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"Firearm sales spiked in March 2020 and have remained at unprecedented levels since. It's a remarkable feat of firearm manufacturers to keep pace with this blistering demand."

No state has seen more gun sales this year than Illinois.

Illinois' FOID Act, which requires gun purchasers to obtain a special ID from state police, was established in 1968, but the system was overwhelmed with requests a year ago when the pandemic fueled a national surge in first-time gun buyers.

"We continue to sell everything that comes into the store within a couple of days," Eldridge said. "When people that live in high crime areas hear a lot of talk and even legislative action to defund the police, it's reasonable for them to take steps to protect themselves."

Eldridge and Oliva said gun sales have been limited by supply. Since the panemic began, Americans buying firearms faster than gun makers can manufacture them.

April gun sales across the nation were down 25% from March, which set a new record for monthly gun sales thanks to a series of high-profile mass shootings that spurred President Joe Biden and Democrats in Congress to push for passing new federal gun control measures that would expand background check requirements and limit or ban future sales of so-called assault weapons.

many of the advances cited as Chinese strengths don’t hold up to close scrutiny. American analysts often publish worries about China’s growing navy, and especially its two aircraft carriers. But, Beckley writes, “Chinese pilots fly 100 to 150 fewer hours than U.S. pilots and only began training on aircraft carriers in 2012,” and he adds that “Chinese troops spend 20 to 30 percent of their time studying communist ideology.”

The book argues that China’s economic, financial, technological, and military strength is hugely exaggerated by crude and inaccurate statistics.

The claim that China will “overtake” the U.S. in any meaningful way is polemical and wrong—and wrong in ways that may mislead Americans into serious self-harming mistakes.

China may well surpass the United States as the largest economy on Earth by the 2030s. China was also almost certainly the largest economy on Earth in the 1830s. A big GDP did not make China a superpower then

Worried about Chinese students’ high scores on comparative math tests? You’re looking at the curated outputs of highly selective groups of students. Whereas public school is free through high school in the United States, China’s government only covers the costs of elementary and middle school. At many Chinese high schools, families have to pay tuition and other expenses, and these outlays are among the highest in the world. Consequently, 76 percent of China’s working-age population has not completed high school.

in the 1800s, the Chinese empire had a GDP much larger than that of Great Britain. The Chinese army of 800,000 men also enormously exceeded Britain’s troop numbers. Yet when the two states clashed in the two Opium Wars, from 1839 to 1842 and again in 1858, China was crushingly defeated. Why? A great part of the answer, then as now, was the cost of repression.

Many Chinese college students describe their universities as “diploma factories,” where student-teacher ratios are double the average in U.S. universities, cheating is rampant, students spend a quarter of their time studying “Mao Zedong thought,” and students and professors are denied access to basic sources of information, such as Google Scholar and certain academic journal repositories.

Chinese firms’ total spending on R&D as a percentage of sales revenue stalled at levels four times below the average for American firms. … Chinese firms remain dependent on foreign technologies and manual labor and have a rudimentary level of automation and digitization: on average Chinese enterprises have just nineteen robots per ten thousand employees; U.S. firms, by contrast, use an average of 176 robots per ten thousand employees.

But isn’t China sprinting to overtake the United States? Yes, but it’s stumbling badly in that pursuit. China now leads the world in retractions of scientific studies due to fraud; one-third of Chinese scientists have admitted to plagiarizing or falsifying results (versus 2 percent of U.S. scientists); and two-thirds of China’s R&D spending has been lost to corruption.

Beckley’s clarifying theoretical insight: Repression is expensive

The Chinese military’s first and paramount mission is preserving the power of the Chinese Communist Party against China’s own people. The U.S. military can focus entirely on external threats.

The lines that plot the comparative GDP of the United States and China distort the real balance of power between the two societies, Beckley argues, because China must devote such a large share of its resources to basic subsistence needs to avert the overthrow of the state.

this might be a useful moment to hear a contrary voice. In 2018, the Tufts University professor Michael Beckley published a richly detailed study of Chinese military and economic weaknesses. The book is titled Unrivaled: Why America Will Remain the World’s Sole Superpower.

Nineteenth-century China faced an average of 25 local uprisings a year. Most of its troops had to be deployed to suppress rebellions and control banditry, leaving few available for war-fighting.

A final piece of the answer is that technological copycats face huge disadvantages against technological innovators. They will always lag behind the more creative rival, not only in the factory, but on the battlefield. “Repeatedly during the Opium Wars … Chinese armies of thousands were routed in minutes by a few hundred, or even a few dozen, British troops,”

Beckley seeks to highlight the immense defects of gross GDP as a measure of national strength—factoring in the costs of repression—and the strategic predicament of China’s location, barred from the open ocean by a ring of potential enemies on its eastern front, extending from Russia, through Korea, past Japan, to the Philippines, and then to Vietnam.

He said that he had become more alarmed by China’s aggressive and repressive intentions, but remained as dubious as ever about Chinese capacities.

Sanders lost the nomination, but he won the debate within the Democratic Party over trade policy. In his address, Biden committed to extending and enlarging “Buy American” favoritism in government procurement. His administration is maintaining Trump’s anti-China tariffs and is “reviewing”—not yet removing—tariffs against the European Union and other trade partners. Biden economic advisers warned during his campaign that trade expansion would rank low on their list of priorities, and so it is proving.

