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Biden’s Department of Education has interpreted Title VI to apply when students “experience discrimination, including harassment,” on the basis of their “shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”

these statements — even if fairly rooted in the text of Title VI — are not a solution

Executive orders and administrative regulations are more ephemeral than federal statutes. The next president (or one elected in 2036 or 2052) may choose to interpret Title VI differently. Biden’s interpretation is broader than Trump’s, for example. Courts will also have their own say, and they are now less deferential to presidential interpretations of the law than they’ve been in decades.

The definitions don’t just implicate the First Amendment, they also breed confusion around the very concept of harassment itself. Hearing unpleasant or even hateful thoughts or ideas isn’t “harassment.”

The best parts of the Antisemitism Awareness Act explicitly incorporate discrimination based on “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics” into federal statutory law, elevating the legal protections well beyond the executive orders and guidance letters of previous administrations.

If the law had stopped there — or even if it had gone further and explicitly stated that discrimination on the basis of actual or perceived Jewish identity is by definition discrimination on the basis of shared ancestry, then it would be a vital addition to federal law.

But the law did not stop there. It goes on to require schools to consider the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism when determining whether there has been a violation of Title VI

This is a serious mistake. The alliance’s definition includes examples of antisemitism that encompass a broad range of statements that are protected by the First Amendment.

Both the Trump and the Biden administrations attempted to solve the problem by interpreting Title VI to apply to antisemitism, at least in some circumstances. The Trump administration issued an executive order stating that “discrimination against Jews may give rise to a Title VI violation when the discrimination is based on an individual’s race, color or national origin.”

That’s an inescapable part of life in a free, pluralistic nation

Harassment is something else entirely.

In a 1999 case, Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education, the Supreme Court defined student-on-student harassment under Title IX (the federal statute prohibiting sex discrimination in federally funded education) as conduct “so severe, pervasive and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victims are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.”

Harassment doesn’t depend so much on the content or viewpoint of the objectionable speech as where, when and how it happens.

If students chant, “Globalize the intifada,” at a lawful public protest, then that’s protected

If they shout down Jewish students in class using the same phrase, or chant it outside the dorm rooms of Jewish students at 3 a.m., then they’re engaging in harassment. Jewish students can’t study or sleep on an equal basis with other students.

In both of those circumstances, the actual content of the words is less important than the timing and the targets. A person can commit an act of antisemitic harassment if he targets Jewish students with words that have nothing to do with ancestry or ethnicity

For example, if someone stands outside a Jewish student’s room night after night yelling, “Michael Jordan is the GOAT” relentlessly so that the student can’t sleep or targets her Jewish roommate with constant interruption and distraction then she’s engaging in antisemitic harassment not because of the content or viewpoint of the words, but rather because of the identity of the target and the time and manner of the speech.

I’d like to humbly offer a better way. Strip the problematic incorporation of the alliance’s antisemitism definition and examples from the bill entirely. Instead, simply amend Title VI itself to make it explicit that discrimination based on “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics” is prohibited by the statute and that antisemitic discrimination meets that definition.

by revising Title VI to clearly prohibit discrimination against Jews without any further amplification or definition, antisemitic harassment will fit neatly into existing case law that has longed harmonized free speech principles and nondiscrimination law

how many are aware that President Biden is among the more popular — well, less unpopular — leaders in the Western world?

First, let’s talk about some other international comparisons that seem relevant to the current situation.

But public perception of our economic performance is strongly colored by rising prices. Inflation — the rate at which prices are rising — has subsided a lot, but prices haven’t and won’t come down

No matter what we did, many people were going to die — but the death toll was affected by politics, perhaps especially by the way vaccines became a front in the culture war. And America had a really bad pandemic, even compared with its peers. U.S. life expectancy was already lagging behind comparable countries’ by 2019, but the gap widened after Covid-19 struck.

On the other hand, the U.S. economy experienced an exceptionally strong bounce back from the pandemic recession. Even after adjusting for inflation, U.S. gross domestic product per capita is up 7 percent since the eve of the pandemic, greatly exceeding growth in other major wealthy economies

This would seem on the face of it to say something good about Biden’s economic policies.

Although we hear politicians on the campaign trail trying to make hay with the old Reagan-era question — Are you better off than you were four years ago? — there’s a lot of amnesia about what was actually happening in 2020, namely a deadly, terrifying pandemic

there have been huge recriminations against policymakers, both the Biden administration and the Federal Reserve, either for supposedly causing the bout of inflation or at any rate failing to prevent it.

the similarities between the wealthiest nations are more revealing than their differences.

Inflation surged almost everywhere after the pandemic. And if you take care to compare “apples to Äpfel” — to use the same consumer price measures — inflation has been remarkably similar in different countries.

Since the eve of the pandemic, the Harmonized Index of Consumer Prices has risen 19.6 percent in the United States and 19.8 percent in the euro area.

This strongly suggests that pandemic-related disruptions, rather than national policies, were inflation’s main driver.

