutrition programs to slow the rise of hunger, but not enough to bring it back down to pre-recession levels.

49 million Americans suffered from food insecurity. Food stamp use has risen to historic levels

Blondness, then, exists as a complicated form of self-expression. It can signal youth, beauty, privilege, and conformity. But it can also represent rebellion, independence, and the demand to be looked at and respected. It’s a choice that’s both distinctly personal and deeply intertwined with what society has taught people to value. Rankine and Lucas have a term for that: complicit freedom

The S&P 500-stock index has risen more than 23 percent since Election Day last year. Along with a rising real estate market, that's helped to push the nation's total household wealth to $96.9 trillion. However, as NPR noted last spring, only about half the people in the country own stocks either directly or through retirement accounts.

“It’s a hard situation because we have let this go for so long,” said Jeanine Guidry, an assistant professor at Virginia Commonwealth University who studies social media and health information. “People using social media have really been able to share what they want for nearly a decade.”

One such page, The Truth About Cancer, has more than a million Facebook followers after years of posting baseless suggestions that vaccines could cause autism or damage children’s brains. The page was identified in November as a “COVID-19 vaccine misinformation super spreader” by NewsGuard.

Facebook said it is taking taking “aggressive steps to fight misinformation across our apps by removing millions of pieces of COVID-19 and vaccine content on Facebook and Instagram during the pandemic.”

As U.S. vaccine supplies continue to increase, immunization efforts will soon shift from targeting a limited supply to the most vulnerable populations to getting as many shots into as many arms as possible.

YouTube, which has generally avoided the same type scrutiny as its social media peers despite being a source of misinformation, said it has removed more than 30,000 videos since October, when it started banning false claims about COVID-19 vaccinations.

Prior to the pandemic, however, social media platforms had done little to stamp out misinformation, said Andy Pattison, manager of digital solutions for the World Health Organization.

“It’s a very fine line between freedom of speech and eroding science,” Pattison said. Purveyors of misinformation, he said, “learn the rules, and they dance right on the edge, all the time.”

But blatantly false COVID-19 information continues to pop up. Earlier this month, several articles circulating online claimed that more elderly Israelis who took the Pfizer vaccine were “killed” by the shot than those who died from COVID-19 itself. One such article from an anti-vaccination website was shared nearly 12,000 times on Facebook, leading earlier this month to a spike of nearly 40,000 mentions of “vaccine deaths” across social platforms and the internet, according to an analysis by media intelligence firm Zignal Labs.

Facebook also banned ads that discourage vaccines and said it has added warning labels to more than 167 million pieces of additional COVID-19 content thanks to our network of fact-checking partners.

“Vaccine hesitancy and misinformation could be a big barrier to getting enough of the population vaccinated to end the crisis,” said Lisa Fazio, a professor of psychology at Vanderbilt University.

“If someone truly believes that the COVID vaccine is harmful and they feel a responsibility to share that with friends and family ... they will find a way,” Guidry said.

When the Center for Countering Digital Hate recently studied the crossover between different types of disinformation and hate speech, it found that Instagram tended to cross-pollinate misinformation via its algorithm.

The new restrictions were first announced as Trump signed the 2018 Farm Bill, a federal relief for distressed farmers, that included stricter work requirements. Those requirements were ultimately dropped.

of the show’s stars have disappeared into a vast new gulag in which more than 1m people, most of them Uyghurs, have been locked up.

Officials say the camps offer “vocational education” to help Uyghurs find better jobs and to curb their “extremist” tendencies.

shown no more sign of extremism than simply being devout Muslims.

their crime has been to show too much enthusiasm for Uyghur culture, not necessarily just Islam.

Uyghur groups in the West reckon the four are among nearly 400 intellectuals and cultural figures who have been detained in the new camps, sent to regular prisons or who have otherwise disappeared since the clampdown began.

Others associated with Uyghur culture have been paraded on state television praising the virtues of the Communist Party or singing patriotic songs.

Mr Tohti had maintained a website that hosted writing by Uyghur intellectuals on social and cultural issues.

In September 2014 Ilham Tohti, a revered academic with moderate political views, was sentenced to life in prison for separatism.

conforming to a stereotype endorsed by the party such as smiling Uyghurs wearing brightly coloured traditional costume, dancing in public squares and singing, often in Mandarin

Uyghurs in exile have been waging a parallel campaign to keep their culture alive

There are still underground artists in Xinjiang, she says. As repression has tightened, their works have become increasingly suffused with lament and despair.

Mr Tursun’s writings and links with other cultural personalities in Xinjiang may have led to his detention in 2018 and his reported jail term of 16 years.