The Trump administration raised the defense budget by more than $100 billion a year, and the spending increases have continued even after the campaign against ISIS came to an end. More and more of the money is being directed to preparations for a conflict with China.

China’s language and behavior is assertive and provocative, for sure. China’s power is rising, yes. Its behavior at home and abroad is becoming more oppressive and more brutal; that’s also tragically true.

as Americans muster the courage and will to face Chinese realities, that reckoning needs also to appreciate the tremendous capabilities of this country, and the very real limits besetting China: a fast-aging population, massive internal indebtedness, and a regime whose worsening repression suggests its declining popularity.

two deep truths about Chinese society: It’s about to be home to a lot of old people, and trust in the state is very low, and for good reason.

As China’s population ages, it will deplete its savings. Chinese people save a lot to compensate for the state’s meager social-security provision. For three decades, the savings of ordinary people financed the spectacular borrowing of China’s state-owned enterprises

What happens as the savings are withdrawn to finance hundreds of millions of retirements? Again—who knows?

China misallocates capital on a massive scale. More than a fifth of China’s housing stock is empty—the detritus of a frenzied construction boom that built too many apartments in the wrong places

China overcapitalizes at home because Chinese investors are prohibited from doing what they most want to do: get their money out of China. Strict and complex foreign-exchange controls block the flow of capital

More than one-third of the richest Chinese would emigrate if they could, according to research by one of the country’s leading wealth-management firms. The next best alternative: sending their children out. Pre-pandemic, almost 1 million young Chinese attended Western universities. Pre-pandemic, only about 10,000 Americans were studying in China; single thousands were from other Western countries—and almost all of them were in the country to study language, not any academic specialty.

U.S. policy makers should look to the future with a little more confidence and a lot more trust in trade, markets, and the superior potential of a free people under an elected government.

Officials once boastful about their preparedness were frantically trying to secure protective gear and materials for tests, as death rates soared in Britain, France, Spain, Italy and Belgium.

Many European leaders felt so secure after the last pandemic — the 2009 swine flu — that they scaled back stockpiles of equipment and faulted medical experts for overreacting.

But that confidence would prove their undoing. Their pandemic plans were built on a litany of miscalculations and false assumptions

European leaders boasted of the superiority of their world-class health systems but had weakened them with a decade of cutbacks. When Covid-19 arrived, those systems were unable to test widely enough to see the peak coming — or to guarantee the safety of health care workers after it hit.

Accountability mechanisms proved toothless. Thousands of pages of national pandemic planning turned out to be little more than exercises in bureaucratic busy work

Officials in some countries barely consulted their plans; in other countries, leaders ignored warnings about how quickly a virus could spread.

Mathematical models used to predict pandemic spreads — and to shape government policy — fed a false sense of security.

National stockpiles of medical supplies were revealed to exist mostly on paper, consisting in large part of “just in time” contracts with manufacturers in China. European planners overlooked the risk that a pandemic, by its global nature, could disrupt those supply chains

Now South Korea, with a death toll below 300, is a paragon of success against the pandemic. Many epidemiologists there are dumbfounded at the mess made by their mentors.

Europe is grappling with how a continent considered among the most advanced failed so miserably.

Dr. Whitty, 54, initially praised in British newspapers as the reassuring “geek-in-chief,” has declined to speak publicly about his role in those decisions. His friends say the government has set him up to take the blame.

Sir David King, a former British chief science officer, said, “The word ‘arrogance’ comes to mind, I am afraid.” He added: “What hubris.”

when swine flu emerged, British leaders again turned to Professor Ferguson and the large modeling department he had built at Imperial College. He projected that swine flu, in a reasonable worst case, could kill nearly 70,000.

But the modelers’ “reasonable worst case” was wildly off. Swine flu ended up killing fewer than 500 people in Britain, less than in a seasonal flu.

For Mr. Johnson, the swine flu episode reinforced instincts not to impose restrictions in the name of public health.

Some experts now say Europe learned the wrong lesson from the swine flu.

“It created some kind of complacency,” said Prof. Steven Van Gucht, a virologist involved in the Belgian response. “Oh, a pandemic again? We have a good health system. We can cope with this.”

It also coincided with Europe’s worst economic slump in decades. French legislators were furious at the cost of buying millions of doses of vaccines and faulted the government for needlessly stockpiling more than 1.7 billion protective masks.

The idea of a government warehousing medical supplies came to seem outdated,” said Francis Delattre, a French senator who raised alarms about dependence on China. “Our fate was put into the hands of a foreign dictatorship.”

“France has a superiority complex,” Mr. Delattre added, “especially when it comes to the health sector.”

“It’s pretty difficult to build a stockpile for something you’ve not seen before,” said Dr. Ben Killingley, an infectious disease expert who advises the government on what to stockpile. “It depends how much you want to spend on your insurance.”

National governments barred the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control from setting benchmarks or pointing out deficiencies. So the agency’s public remarks were almost unfailingly positive

“We couldn’t say, ‘You should have this,’” said Arthur Bosman, a former agency trainer. “The advice and the assessment had to be phrased in an observation.”

the European Union in 2016 solicited bids to build a continent-wide repository. But the initiative fizzled because Britain, France and other large countries thought they had the situation covered

European and global health officials had thoroughly reviewed Belgium’s pandemic plan over the years. But when Covid-19 hit, Belgian officials did not even consult it.