Still, inflation rankles voters. Even when income growth exceeds inflation, as it has in the United States, people tend to feel that they earned their higher wages only to have them snatched away by higher prices

this is probably the most important reason that, according to tracking polls conducted by Morning Consult, every single leader of a Group of 7 nation is underwater, with more voters disapproving than approving of their leadership.

So who’s the winner of this unpopularity contest? Who has the least bad net approval? The answer is Joe Biden, with Giorgia Meloni of Italy a close second. The other Group of 7 leaders are even more unpopular

this has political consequences

every political analysis that says the fault for Biden’s low approval lies with the president and his campaign — that he’s too old (although that narrative, after suddenly peaking, mostly faded away after his State of the Union address) or is out of touch with the concerns of “real” Americans — needs to explain why he’s doing less badly than his foreign peers.

When the pandemic took hold in early 2020, air travel plummeted, and many aviation executives believed it would take years for passengers to return in large numbers. Boeing began to cut jobs and encouraged workers to take buyouts or retire early. It ultimately lost about 19,000 employees companywide — including some with decades of experience.

Current and former Boeing employees, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters and feared retaliation, offered examples of how quality has suffered over the years. Many said they still respected the company and its employees and wanted Boeing to succeed.

“For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right, and that’s got to change,” Brian West, the company’s chief financial officer, said at an investor conference last week.

In late 2022, Boeing lost veteran engineers who retired to lock in bigger monthly pension payments, which were tied to interest rates, according to the union that represents them,

“We warned Boeing that it was going to lose a mountain of expertise, and we proposed some workarounds, but the company blew us off,” Ray Goforth, executive director of the union, said in a statement, adding that he thought the company used the retirements as an opportunity to cut costs by replacing veteran workers with “lower-paid entry-level engineers and technical workers.”

the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union, which represents more than 30,000 Boeing employees, said the average tenure of its members had dropped sharply in recent years. The proportion of its members who have less than six years of experience has roughly doubled to 50 percent from 25 percent before the pandemic.

With consumers buying so little, at least relative to the Chinese economy’s productive capacity, how can the nation generate enough demand to keep that capacity in use? The main answer, as Michael Pettis points out, has been to promote extremely high rates of investment, more than 40 percent of G.D.P. The trouble is that it’s hard to invest that much money without running into severely diminishing returns.

financial repression — paying low interest on savings and making cheap loans to favored borrowers — that holds down household income and diverts it to government-controlled investment, a weak social safety net that causes families to accumulate savings to deal with possible emergencies, and more.

Part of the answer is bad leadership. President Xi Jinping is starting to look like a poor economic manager, whose propensity for arbitrary interventions — which is something autocrats tend to do — has stifled private initiative.

But China’s working-age population peaked around 2010 and has been declining ever since. While China has shown impressive technological capacity in some areas, its overall productivity also appears to be stagnating.

very high rates of investment may be sustainable if, like China in the early 2000s, you have a rapidly growing work force and high productivity growth as you catch up with Western economies

This, in short, isn’t a nation that can productively invest 40 percent of G.D.P. Something has to give.

the government was able to mask the problem of inadequate consumer spending for a number of years by promoting a gigantic real estate bubble. In fact, China’s real estate sector became insanely large by international standards.

what China must do seems straightforward: end financial repression and allow more of the economy’s income to flow through to households, and strengthen the social safety net so that consumers don’t feel the need to hoard cash. And as it does this it can ramp down its unsustainable investment spending.

But there are powerful players, especially state-owned enterprises, that benefit from financial repression

And when it comes to strengthening the safety net, the leader of this supposedly communist regime sounds a bit like the governor of Mississippi, denouncing “welfarism” that creates “lazy people.”

Japan ended up managing its downshifting well. It avoided mass unemployment, it never lost social and political cohesion, and real G.D.P. per working-age adult actually rose 50 percent over the next three decades, not far short of growth in the United States.

My great concern is that China may not respond nearly as well. How cohesive will China be in the face of economic trouble? Will it try to prop up its economy with an export surge that will run headlong into Western efforts to promote green technologies? Scariest of all, will it try to distract from domestic difficulties by engaging in military adventurism?

Opening the marriage wasn’t just about doing whatever — and whoever — she wanted, she said. She had to cast off internalized sexism and her tendency to put others’ needs before her own, issues she worked through in therapy. What began as sexual thrill-seeking led unexpectedly to self-discovery.

“I thought non-monogamy was going to be all about the sex,” she said. “I thought I was going on a big sexual adventure, and it was going to be super exciting. And it was, until it wasn’t.”

Eventually, Winter swore off men who were cheating and began seeing people who were also in open relationships, a demographic that became easier to find when online dating services added non-monogamous to their menus. Even then, options were limited.

Winter and her husband struggled with when and how to tell their sons about their arrangement, and wanted to wait until their children were mature enough to handle it. That plan failed when their oldest son, then 13, saw his dad’s online dating profile on his laptop, and texted his mother in a panic, asking if they were in an open marriage. Her youngest son found out in a similar way a few years ago, when he was 14, she said.