But displays of loyalty to the party are no longer enough to keep people safe.

It includes fawning lyrics such as: “You put light into the hearts of the people.” Uyghurs in exile were dismayed to hear a much-loved performer crooning for the regime.

It returned last year, with changes. Introducing the new series, the host made approving remarks about building socialism in Xinjiang and loving the party.

In the show’s early days, this would have been “unimaginable”, says Elise Anderson of the Uyghur Human Rights Project in Washington, an American ethnomusicologist who competed in the inaugural series of “The Voice of the Silk Road” in 2014.

Water pumps powered by cheap and highly efficient solar panels are able to drill deep down into rapidly dwindling desert aquifers. The solar panels have helped generate bumper opium harvests year after year since farmers in southern Afghanistan’s poppy-growing belt began installing them around 2014.

The opium trade earned about $1.8 billion to $2.7 billion last year, the United Nations has estimated. Opium sales have provided 9 to 14 percent of Afghanistan’s gross domestic product, compared with 9 percent provided by legal exports of goods and services.

The solar arrays have been central to ensuring Afghanistan’s status as the global leader in opium.

The Taliban, for their part, have condemned opium as anti-Islamic, as Afghanistan’s poppy crop sustains addicts in Europe and the Middle East, as well as a huge number inside Afghanistan. But given their own deep ties to opium smuggling during the insurgency, Taliban leaders are walking a fine line between hypocrisy and holiness.

Now, solar power is a defining feature of southern Afghan life. Tiny solar panels power light bulbs in mud huts, and solar-driven pumps irrigate cash crops like wheat and pomegranates, as well as subsistence farmers’ vegetable plots.

The panels, which supplanted more expensive and less reliable diesel to run water pumps, have helped turn the desert green.

Opium farmers now rely on at least 67,000 solar-power-fed water reservoirs across Afghanistan’s desert southwest, according to a European Union-funded research project by David Mansfield, a consultant who has studied illicit economies and rural livelihoods in Afghanistan for two decades.

“For many opium farmers, abundant water is now a given,” he said. “No one perceives it to have a cost.”

“Do not destroy the fields, but make the fields dry out,” Gov. Maulave Talib Akhund said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to fulfilling the opium decree.”

The opium ban was met with a collective shrug this spring by southern farmers, many of whom were already harvesting their spring crops. Opium prices surged almost immediately, several farmers said, to roughly $180 per kilogram from $60 per kilogram.

But the Taliban have vowed to crack down on farmers who try to cultivate any new crops.

Dr. Mansfield said that determining how long the aquifers could continue to supply water was uncharted territory because no one had been able to conduct a rigorous scientific study of the desert groundwater.

“We have to continue to dig our wells deeper and deeper,” Mr. Armani said.

Even when prices are high, many poppy farmers say, they earn only about $2 a day for each family member. They are at the very bottom of a narcotic trafficking system in which profits increase exponentially from growers to middlemen to processing labs to major cross-border traffickers.

Farmers whose poppy fields were plowed under by the previous government could send their sons to paying jobs as soldiers or police officers — or to the constellation of unskilled jobs provided by the United States and NATO. But those options are gone, and unemployment has soared under the Taliban.

“Growing poppies is the only option to survive right now,” he said.

“If you don’t have a free program, the vast majority of your customers are blank to you,”

Mr. Daunt said the new paid-membership program would replace a previous one, which offered discounts for purchases made inside Barnes & Noble’s physical stores—as well as free shipping for most online orders—and cost $25 a year. That plan didn’t extend discounts to online shoppers, a strategy that Mr. Daunt said conflicts with the retailer’s strategy of making books available wherever customers want to buy them. 

great gaming experiences speak to our inner desire for mastery, autonomy and purpose, Mr. Zichermann noted. The same can be said of travel. “Why do we travel?” he said. “It’s all about creating memories and discovering ourselves. Gamification is perfectly aligned with that.”

Some of the fundamental ideas are derived from research by the social scientist BJ Fogg at Stanford University; you can learn about gaming your own behavior at Behaviorwizard.org.

Even acquiring travel skills has become a game with language-learning Web sites like Duolingo and MindSnacks.

Despite gamification’s popularity, there are many poorly designed experiences. In fact, the technology research company Gartner is predicting that by next year 80 percent of gamification projects will fail to meet business objectives. When done right, however, gamification can garner brand loyalty while also helping travelers interact, learn, share opinions and explore the world.

companies that specialize in gamification say they are trying to design experiences that are emotional, that delight or surprise, unlike early loyalty programs