“It has never been used,” said Dr. Emmanuel André, who was drafted to help lead the country’s coronavirus response

“I don’t understand why we were not prepared,” said Dr. Matthieu Lafaurie, of the Saint-Louis hospital in Paris. “It was very surprising that every country had to realize itself what was going on, as if they didn’t have the examples of other countries.

He insisted that he had warned privately in early March that Britain’s insufficient testing meant the scientists did not have enough information to track the epidemic.Across Europe, he said, more testing “would have been the single thing which would have made the biggest difference.”

there is another lesson to learn, said Dr. André, who spent years fighting epidemics in Africa before advising Belgium on the coronavirus.“They keep on telling countries what they should do, very clearly. But all these experts, when it happens in your own countries? There’s nothing,” he said.“One lesson to learn is humility.”

on average, the rate of black fatalities is 2.4 times that of whites with Covid-19

In states including Michigan, Kansas and Wisconsin and in Washington, D.C., that ratio jumps to five to seven black people dying of Covid-19 complications for every one white death

one interpretation of these disparities that has gained traction is the idea that black people are unduly obese (currently defined as a body mass index greater than 30)

black people are overrepresented in service positions and as essential workers who have greater exposure than those with the luxury of sheltering in place

has served to reinforce an image of black people as wholly swept up in sensuous pleasures like eating and drinking, which supposedly makes our unruly bodies repositories of preventable weight-related illnesses.

When I learned about guidelines suggesting that doctors may use existing health conditions, including obesity, to deny or limit eligibility to lifesaving coronavirus treatments, I couldn’t help thinking of the slavery-era debates I’ve studied about whether or not so-called “constitutionally weak” African-Americans should receive medical care.

The New York Times’ 1619 Project featured essays detailing how the legacy of slavery impacted health and health care for African-Americans and explaining how, since the since the era of slavery, black people’s bodies have been labeled congenitally diseased and undeserving of access to lifesaving treatments.

the legacy of redlining that pushed black people into poor, densely populated communities often with limited access to health care

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 42.2 percent of white Americans and 49.6 percent of African-Americans are obese. Researchers have yet to clarify how a 7 percentage-point disparity in obesity prevalence translates to a 240 percent-700 percent disparity in fatalities.

Even before Covid-19, black Americans had higher rates of multiple chronic illnesses and a lower life expectancy than white Americans, regardless of weight. This is an indication that our social structures are failing us

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, who died last month, utterly rejected this account of faith and reason. 

The God of the Hebrew Bible, he believed, was never the God of the Academy to begin with. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is neither the unmoved mover nor the ground of being, but a historical God, who has put himself in dialogue and relationship with one people, the Jews.

little about him could be deduced by processes of reason. He is best known, rather, through the moral revolution heralded by Abrahamic faith: Judaism first, followed by Christianity and Islam.

De-Hellenization was thus no skin off the back of biblical faith, rightly understood. For, in this telling, the faith of the Jews, including Jesus, had always sat uneasily with the “faith” of Plato and Aristotle.

The synthesis between the two collapsed once its Greek metaphysical structure gave way to the battering ram of modern science.

The God of the Bible, Sacks contended, was lost in the bargain of Saint Paul’s ambition to spread his newfound faith to the Greco-Roman sphere. More to the point, God was lost in translation. The Greek language, with its left-to-right script, per Sacks, tends toward abstraction and universalization, whereas Hebrew is fundamentally a “right-brained” language, tending toward narrative and particularity.

The result was that the West received an abstract, theoretical version of a supremely narrativistic deity.

The Hebrew Bible, Sacks believed, has no “theory” of being itself, of natural law or of political regimes.

Sacks was, in truth, a pure anti-metaphysicist. In his 2011 book, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning, he declared: “We cannot prove that life is meaningful and that God exists.”

he was thrilled by his atheist teachers’ demolition of the classical proofs for God, which he’d always considered a kind of cheap sleight of hand.

“Neither can we prove that love is better than hate, altruism than selfishness, forgiveness than the desire for revenge.” All of these statements are a matter of “interpretation,” rather than of “explanation,” and all interpretations are beyond proof or falsification.

The quest for ultimate meaning, he argued, falls into the same territory as “ethics, aesthetics and metaphysics”—and “in none of these three disciplines can anything of consequence be proved.”

Ethics, aesthetics, and metaphysics are great “repositories of human wisdom,” to be sure, but they simply don’t belong in “the same universe of discourse” as science.

If we distinguish the two discourses, neither need threaten the other: The one (science) explains the world by “taking things apart,” as Sacks put it; the other (religion) puts them back together via interpretation and moral formation.

For many Catholic intellectuals, not least Benedict XVI, restoring religion to its rightful place in human affairs involves undoing the philosophical mistakes of nominalism and of the Reformation, which the pope emeritus singled out for criticism in his much-misunderstood 2006 Regensburg Lecture.

We must dilate reason’s scope, Benedict thought, so that “reasoning” might again include more than merely observing phenomena and identifying their efficient material causes. Sacks did not think faith and reason could be reunited in this way.

But shouldn't we try? I seek ultimate meaning, yes, but I want that meaning to be true in a way that satisfies reason’s demands. And there lies the disagreement, I think, between “Regensburg Catholics,” if you will, and the various de-Hellenizing strands of contemporary religious thought.

despite rejecting almost in toto the Church’s account of faith and reason, Sacks nevertheless credited it for the fundamental humaneness of Western civilization.