The basic driver is this: “Europe has an aging population that values its free time and social benefits over work and productivity. (This reduces labor force participation, innovation potential, and the economic growth of the continent.)

The eurozone economy grew about 6% over the past 15 years, measured in dollars, compared with 82% for the US, according to International Monetary Fund data. That has left the average EU country poorer per head than every US state except Idaho and Mississippi

If the current trend continues, by 2035 the gap between economic output per capita in the US and EU will be as large as that between Japan and Ecuador today

even in Smith’s figures, there is no Northern European economy that outperforms the US.

The US economy has grown 82% in fifteen years! Barring anything more than a mild recession, that means that we can expect the US economy to more than double by the time we hit 20 years from 2008. Isn’t that wonderful?

It’s not just a case of doubling the overall size of the economy. The increase in wealth has been widely distributed.

I was struck by a calculation by George Washington University’s Stephen Rose that he describes at a center-left newsletter called The Liberal Patriot

Deciding what is “middle class” versus “lower middle class” versus “upper middle class” is difficult, and every analysis sets up different cutoffs between these categories. But Rose sets a reasonable level, describing “upper middle class” as an income between $100,000 and $350,000

Using this measure, there was real growth in every rung of the economic ladder over the period from 1979 to 2019, with each ascending step having slightly higher percentage gain….

In brief, economic growth from 1979 to 2019 led more of the population to move up to higher social classes. As Table 1 shows, the bottom two categories—poor and near-poor plus lower middle class—went from a combined 49 percent to 29 percent

The size of the [core middle class] also declined, down from 39 percent to 31 percent over these years

These declines manifest themselves in a massive—and massively under-covered—growth of the [upper middle class], spiking from 13 percent in 1979 to 37 percent in 2019.

America has always thought of itself as a middle-class country. But we are rapidly becoming an upper-middle-class country

This is now the largest category, and at the rate we’re going, it will soon be an outright majority.

upper-middle-class people can afford more welfare-state spending, and they also have more access to education and, frankly, the luxury of agonizing over something other than our pocketbooks. It has been a long time since most Americans were concerned about how to put a roof over our heads, so we have moved on from “kitchen table” issues to concerns about values and status and self-image.

in this context, the Old Left welfare-state programs look, not merely unnecessary, but callous and cruel

the incentives created by welfare programs discourage work for the poor. But in a growing and thriving upper-middle-class country, this looks like a way to create a permanent underclass who are kept in poverty so we can congratulate ourselves on our compassion and generosity

some of this may also explain the right’s belligerent opposition to immigration. If we are becoming an upper-middle-class country, perhaps we are taking on some of the attitudes of a gated community that wants to keep out the riff-raff.

the characters in the core three modern shows—Discovery, Picard, and Strange New Worlds—are less concerned with professionalism and duty and more concerned with personal morality, authenticity, and teamwork.

Dylan Roth, writing for Fanbyte, suggested that as Star Trek has aged, it has “changed from a series about benign authority to one about stalwart heroes protecting an institution from moral decay.” This is true enough, but I also think there’s something else going on with the modern Trek shows. Namely, the atmosphere and philosophy of the shows is much less comfortable with the maxims of professionalism and duty that were foundational to pre-2017 Star Trek media.

Modern Star Trek, much like older Star Trek, often presents its main characters as moral paragons, but whereas older Trek would usually depict them embodying Starfleet’s ideals in the presence of challenging aliens, modern Trek is more likely to establish their uprightness by contrast with the faceless and untrustworthy institution of Starfleet itself. Both eras do both things, at least occasionally, but the ratio has notably shifted.

WHY THE CHANGE? Part of it probably has to do with the other material that Star Trek writers are drawing from. The ’60s and ’90s-era Trek writers either served in the military themselves or were drawing from science fiction written by people who had. (Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, and many of the great science-fiction authors of the mid-twentieth century, including Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, and Walter M. Miller Jr., each served in some capacity in the World War II-era U.S. or British armed forces.

difference in leadership style is everywhere between the two eras. The Strange New Worlds version of Capt. Christopher Pike has been repeatedly praised for being more collaborative than commanding (I struggle to remember a time he has ever raised his voice), whereas Capt. Sisko shouts at everyone, as only the great Avery Brooks can shout. Picard’s version of its title character trades all his twentieth-century grouchy gravitas for a more grandfatherly role; his inspirational speeches now seek to buoy his friends’ confidence rather than inspire subordinates to high achievement.

Old-school Sisko reminds his crew of the expectations he has for them and unsubtly critiques their behavior as unbecoming of Starfleet officers. He acknowledges their difficulties (“I know it’s hot. . .”), but leaves no doubt that he expects them to perform their duties as professionals anyway. New-school Tilly motivates her command by making it clear that she sees and hears their concerns, and encourages them to work together by seeing the value in their unique life experiences.

modern Trek writers are far less likely to have served—but are far more likely to have worked in twenty-first-century corporate America, which has a rather different set of norms and concepts of professionalism.

more fundamentally, popular science fiction today—as written by authors like N.K. Jemisin, Martha Wells, and Tamsyn Muir—is more likely to be concerned with questions of identity and combating imperialism. It is also more likely to be written from marginalized perspectives, which have valid reasons to distrust institutions and authority. For many of these writers, concepts like “professionalism” have questionable implications

Besides, nobody likes any of America’s institutions anymore (and for all that Star Trek is ostensibly international, it is a fundamentally American franchise). Gallup’s polling about Americans’ faith in U.S. institutions shows it hovering at or near record-breaking lows, spawning a great deal of hand-wringing from people across the political spectrum. These apparently untrustworthy institutions range from purely political ones (the presidency, the Supreme Court, etc.) to “the church or organized religion” (whatever that means), “banks,” and “newspapers.”

What are professionalism and duty if not the suppression of individual quirks in service of some larger goal or institution? Duty overrides individual desires or assessments of right and wrong.

But older Trek nevertheless believed in duty, because it believed that Starfleet was a fundamentally good institution, even if it may be failed by individual bad or misguided actors. It elevated Starfleet’s regulations and codes of conduct almost to the status of holy wri

it is difficult to be seriously inspired by the notion of duties if one has a deep distrust of the institutions that assign such duties.

Of course the characters written by twenty-first-century authors, who are animated by the same deep distrust of American institutions as the rest of us, are less likely to justify themselves with the language of duty than they are by reference to personal morality and authenticity. And of course they’re going to be skeptical of rank and hierarchy because they don’t believe these things are necessarily signs of actual merit or accomplishment any more than the rest of us do.

Yet I worry. If Star Trek is supposed to start from the assumption that Starfleet and the Federation are quasi-utopian, I worry about what it says about our collective imaginations if we can’t even let the institutions of that fictional utopia be utopian. If we can’t even trust Starfleet, who can we trust?

On the left, what gets termed “wokeness” is indissociable from self-help. How should we understand superficial, performative expressions of “anti-racism” or preening social-media politics if not as a way for self-described good-hearted liberals to make grand public displays of pruning their moral shrubbery?

We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture “therapeutic libertarianism”: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth

This attitude is therapeutic because it is invariably couched in self-help babble. And it is libertarian not only because it makes a cult out of personal freedom, but because it applies market logic to human beings. We are all our own start-ups. We must all adopt a pro-growth mindset for our personhood and deregulate our desires.

We must all assess and reassess our own “fulfillment,” a kind of psychological Gross Domestic Product, on a near-constant basis. And like the GDP, our fulfillment must always increase.

Among the right, a new kind of reactionary self-help is ascendant. Its mainstream version is legible in the manosphere misogyny of Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, and Andrew Tate, while more eldritch currents lurk just beneath the surface. The Nietzscheanism of internet personalities like Bronze Age Pervert—who combines ethnonationalist chauvinism in politics and personal life with a Greco-Roman obsession with physical fitness—is only one of many examples of the trend the social critic Maya Vinokour has called “lifestyle fascism.”

Stewart’s response to the UTIs is not concern for his wife but irritation: “This guy is breaking all my toys,” he grumbles. When she gets upset that her husband keeps calling her a “cunt” and a “whore” during sex—something he professes not being able to help—Stewart does not change this habit. Instead they strike a preposterous bargain: “He will try his best not to scream cunt during sex, and I will do my best to ignore him if he does.”

What the author is trying to find in her open relationship is not sex, but self-understanding—what it means, how we get it, whether sex can provide it. And although the answers Molly arrives at are not cheaply won, they are cheap all the same.

his concept doesn’t quite capture the extent to which this relentless quest for self-optimizing authenticity has infused our social and even political sensibilities.

though Molly may tell herself and her readers that she is on a journey of learning and growth, the ugly truth is that More feels like a 290-page cry for help. Molly does not come off as a woman boldly finding herself, but rather as someone who is vulnerable to psychological manipulation and does not enjoy her open marriage.

if it seems like Molly Roden Winter does not want to be in an open marriage, it is because she often lets us know that she doesn’t want to be in an open marriage.

When a couples therapist asks the pair why they’re in counseling halfway through the book—prompted by a breakdown Molly experiences that stems from their marital arrangement—she explains: “We’re here because I don’t want to be in an open marriage anymore, but Stewart does.”

There are precious few sex scenes where Molly seems to be enjoying herself. When Molly is in the middle of a squirmy threesome she’s been dreading, she literally dissociates from her body, pretending that she is a director staging a scene in which her physical person is merely an actor. Molly describes how she performs her role with “a clinician’s detachment” and leaves the apartment rapidly so as not “to be pulled back into this scene.” After one of her dates repeatedly removes his condom without her consent—an act known as “stealthing,” which is considered a sex crime in a number of countries and the state of California—she contracts a series of urinary tract infections

Near the end of the memoir, the author’s mother provides the empty epiphany toward which the text careens. “Everything that happens in life,” her mom offers, “is an opportunity to learn about yourself. Marriage. Motherhood. Relationships. Even anger and illness. Nothing that happens is good or bad in and of itself. It’s all just an opportunity to learn and grow.” With this maternal revelation, Molly’s “skin starts to tingle.” She relates that the advice “feels almost holy.”