More than that, the rabbi blamed the mass horrors of modernity on the narrow and arrogant rationalism that supplanted the old synthesis.

“Outside religion,” he wrote, there is no secure base for the unconditional source of worth that in the West has come from the idea that we are each in God’s image.

Though many have tried to create a secular substitute, none has ultimately succeeded. None has stood firm under pressure. That has been demonstrated four times in the modern world, when an attempt was made to create a social order on secular lines: the French Revolution, Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Communist China. When there is a bonfire of sanctities, lives are lost.

As a student of Jewish history, Sacks knew well that the old synthesis of faith and reason wasn’t always a guarantee against unreason when it came to the treatment of Jews within Christendom. Nevertheless, he was far more wary of the merciless abstractions of the post-Enlightenment era

Sacks, to be clear, was no counter-Enlightenment thinker. And he paid gracious tribute to the modern scientific enterprise as an almost-miraculous instance of human cooperation with divine creativity.

Nevertheless, he insisted, the Enlightenment ideology, with its tendency to apply the methods of scientific inquiry to all of life, “dehumanize[d] human beings.” Its universalist “reason” detested particularity, not least the stubborn particularity of the Jewish people

Moreover, it targeted for demolition, in the name of humanity and reason, “the local, the church, the neighborhood, the community, even the family, the things that make us different, attached.”

Sacks saw similar dangers at work in today’s market liberalism: “a loss of belief in the dignity and sanctity of life”; “the loss of the politics of covenant, the idea that society is a place where we undertake collective responsibility for the common good”; “a loss of morality”; “the loss of marriage”; and the loss of “the possibility of a meaningful life.” In short, the technocratic dystopia we are stumbling into.

Except, Sacks rightly insisted, we don’t have to, provided we can make room in our lives and societies for “the still-small voice that the Bible tells us is the voice of God”:

Sacks felt that divine voice couldn’t be definitively reasoned about, certainly not in the way that, say, Benedict XVI called for. Yet the rabbi’s own public presence—supremely learned yet humble and unfailingly charitable, even to his most vicious secularist opponents—was and will remain an enduring testament to the reasonableness of faith. 

Traditionally, a scientist submits her paper to a journal, which sends it to a (surprisingly small) group of peers for (several rounds of usually anonymous) comments; if the paper passes this (typically months-long) peer-review gantlet, it is published (often behind an expensive paywall). Languid and opaque, this system is ill-suited to a fast-moving outbreak. But biomedical scientists can now upload preliminary versions of their papers, or “preprints,” to freely accessible websites, allowing others to immediately dissect and build upon their results. This practice had been slowly gaining popularity before 2020, but proved so vital for sharing information about COVID‑19 that it will likely become a mainstay of modern biomedical research. Preprints accelerate science, and the pandemic accelerated the use of preprints. At the start of the year, one repository, medRxiv (pronounced “med archive”), held about 1,000 preprints. By the end of October, it had more than 12,000.

The U.S. is now catching up. In April, the NIH launched a partnership called ACTIV, in which academic and industry scientists prioritized the most promising drugs and coordinated trial plans across the country. Since August, several such trials have started.

Researchers have begun to uncover how SARS‑CoV‑2 compares with other coronaviruses in wild bats, the likely reservoir; how it infiltrates and co-opts our cells; how the immune system overreacts to it, creating the symptoms of COVID‑19. “We’re learning about this virus faster than we’ve ever learned about any virus in history,” Sabeti said.

Similar triumphs occurred last year—in other countries. In March, taking advantage of the United Kingdom’s nationalized health system, British researchers launched a nationwide study called Recovery, which has since enrolled more than 17,600 COVID‑19 patients across 176 institutions. Recovery offered conclusive answers about dexamethasone and hydroxychloroquine and is set to weigh in on several other treatments. No other study has done more to shape the treatment of COVID‑19.

SARS‑CoV‑2’s genome was decoded and shared by Chinese scientists just 10 days after the first cases were reported. By November, more than 197,000 SARS‑CoV‑2 genomes had been sequenced. About 90 years ago, no one had even seen an individual virus; today, scientists have reconstructed the shape of SARS‑CoV‑2 down to the position of individual atoms

Respiratory viruses, though extremely common, are often neglected. Respiratory syncytial virus, parainfluenza viruses, rhinoviruses, adenoviruses, bocaviruses, a quartet of other human coronaviruses—they mostly cause mild coldlike illnesses, but those can be severe. How often? Why? It’s hard to say, because, influenza aside, such viruses attract little funding or interest.

COVID‑19 has developed a terrifying mystique because it seems to behave in unusual ways. It causes mild symptoms in some but critical illness in others. It is a respiratory virus and yet seems to attack the heart, brain, kidneys, and other organs. It has reinfected a small number of people who had recently recovered. But many other viruses share similar abilities; they just don’t infect millions of people in a matter of months or grab the attention of the entire scientific community

Thanks to COVID‑19, more researchers are looking for these rarer sides of viral infections, and spotting them.

These factors pull researchers toward speed, short-termism, and hype at the expense of rigor—and the pandemic intensified that pull. With an anxious world crying out for information, any new paper could immediately draw international press coverage—and hundreds of citations.

“There’s a perception that they’re just colds and there’s nothing much to learn,” says Emily Martin of the University of Michigan, who has long struggled to get funding to study them. Such reasoning is shortsighted folly. Respiratory viruses are the pathogens most likely to cause pandemics, and those outbreaks could potentially be far worse than COVID‑19’s.