Winter is trapped in her therapeutic worldview, one imposed on her by an American culture that has made narcissism into not simply a virtue, but a quasi-religion that turns external obstacles into opportunities for internal self-improvement.

These obstacles include, in her case, profound gender inequality relating to Molly’s life as a parent to two sons, and a troubling family history. Molly’s mother joined a cult—and indoctrinated the author into it as a child—at the urging of a male partner in her own open marriage. The book makes tacit comparisons between Molly’s mother’s initiation into a cult at the behest of an extramarital partner, and Molly’s own initiation into an open marriage at the behest of her husband.

throughout More, the dominant emotion Molly reports is not lust but rage—primarily at the deeply unequal child-care burdens that are placed upon her. “I think about all the years I’ve spent my night alone with the kids—the dinners, the bedtimes, the dishes, the loneliness of doing it all by myself—because Stew had to work,” she laments at one point. That Stewart is now spending late nights not working (if he ever was) but rather schtupping his endless reserve of mistresses pushes Molly further to the brink: “I feel my jealousy mingle with the resentment I’ve kept at bay for years,”

Molly doubles down on her quest for self-actualization through the relentless pursuit of bitter novelty: new sexual experiences that she rarely seems to enjoy, new partners who rarely treat her kindly.

The only solution Molly can imagine is to persist in an open marriage, rather than push for an equal one. Inward sexual revolution plainly feels more possible than a revolution in who does the dishes.

The alarm is growing louder, but the German public remains unconvinced that the security of Germany and Europe has been fundamentally threatened by a newly aggressive Russia.

Mr. Pistorius’s status as one of the country’s most popular politicians has given him a freedom to speak that others — including his boss, Chancellor Olaf Scholz — do not enjoy.

The prospect of a re-elected Mr. Trump has German officials and many of their fellow NATO counterparts informally discussing whether the nearly 75-year-old alliance structure they are planning to celebrate in Washington this year can survive without the United States at its center. Many German officials say that Mr. Putin’s best strategic hope is NATO’s fracture.

Only a year ago NATO was celebrating a new sense of purpose and a new unity, and many were confidently predicting Mr. Putin was on the run.

now, with an undependable America, an aggressive Russia and a striving China, as well as a seemingly stalemated war in Ukraine and a deeply unpopular conflict in Gaza, German officials are beginning to talk about the emergence of a new, complicated and troubling world, with severe consequences for European and trans-Atlantic security.

some of Mr. Pistorius’s colleagues are warning that if American funding dries up and Russia prevails, its next target will be closer to Berlin.

“If Ukraine were forced to surrender, that would not satisfy Russia’s hunger for power,” the chief of Germany’s intelligence service, Bruno Kahl, said last week. “If the West does not demonstrate a clear readiness to defend, Putin will have no reason not to attack NATO anymore.”

In the decades since the Soviet Union collapsed, most Germans have grown accustomed to the notions that the country’s security would be assured if it worked with Russia, not against it, and that China is a necessary partner with a critical market for German automobiles and equipment.

Mr. Scholz, a Social Democrat whose party traditionally sought decent ties with Moscow, seems reluctant to discuss the far more confrontational future with Russia or China that German defense and intelligence chiefs describe so vividly.

few politicians will take on the subject in public. Mr. Scholz is especially careful, tending to Germany’s relationship with the United States and wary of pushing Russia and its unpredictable president too hard.

Mr. Scholz has moved with great caution. He has opposed — along with Mr. Biden — setting a timetable for Ukraine’s eventual entry into the alliance

The most vivid example of his caution is his continued refusal to provide Ukraine a long-range, air-launched cruise missile called the Taurus.

The Taurus has a range of more than 300 miles, meaning Ukraine could use it to strike deep into Russia. And Mr. Scholz is not willing to take that chance — nor is the country’s Bundestag, which voted against a resolution calling for the transfer. While the decision seems to fit German opinion, Mr. Scholz wants to avoid the subject.

Polls show that Germans want to see a more capable German military. But only 38 percent of those surveyed said they wanted their country to be more involved in international crises, the lowest figure since that question began to be asked in 2017, according to the Körber Foundation, which conducted the survey. Of that group, 76 percent said the engagement should be primarily diplomatic, and 71 percent were against a military leadership role for Germany in Europe.

German military officials recently set off a small outcry when they suggested that the country must be “kriegstüchtig,” which roughly translates to the ability to fight and win a war.

Norbert Röttgen, an opposition legislator and a foreign policy expert with the Christian Democrats, said the term was regarded as “rhetorical overreach” and quickly dropped.

“Scholz has always said that ‘Ukraine must not lose but Russia must not win,’ which indicated that he’s always thought of an impasse that would lead to a diplomatic process,” Mr. Röttgen said. “He thinks of Russia as more important than all the countries between us and them, and he lacks a European sense and of his possible role as a European leader.”

Mr. Scholz clearly feels most comfortable relying heavily on Washington, and senior German officials say he especially mistrusts Emmanuel Macron, the president of France, who has argued for European “strategic autonomy.” Mr. Macron has found few followers on the continent.

Even Mr. Scholz’s main European defense initiative, a coordinated ground-based air defense against ballistic missiles known as Sky Shield, depends on a mix of American, American-Israeli and German missile systems.

Mr. Scholz’s ambitions are also hamstrung by his increasingly weak economy. It shrank 0.3 percent last year, and roughly the same is expected in 2024. The cost of the Ukraine war and China’s economic problems — which have hit the auto and manufacturing sectors hardest — have exacerbated the problem.

While Mr. Scholz acknowledges that the world has changed, “he is not saying that we must change with it,” said Ulrich Speck, a German analyst.

“He is saying that the world has changed and that we will protect you,”

Germans, and even the Social Democrats, “have come to the realization that Germany lives in the real world and that hard power matters,”

“At the same time,” he said, “there’s still this hope that this is all just a bad dream, and Germans will wake up and be back in the old world.”

“In an age of conflict, climate and geopolitical crisis the rise of the AfD is a wake-up call. The collapse in living standards experienced by Germans is unprecedented since world war two. While it is true that the factors that fuelled the rise of the AfD go beyond economics, it is also impossible to ignore how this unprecedented slump in German living went hand-in-hand with the rising popularity of the far right.”

Europe’s largest economy is still reeling from the February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The International Monetary Fund forecast for German growth in 2024 and 2025 is that it will be lower than any comparable advanced economy save Argentina.

Weber and Krebs highlighted that two distinct surges in support for the AfD in the summers of 2022 and 2023 coincide with periods of uncertainty in the German government about how to address the impact of energy price shocks on living standards.

Once the damage to output caused by the Covid crisis is included, actual output at the end of 2023 was about 7% below the pre-crisis trend. Real wages were 10% below their pre-crisis trend in 2023.

“So far we’re seeing basic agreement with our best model of the universe, but we’re also seeing some potentially interesting differences that could indicate that dark energy is evolving with time,”

When the scientists combined their map with other cosmological data, they were surprised to find that it did not quite agree with the otherwise reliable standard model of the universe, which assumes that dark energy is constant and unchanging. A varying dark energy fit the data points better.

“It’s certainly more than a curiosity,” Dr. Palanque-Delabrouille said. “I would call it a hint. Yeah, it’s not yet evidence, but it’s interesting.”

But this version of dark energy is merely the simplest one. “With DESI we now have achieved a precision that allows us to go beyond that simple model,” Dr. Palanque-Delabrouille said, “to see if the density of dark energy is constant over time, or if it has some fluctuations and evolution with time.”

“While combining data sets is tricky, and these are early results from DESI, the possible evidence that dark energy is not constant is the best news I have heard since cosmic acceleration was firmly established 20-plus years ago.”

praised the new survey as “superb data.” The results, she said, “open the potential for a new window into understanding dark energy, the dominant component of the universe, which remains the biggest mystery in cosmology. Pretty exciting.”

what if dark energy were not constant as the cosmological model assumed?

At issue is a parameter called w, which is a measure of the density, or vehemence, of the dark energy. In Einstein’s version of dark energy, this number remains constant, with a value of –1, throughout the life of the universe. Cosmologists have been using this value in their models for the past 25 years.

Dark energy took its place in the standard model of the universe known as L.C.D.M., composed of 70 percent dark energy (Lambda), 25 percent cold dark matter (an assortment of slow-moving exotic particles) and 5 percent atomic matter. So far that model has been bruised but not broken by the new James Webb Space Telescope

As a measure of distance, the researchers used bumps in the cosmic distribution of galaxies, known as baryon acoustic oscillations. These bumps were imprinted on the cosmos by sound waves in the hot plasma that filled the universe when it was just 380,000 years old. Back then, the bumps were a half-million light-years across. Now, 13.5 billion years later, the universe has expanded a thousandfold, and the bumps — which are now 500 million light-years across — serve as convenient cosmic measuring sticks.

The DESI scientists divided the past 11 billion years of cosmic history into seven spans of time. (The universe is 13.8 billion years old.) For each, they measured the size of these bumps and how fast the galaxies in them were speeding away from us and from each other.

When the researchers put it all together, they found that the usual assumption — a constant dark energy — didn’t work to describe the expansion of the universe. Galaxies in the three most recent epochs appeared closer than they should have been, suggesting that dark energy could be evolving with time.

Dr. Riess of Johns Hopkins, who had an early look at the DESI results, noted that the “hint,” if validated, could pull the rug out from other cosmological measurements, such as the age or size of the universe. “This result is very interesting and we should take it seriously,” he wrote in his email. “Otherwise why else do we do these experiments?”

In other words, the cultural crackup of the last few months only appears to be part of an international conflict. It is, in fact, resolutely German. What is really being fought over here is a hazy, transcendent national concept that, since Oct. 7, has overtaken more firmly constitutional principles of free expression and free association.