Their movements through the air have been poorly studied, too. “There’s this very entrenched idea,” says Linsey Marr at Virginia Tech, that viruses mostly spread through droplets (short-range globs of snot and spit) rather than aerosols (smaller, dustlike flecks that travel farther). That idea dates back to the 1930s, when scientists were upending outdated notions that disease was caused by “bad air,” or miasma. But the evidence that SARS‑CoV‑2 can spread through aerosols “is now overwhelming,”

Another pandemic is inevitable, but it will find a very different community of scientists than COVID‑19 did. They will immediately work to determine whether the pathogen—most likely another respiratory virus—moves through aerosols, and whether it spreads from infected people before causing symptoms. They might call for masks and better ventilation from the earliest moments, not after months of debate

They will anticipate the possibility of an imminent wave of long-haul symptoms, and hopefully discover ways of preventing them. They might set up research groups to prioritize the most promising drugs and coordinate large clinical trials. They might take vaccine platforms that worked best against COVID‑19, slot in the genetic material of the new pathogen, and have a vaccine ready within months

the single-minded focus on COVID‑19 will also leave a slew of negative legacies. Science is mostly a zero-sum game, and when one topic monopolizes attention and money, others lose out.

Long-term studies that monitored bird migrations or the changing climate will forever have holes in their data because field research had to be canceled.

negligence has left COVID‑19 long-haulers with few answers or options, and they initially endured the same dismissal as the larger ME community. But their sheer numbers have forced a degree of recognition. They started researching, cataloging their own symptoms. They gained audiences with the NIH and the World Health Organization. Patients who are themselves experts in infectious disease or public health published their stories in top journals. “Long COVID” is being taken seriously, and Brea hopes it might drag all post-infection illnesses into the spotlight. ME never experienced a pivot. COVID‑19 might inadvertently create one

Other epistemic trespassers spent their time reinventing the wheel. One new study, published in NEJM, used lasers to show that when people speak, they release aerosols. But as the authors themselves note, the same result—sans lasers—was published in 1946, Marr says. I asked her whether any papers from the 2020 batch had taught her something new. After an uncomfortably long pause, she mentioned just one.

The incentives to trespass are substantial. Academia is a pyramid scheme: Each biomedical professor trains an average of six doctoral students across her career, but only 16 percent of the students get tenure-track positions. Competition is ferocious, and success hinges on getting published

Conservationists who worked to protect monkeys and apes kept their distance for fear of passing COVID‑19 to already endangered species.

Among scientists, as in other fields, women do more child care, domestic work, and teaching than men, and are more often asked for emotional support by their students. These burdens increased as the pandemic took hold, leaving women scientists “less able to commit their time to learning about a new area of study, and less able to start a whole new research project,

published COVID‑19 papers had 19 percent fewer women as first authors compared with papers from the same journals in the previous year. Men led more than 80 percent of national COVID‑19 task forces in 87 countries. Male scientists were quoted four times as frequently as female scientists in American news stories about the pandemic.

American scientists of color also found it harder to pivot than their white peers, because of unique challenges that sapped their time and energy.

Science suffers from the so-called Matthew effect, whereby small successes snowball into ever greater advantages, irrespective of merit. Similarly, early hindrances linger. Young researchers who could not pivot because they were too busy caring or grieving for others might suffer lasting consequences from an unproductive year. COVID‑19 “has really put the clock back in terms of closing the gap for women and underrepresented minorities,”

In 1848, the Prussian government sent a young physician named Rudolf Virchow to investigate a typhus epidemic in Upper Silesia. Virchow didn’t know what caused the devastating disease, but he realized its spread was possible because of malnutrition, hazardous working conditions, crowded housing, poor sanitation, and the inattention of civil servants and aristocrats—problems that require social and political reforms. “Medicine is a social science,” Virchow said, “and politics is nothing but medicine in larger scale.”

entists discovered the microbes responsible for tuberculosis, plague, cholera, dysentery, and syphilis, most fixated on these newly identified nemeses. Societal factors were seen as overly political distractions for researchers who sought to “be as ‘objective’ as possible,” says Elaine Hernandez, a medical sociologist at Indiana University. In the U.S., medicine fractured.

New departments of sociology and cultural anthropology kept their eye on the societal side of health, while the nation’s first schools of public health focused instead on fights between germs and individuals. This rift widened as improvements in hygiene, living standards, nutrition, and sanitation lengthened life spans: The more social conditions improved, the more readily they could be ignored.

The ideological pivot away from social medicine began to reverse in the second half of the 20th century.

Politicians initially described COVID‑19 as a “great equalizer,” but when states began releasing demographic data, it was immediately clear that the disease was disproportionately infecting and killing people of color.

These disparities aren’t biological. They stem from decades of discrimination and segregation that left minority communities in poorer neighborhoods with low-paying jobs, more health problems, and less access to health care—the same kind of problems that Virchow identified more than 170 years ago.

In March, when the U.S. started shutting down, one of the biggest questions on the mind of Whitney Robinson of UNC at Chapel Hill was: Are our kids going to be out of school for two years? While biomedical scientists tend to focus on sickness and recovery, social epidemiologists like her “think about critical periods that can affect the trajectory of your life,” she told me. Disrupting a child’s schooling at the wrong time can affect their entire career, so scientists should have prioritized research to figure out whether and how schools could reopen safely. But most studies on the spread of COVID‑19 in schools were neither large in scope nor well-designed enough to be conclusive. No federal agency funded a large, nationwide study, even though the federal government had months to do so. The NIH received billions for COVID‑19 research, but the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development—one of its 27 constituent institutes and centers—got nothing.