The tensions have been building since at least 2019, when the federal Parliament adopted a resolution designating the movement calling for a boycott of Israel as antisemitic, and urging local governments and “public stakeholders” not to fund organizations or individuals that support it. That makes a big difference here, since so many artists, writers and musicians receive generous government aid. The resolution, though nonbinding, led some cultural institutions to rescind invitations to critics of Israeli policy, and many more to take a hesitant approach.

“People in cultural institutions are risk-averse,” said Tobias Haberkorn, who edits the Berlin Review, a new literary publication. “So if they have to decide, ‘Am I going to invite this or that artist with a Middle Eastern background, or not?’ I can very well see them not inviting them. Just to avoid the potential hassle.”

Since Oct. 7, accusations of antisemitism have flown much more broadly. Some are merited. Many others are dubious. Quite a number of those accused of antisemitism have been Jewish, such as Gessen.

“There are many Jewish perspectives, and that is not being honored here in a country where the history cannot be excused,” said Peaches, who is also Jewish. “For any progressive Jewish person who is thinking about what is going on, and understanding the history of what is going on, to be called antisemitic — by Germans — is ridiculous. Never did I think in 2024 that I would be thinking about that.”

Yet it’s worth pointing out how few of these accusations revolve around cultural production. It is rare for Berlin’s theaters or festivals to cancel someone for what they actually sing or paint or film

What gets you now are statements, posts, likes, signatures: the imperatives of social media, which are swallowing culture wholesale. Once debates like this would have played out in Germany’s elite press, where intellectuals clashed over the country’s moral responsibility to the past. Today the national papers, and the institutions too, are playing catch-up to Ruhrbarone, a small website from the provincial city of Bochum that took down Anderson and many others.

The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:

“The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”

Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception

his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo

By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.

For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures

In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.

he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew

She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision

in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975

while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.

Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state

It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.

Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich

She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another

All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it

right now Germany’s resolution forbids it

This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth

The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”

What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning

Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil

Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.

“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.”

In his review, Bernanke compared the MPC’s forecasting record with six other central banks — in the Nordic countries, New Zealand, the United States and the eurozone — and found the Bank was particularly bad at understanding dynamics in the jobs market and had consistently forecast far higher unemployment, which had not materialised. Its other errors, on forecasting future inflation and growth, put it largely in the “middle of the pack” with its peers.

He is concerned that masters of the A.I. universes are developing systems that will expand chasms of inequality. He fears the transition to A.I. will be so abrupt that entire professional fields will be left doing menial jobs, or nothing, stripping people of dignity and unleashing floods of “despair.”

Father Benanti, who does not believe in the industry’s ability to self-regulate and thinks some rules of the road are required in a world where deep fakes and disinformation can erode democracy.

He shares his insights with Pope Francis, who in his annual World Day of Peace message on Jan. 1 called for a global treaty to ensure the ethical development and use of AI to prevent a world devoid of human mercy, where inscrutable algorithms decide who is granted asylum, who gets a mortgage, or who, on the battlefield, lives or dies.

all the time he applies his perspective about what it means to be alive, and to be human, when machines seem more alive and human. “This is a spiritual question,” he said.

raises enormous questions about redistributing wealth in an A.I. dominant universe.

he pursued an engineering degree at Sapienza University in Rome. It wasn’t enough.“I started to feel that something was missing,” he said, explaining that his advancement as an engineering student erased the mystique machines held for him. “I simply broke the magic.”

He left Rome to study in Assisi, the home of St. Francis, and over the next decade, took his final vows as a friar, was ordained as a priest and defended his dissertation on human enhancement and cyborgs. He got his job at the Gregorian, and eventually as the Vatican’s IT ethics guy.

In 2017, Cardinal Ravasi organized an event at the Italian embassy to the Holy See where Father Benanti gave a talk on the ethics of A.I. Microsoft officials in attendance were impressed and asked to stay in touch. That same year, the Italian government asked him to contribute to A.I. policy documents and the next year he successfully applied to sit on its commission for developing a national A.I. strategy.

Francis, he said, didn’t at first realize what Microsoft really did, but liked that Mr. Smith took out of his pocket one of the pope’s speeches on social media and showed the pontiff the concerns the business executive had highlighted and shared.

e said, arguing that as ancient Roman augurs turned to the flight of birds for direction, A.I., with its enormous grasp of our physical, emotional and preferential data, could be the new oracles, determining decisions, and replacing God with false idols.

“It’s something old that probably we think that we left behind,” the friar said, “but that is coming back.”

The dourness of the mood contrasted sharply with just a year ago, when many of the same participants — intelligence chiefs and diplomats, oligarchs and analysts — thought Russia might be on the verge of strategic defeat in Ukraine. There was talk of how many months it might take to drive the Russians back to the borders that existed before their invasion on Feb. 24, 2022. Now that optimism appeared premature at best, faintly delusional at worst.

Nikolai Denkov, the prime minister of Bulgaria, argued that Europeans should draw three lessons from the cascade of troubles. The war in Ukraine was not just about gray zones between Europe and Russia, he argued, but “whether the democratic world we value can be beaten, and this is now well understood in Europe.”

“European defense was a possibility before, but now it’s a necessity,” said Claudio Graziano, a retired general from Italy and former chairman of the European Union Military Committee. But saying the right words is not the same as doing what they demand.

third, they needed to separate Ukraine’s urgent needs for ammunition and air defense from longer-term strategic goals.

Some attendees found the commitments made by the leaders who showed up uninspiring, said Nathalie Tocci, director of Italy’s Institute of International Affairs. “Kamala Harris empty, Scholz mushy, Zelensky tired,

Second, European nations have realized that they must combine their forces in military, not just economic endeavors, to build up their own deterrence

“I feel underwhelmed and somewhat disappointed” by the debate here, said Steven E. Sokol, president of the American Council on Germany. “There was a lack of urgency and a lack of clarity about the path forward, and I did not see a strong show of European solidarity.

now two-thirds of the alliance members have met the goal of spending 2 percent of their gross domestic product on defense — up from just a handful of nations 10 years ago. But a few acknowledged that goal is now badly outdated, and they talked immediately about the political barriers to spending more.

the prospect of less American commitment to NATO, as the United States turned to other challenges from China or in the Middle East, was concentrating minds.

the fundamental disconnect was still on display: When Europeans thought Russia would integrate into European institutions, they stopped planning and spending for the possibility they might be wrong. And when Russia’s attitude changed, they underreacted.

“This is 30 years of underinvestment coming home,” said François Heisbourg, a French defense analyst, who called them “les trente paresseuses” — the 30 lazy years of post Cold-War peace dividends, in contrast to the 30 glorious years that followed World War II.

What was important for Europeans to remember was that this hot war in Ukraine was close and could spread quickly, Ms. Kallas said. “So if you think that you are far away, you’re not far away. It can go very, very fast.”

Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister of embattled Ukraine, was blunter. “I think our friends and partners were too late in waking up their own defense industries,” he said. “And we will pay with our lives throughout 2024 to give your defense industries time to ramp up production.”

Linker’s description of Bushnell’s options and actions is measured and not without some respect:

Damon hops off the bus at the same point I do: Bushnell displayed a tremendous amount of courage, yes. But this was mated to an absolute moral certainty.

Every society needs both, because that is how we conserve our achievements while still working toward a more perfect order.

[Bushnell’s] choice of that word to describe Israel means he followed the “anti-colonial left” in viewing the interminable conflict in and around the Jewish state through the lens of Western imperialism across the “global south.” Viewed in this way, Israelis are rapacious oppressors, exploiters, unjustly stealing from the Palestinians, occupying their land, not just in the territories of the West Bank that are occupied under international law but likely in its entirety. That’s certainly how Hamas views the situation, with an added overlay of Islamist theofascism.

What would it be like, I wonder, to live in a world so morally simple, so neat and tidy, so devoid of tragic clashes, so orderly, with its heroes and villains, its Children of Light and its Children of Darkness? I really wouldn’t know. Because the world I inhabit is one permeated by ambiguity and people with mixed motives who are often (usually?) torn between competing moral considerations and imperatives, not a world divided between the absolutely good and the absolutely evil. The line between good and evil doesn’t run between East and West, or North and South, or white and black, or Israel and Palestine. It runs right through every human heart. Or at least most hearts.

This is where liberalism and conservatism meet, in the most elemental sense. The conservative impulse is to be suspicious of change because you are aware that things can always get worse, that systems are often too complex to be understood, that tail risk rules the world. The liberal impulse is to believe that agency is precious, that the world can be improved, that progress is both possible and desirable.

Linker notes that Bushnell referred to Israelis as “colonizers”:

Every governing system needs both, because that is how we channel passions out of the street and into political institutions.

And every person needs both, because that is how we avoid the epistemic certainty that can drive us to extremes of exuberance or despair.

The war in Gaza is a textbook example of the dangers of epistemic certainty, because it is too complicated, freighted with too much history, and too full of horrors to fit neatly on one side of the ledger or the other.

The 10/7 attack was an act of unconstrained barbarism that made it impossible for Israel to coexist with Hamas. Or at least: I am not aware of any proposed remedy that would have made coexistence possible without Israel becoming a fully militarized, illiberal state.

The Israeli response has at times violated the rules of war—sometimes of its own volition and sometimes because Hamas’s strategy has been to position assets in such a manner as to result in the deaths of as many Palestinian civilians as possible.

The suffering of the Palestinian people is real and of a magnitude that is almost impossible to comprehend.

And yet, the war continues because Hamas has no interest in a ceasefire. “We are not interested in engaging with what’s been floated, because it does not fulfill our demands,” one Hamas official told the media yesterday.

The world is messy. Life is messy. Often in ways which break the human heart. The project of liberal society, which requires equal measures of liberalism and conservatism, is to manage this messiness as well as possible.

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.”