The horrors that Rudolf Virchow saw in Upper Silesia radicalized him, pushing the future “father of modern pathology” to advocate for social reforms. The current pandemic has affected scientists in the same way

COVID‑19 could be the catalyst that fully reunifies the social and biological sides of medicine, bridging disciplines that have been separated for too long.

“To study COVID‑19 is not only to study the disease itself as a biological entity,” says Alondra Nelson, the president of the Social Science Research Council. “What looks like a single problem is actually all things, all at once. So what we’re actually studying is literally everything in society, at every scale, from supply chains to individual relationships.”

Wait a second, though — wasn’t coding supposed to be one of the can’t-miss careers of the digital age?

computer programming grew from a nerdy hobby into a vocational near-imperative, the one skill to acquire to survive technological dislocation

Joe Biden to coal miners: Learn to code! Twitter trolls to laid-off journalists: Learn to code! Tim Cook to French kids: Apprendre à programmer!

Over time, from the development of assembly language through more human-readable languages like C and Python and Java, programming has climbed what computer scientists call increasing levels of abstraction — at each step growing more removed from the electronic guts of computing and more approachable to the people who use them.

A.I. might now be enabling the final layer of abstraction: The level on which you can tell a computer to do something the same way you’d tell another human.

GitHub, the coder’s repository owned by Microsoft, surveyed 2,000 programmers last year about how they’re using GitHub’s A.I. coding assistant, Copilot. A majority said Copilot helped them feel less frustrated and more fulfilled in their jobs; 88 percent said it improved their productivity. Researchers at Google found that among the company’s programmers, A.I. reduced “coding iteration time” by 6 percent.

The financial cost, while vast, is impossible to calculate. In late December, Russia’s Communications Ministry reported that 10 percent of the country’s IT workers had left in 2022 and not returned.

those remaining in the depleted political opposition also faced a choice this year: prison or exile. Most chose exile. Activists and journalists are now clustered in cities such as Berlin and the capitals of Lithuania, Latvia and Georgia.

“This exodus is a terrible blow for Russia,” said Tamara Eidelman, a Russian historian who moved to Portugal after the invasion. “The layer that could have changed something in the country has now been washed away.”

the influx of Russians into countries such as Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, which have long sent immigrants to Russia, set off political tremors, straining ties between Moscow and the other former Soviet states. Real estate prices in those countries have shot up, causing tensions with local populations.

For many Russians choosing to flee, Armenia was a rare easy option. It is one of five ex-Soviet countries that allow Russians to enter with just a national ID — making it a popular destination for former soldiers, political activists and others needing a quick escape.

Given the shared religion and use of language, Russians typically do not face animosity or social stigma in Armenia. Obtaining residency permits is also straightforward, and living costs are lower than in the European Union.

Yerevan has attracted thousands of IT workers, young creatives and working-class people, including families with children, from across Russia. They have established new schools, bars, cafes and robust support networks.

n the courtyard of the “Free School” for Russian children, established in April, Maxim, a construction company manager, was waiting for his 8-year-old son, Timofey. The school started with 40 students in an apartment. Now, there are nearly 200 in a multistory building in the city center.

“I did not want to be a murderer in this criminal war,” said Andrei, who is being identified by his first name for safety reasons

Like the White Russian emigres of the Bolshevik era and the post-Soviet immigrants of the 1990s, many of those leaving Russia because of the war in Ukraine are probably gone for good.

The family has adapted seamlessly to Yerevan. Everyone around them speaks Russian. Maxim works remotely on projects in Russia. Timofey likes his school and is learning Armenian. Maxim said he is sure the family will not return to Russia.

Tanya Raspopova, 26, arrived in Yerevan last March, with her husband but without a plan, overwhelmed and frightened.Then she heard that another emigre was seeking partners to set up a bar, a space where Russian expats could come together, and she wanted to help. Tuf, named after the pink volcanic rock common throughout Yerevan, opened its doors within a month.

They started with a neon-lit bar and kitchen on the ground floor, which soon expanded into a small courtyard. Then they opened up a second floor, then a third. Upstairs there is now a recording studio, a clothing boutique and a tattoo parlor. On a Wednesday night in January, the place was packed with young Russians and Armenians singing karaoke, drinking cocktails and playing ping-pong. “We have since created such a big community, a big family,” Raspopova said. “Tuf is our new home.”

Thousands have chosen the UAE, which did not join Western sanctions and still has direct flights to Moscow, as their new home. Russians enjoy visa-free travel for 90 days, and it is relatively easy to get a national ID, through business or investment, for a longer stay.

The high cost of living means there are no activists or journalists. Dubai is a haven, and the go-to playground, for Russian tech founders, billionaires under sanctions, unpenalized millionaires, celebrities, and influencers.

Shortly after the invasion, conversations in Moscow’s affluent Patriarch Ponds neighborhood turned to the best Dubai real estate deals, said Natalia Arkhangelskaya, who writes for Antiglyanets, a snarky and influential Telegram blog focused on Russia’s elite. A year later, Russians have ousted Brits and Indians as Dubai’s top real estate buyers, Russian-owned yachts dock at the marina, and private jets zigzag between Dubai and Moscow.

Russians can still buy apartments, open bank accounts and snag designer leather goods they previously shopped for in France.

The UAE’s embrace of foreign business has lured a stream of Russian IT workers seeking to cut ties with Russia and stay linked to global markets. Start-ups seek financing from state-supported accelerators. Larger firms pursue clients to replace those lost to sanctions.

About a dozen people arrived to discuss opportunities in India, which has maintained ties with Russia despite the war. Most expressed bitterness about the Kremlin’s politics and a longing for Moscow when it was an aspiring global hub.

“The most important thing for me is to be able to develop international projects and to integrate my kids into a global community, so they grow up in a free environment,”

Andrei works as a delivery driver and shares a modest room with two other men in a shelter set up by Kovcheg, a support organization for Russian emigrants. “Before the war, I never followed politics, but after the invasion, I started reading about everything,” Andrei said. “I feel so ashamed about what Russia has done.”

“Every extra month leads people to get used to a different country,” she said. “They get a job there, their children go to school, they begin to speak a different language. The longer the war lasts — the longer the dictatorship in the country continues — the fewer people will return.”

the expats could become “a repository of relevant skills for a better, freer, modern Russia.” For now, though, Rojansky said, the outflow sends a clear message.

There is, needless to say, no escape route into social housing. There are reckoned to be about 1.2m households on local waiting lists in England

thanks to post-2010 austerity, 40 local authority areas – including Peterborough, Luton, the Isle of Wight and parts of Greater Manchester – had neither built nor acquired any new social housing between 2016 and 2021

: it was just a mundane and reassuring reality, and the foundation of millions of lives.

The private rented sector is what it has always been, only more so: a repository for people held back from either home ownership or social housing, where lives are often damaged by the rawest kind of business practices.

56% of first-time buyers aged under 35 needed a “financial gift” from their parents to buy a flat or house. Even if prices slowly fall, the old Tory vision of the property-owning democracy seems to have shrunk into a rigid oligarchy, built on very familiar foundations of class, age and wealth.

Recent(ish) history suggests there might be an alternative: council housing with lifelong, secure tenancies. Fifty or so years ago, thanks to investment by both Labour and Conservative governments, about a third of us lived in homes like that

even if access to the bank of Mum and Dad means you can just about afford to buy, isn’t the current reality of shoved-up interest rates and declining property prices a reminder of what that may well entail? Chasing security now means being at the mercy of its complete opposite: the hurly burly of financial markets, and fears of negative equity and repossession.

The foreground of Labour policy, however, is all about home ownership. Not unreasonably, Keir Starmer sees buying a house as “the bedrock of security and aspiration”, and often makes glowing references to the pebble-dashed semi in which he grew up

Given the chance, he will apparently lead a government set on pursuing a 70% target for home ownership, up from England’s current figure of 64%. Th

the party’s first actions in government will include “helping first-time buyers on to the housing ladder and building more affordable homes by reforming planning rules”. Labour, we are told, “is the party of home ownership in Britain today”.

There are signs that Labour has at least the beginnings of an answer. Lisa Nandy insists that she will be the first housing minister in decades to ensure that social housing provides for more people than the private rented sector; her mantra, she says, will be “council housing, council housing, council housing”

Mr. Khamenei’s ruling philosophy has been shaped and reinforced by three notable authoritarian collapses: The 1979 fall of Iran’s monarchy, the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union and the Arab uprisings of 2011. His takeaway from each of these events has been to never compromise under pressure and never compromise on principles.

The Iranian regime’s repressive capacity — at least on paper — remains formidable. Ayatollah Khamenei is commander in chief of 190,000 armed members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who oversee tens of thousands of Basij militants tasked with instilling public fear and morality.

Iran’s nonideological conscription army, whose active forces are an estimated 350,000, is unlikely to take part in mass repression

Until now, the political and financial interests of Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guards have been intertwined. But persistent protests and chants of “Death to Khamenei” might change that

The sociologist Charles Kurzman wrote in his seminal book, “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran,” that the paradox of revolutionary movements is that they are not viable until they attract a critical mass of supporters but that to attract a critical mass of supporters, they must be perceived as viable.

If the organizing principle that united Iran’s disparate opposition forces in 1979 was anti-imperialism, the organizing principles of today’s socioeconomically and ethnically diverse movement are pluralism and patriotism.

The faces of this movement are not ideologues or intellectuals but athletes, musicians and ordinary people, especially women and ethnic minorities, who have shown uncommon courage. Their slogans are patriotic and progressive — “We will not leave Iran, we will reclaim Iran,” and “Women, life, freedom.”

The demands of the current movement are brilliantly distilled in Shervin Hajipour’s song “Baraye,” or “For,” which has become the anthem of the protests and articulates a “yearning for a normal life” rather than the “forced paradise” of a religious police state.

Abbas Amanat, a historian of Iran, observed that one of the keys to Iran’s civilizational longevity, which dates to the Persian Empire of 2,500 years ago, is the power of its culture to co-opt its military invaders. “For nearly two millenniums, Persian political culture and, in a broader sense, a repository of Persian civilizational tools successfully managed to convert Turkic, Arab and Mongolian conquerors,” he told me. “Persian language, myth, historical memories and timekeeping endured. Iranians persuaded invaders to appreciate a Persian high culture of poetry, food, painting, wine, music, festivals and etiquette.”

When Ayatollah Khomeini acquired power in 1979, he led a cultural revolution that sought to replace Iranian patriotism with a purely Islamic identity. Ayatollah Khamenei continues that tradition, but he is one of the few remaining true believers. While the Islamic Republic sought to subdue Iranian culture, it is Iranian culture and patriotism that are threatening to undo the Islamic Republic.

Four decades of the Islamic Republic’s hard power will ultimately be defeated by two millenniums of Iranian cultural soft power. The question is no longer about whether this will happen but when.

he trickiest question may be how to prevent abuse. AI generators have technological boundaries, but not morals, and it’s relatively easy for users to trick them into creating content that depicts violence, rape, sex with children or a celebrity — or even a crush from work who never consented to appear

In some cases, the engines themselves are trained on porn images whose subjects didn’t explicitly agree to the new use. Currently, no federal laws protect the victims of nonconsensual deepfakes.

Adult entertainment is a giant industry accounting for a substantial chunk of all internet traffic: Major porn sites get more monthly visitors and page views than Amazon, Netflix, TikTok or Zoom

The industry is a habitual early adopter of new technology, from VHS to DVD to dot com. In the mid-2000s, porn companies set up massive sites where users upload and watch free videos, and ad sales foot the bills.

At last year’s AVN conference, Steven Jones said his peers looked at him “like he was crazy” when he talked about AI opportunities: “Nobody was interested.” This year, Jones said, he’s been “the belle of the ball.”

He called up his old business partner, and the two immediately spent about $550,000 securing the web domains for porn dot ai, deepfake dot com and deepfakes dot com, Jones said. “Lightspeed” was back.

One major model, Stable Diffusion, shares its code publicly, and some technologists have figured out how to edit the code to allow for sexual images

What keeps Jones up at night is people trying to use his company’s tools to generate images of abuse, he said. The models have some technological guardrails that make it difficult for users to render children, celebrities or acts of violence. But people are constantly looking for workarounds.

So with help from an angel investor he will not name, Jones hired five employees and a handful of offshore contractors and started building an image engine trained on bundles of freely available pornographic images, as well as thousands of nude photos from Jones’s own collection

Users create what Jones calls a “dream girl,” prompting the AI with descriptions of the character’s appearance, pose and setting. The nudes don’t portray real people, he said. Rather, the goal is to re-create a fantasy from the user’s imagination.

The AI-generated images got better, their computerized sheen growing steadily less noticeable. Jones grew his user base to 500,000 people, many of whom pay to generate more images than the five per day allotted to free accounts, he said. The site’s “power users” generate AI porn for 10 hours a day, he said.

Jones described the site as an “artists’ community” where people can explore their sexualities and fantasies in a safe space. Unlike some corners of the traditional adult industry, no performers are being pressured, underpaid or placed in harm’s way

And critically, consumers don’t have to wait for their favorite OnlyFans performer to come online or trawl through Pornhub to find the content they like.

Next comes AI-generated video — “porn’s holy grail,” Jones said. Eventually, he sees the technology becoming interactive, with users giving instructions to lifelike automated “performers.” Within two years, he said, there will be “fully AI cam girls,” a reference to creators who make solo sex content.

It costs $12 per day to rent a server from Amazon Web Services, he said, and generating a single picture requires users to have access to a corresponding server. His users have so far generated more than 1.6 million images.

Copyright holders including newspapers, photographers and artists have filed a slew of lawsuits against AI companies, claiming the companies trained their models on copyrighted content. If plaintiffs win, it could cut off the free-for-all that benefits entrepreneurs such as Jones.

But Jones’s plan to create consumer-friendly AI porn engines faced significant obstacles. The companies behind major image-generation models used technical boundaries to block “not safe for work” content and, without racy images to learn from, the models weren’t good at re-creating nude bodies or scenes.

Jones said his team takes down images that other users flag as abusive. Their list of blocked prompts currently contains 1,000 terms including “high school.”

“I see certain things people type in, and I just hope to God they’re trying to test the model, like we are. I hope they don’t actually want to see the things they’re typing in.

Peter Acworth, the owner of kink dot com, is trying to teach an AI porn generator to understand even subtler concepts, such as the difference between torture and consensual sexual bondage. For decades Acworth has pushed for spaces — in the real world and online — for consenting adults to explore nonconventional sexual interests. In 2006, he bought the San Francisco Armory, a castle-like building in the city’s Mission neighborhood, and turned it into a studio where his company filmed fetish porn until shuttering in 2017.

Now, Acworth is working with engineers to train an image-generation model on pictures of BDSM, an acronym for bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, sadism and masochism.

Others alluded to a porn apocalypse, with AI wiping out existing models of adult entertainment.“Look around,” said Christian Burke, head of engineering at the adult-industry payment app Melon, gesturing at performers huddled, laughing and hugging across the show floor. “This could look entirely different in a few years.”

But the age of AI brings few guarantees for the people, largely women, who appear in porn. Many have signed broad contracts granting companies the rights to reproduce their likeness in any medium for the rest of time

Not only could performers lose income, Walters said, they could find themselves in offensive or abusive scenes they never consented to.

Lana Smalls, a 23-year-old performer whose videos have been viewed 20 million times on Pornhub, said she’s had colleagues show up to shoots with major studios only to be surprised by sweeping AI clauses in their contracts.

“This industry is too fragmented for collective bargaining,” Spiegler said. “Plus, this industry doesn’t like rules.”