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our risk sensor is fixed to the anxieties and illusions of the 1900s

We’re arming and empowering the police like it’s 1990, when urban crime had reached historic highs. But violent-crime rates have fallen by more than 50 percent in almost every major American city in the past generation, while police still drape themselves in military gear and kill more than 1,000 people annually.

Too many police are instructed to believe that the 20th-century crime wave never ended.

Between the 1960s and the early 1990s, the violent-crime rate in many U.S. cities rose “to levels seen only in the most violent, war-torn nations of the developing world,”

As American cities became perceived as war zones, police responded by adopting a “warrior” mentality.

Then violent crime plunged by more than 70 percent from 1993 to 2018, according to data maintained by the Department of Justice. Although officers routinely face threats that most white-collar workers never will, cops are safer now than at any point in nearly 50 years.

calls the idealization of the warrior “the most problematic aspect of modern [police] policy.”

The message is clear: Be a warrior, because it’s a war out there.

The warrior mentality encourages an adversarial approach in which officers needlessly escalate encounters.

The U.S. has about the same number of police officers per capita as, say, Australia; but adjusted for population, U.S. law enforcement kills 10 times more people.

the CDC had waited “its entire existence for this moment,” but it was so unprepared to deal with COVID-19 that the group initially in charge of the response, the Division of Viral Diseases, had to cede responsibilities to the Influenza Division, despite the fact that COVID-19 is not caused by any kind of influenza virus

Police aren’t just trained to feel like warriors; many are armed for war

Over time, SWAT itself served as a gateway drug for police militarization, as equipment once reserved for special teams, such as AR-15 rifles, were made available to ordinary officers.

the War on Drugs has been roundly discredited as a trillion-dollar failure that incurs thousands of unnecessary deaths. But it has bequeathed us a world where police bearing semiautomatics are armed with the wrong tools for the actual job

Violent crime plays a minuscule role in the day of a modern officer, who spends most of his or her time driving around, taking ho-hum radio calls, and performing the tertiary duties of traffic patroller and mental-health counselor.

the U.S. mental-health crisis has been effectively outsourced to the streets, where police who aren’t trained as social workers or behavioral therapists must perform the ad hoc duties of both.

Rather than respond to the drastically changing nature of American life, our cities and counties use police as a civic Swiss Army knife to solve problems such as homelessness and mental-health emergencies that have little to do with police training.

the failures of American police are not unique, but rather a symptom of a broader breakdown in high-quality governance.

Before it stood for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC was founded as the Communicable Disease Center in the 1940s. Its original mission was to stop an epidemic. The organization’s first 400, Atlanta-based employees were tasked with arresting an outbreak of malaria in the Southeast

Today, the center’s 14,000 employees work “at the speed of science”—that is, slowly and deliberately—to understand an array of health issues, including cancer, obesity, and vaping.

its mission creep has transformed what was once a narrowly focused agency into a kaleidoscopic bureaucracy with no fast-twitch instinct for achieving its founding mission to protect Americans from an epidemic.

The CDC’s recent failures are well known, but worth repeating. It failed to keep track of early COVID-19 cases in part because of a leaden-footed reliance on fax machines and other outdated record-keeping technology. It failed to compile accurate case counts, forcing private actors—such as The Atlantic’s COVID Tracking Project—to fill the void. It failed its most basic coordination functions as an agency

“The world has changed dramatically since the most violent years of the 1990s, but police training trails lived experience,”

Most important, the CDC failed to manufacture basic testing equipment. Its initial test kits were contaminated and unusable, which allowed the disease to spread undetected throughout the U.S. for weeks.

Compare the situation in the U.S. with the one in East Asia, where several countries have navigated the pandemic far more deftly. China, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and Vietnam all updated their infectious-disease protocols based on what they learned from 21st-century epidemics: SARS in 2003, H1N1 in 2009, and MERS in 2012. These countries quickly understood what artillery would be necessary to take on COVID-19, including masks, tests, tracing, and quarantine spaces. Yet the CDC—armed with an $8 billion budget and a global team of scientists and officials—was somehow unprepared to read from the playbook.

The FDA fumbled just as tragically. In January, Alex Greninger, a virologist at the University of Washington, was prepared to build an in-house coronavirus test

By the time Greninger was ready to set up his lab, the calendar had turned to March. Hundreds of thousands of Americans were sick, and the outbreak was uncontrollable.

the White House cannot be entirely blamed for the ponderous incompetence of what ought to be the greatest public-health system in the world.

Not every American institution is trapped in amber. For a perhaps surprising example of one that has adapted to 21st-century needs, take the Federal Reserve.

Ben Bernanke, the Fed chair during the Great Recession, used his expertise about the 1930s economy to avoid a similar collapse in financial markets in 2008. Today’s Fed chair, Jerome Powell, has gone even further, urging Congress and the Treasury to “think big” and add to our already-historic deficits.

the Federal Reserve has junked old shibboleths about inflation and deficit spending and embraced a policy that might have scandalized mainstream economists in the 1990s. Rejecting the status-quo bias that plagues so many institutions, this 106-year-old is still changing with the world.

what strikes me is that America’s safekeeping institutions have forgotten how to properly see the threats of the 21st century and move quickly to respond to them. Those who deny history may be doomed to repeat it. But those who deny the present are just doomed

It is a small island of just 24 million people, but it is at the center of the battle for global technological supremacy. Pound for pound, it is the most important place in the world. As the Cold War between China and the United States intensifies, that importance will only continue to grow.

After World War II, only two major emerging economies managed to grow faster than 5 percent for five decades in a row and to rise from poverty into the ranks of developed economies. One was Taiwan, the other South Korea

They kept advancing up the industrial ladder by investing more heavily in research and development than did any of their rivals among emerging economies. Now they are among the research leaders of the developed economic world as well.

How did they accomplish this feat? Competent governments played a major role. South Korea nurtured giant conglomerates like Samsung and Hyundai, which exported consumer products under their own brand names. Taiwan cultivated smaller companies focused on making parts or assembling finished products for foreign brands

Today the flexibility goes a long way toward explaining its success.

Mixing overseas experience with young local graduates, the science parks became hothouses for entrepreneurial start-ups.

Going forward, many tech analysts predict that Taiwan’s business model gives it a clear edge. Most customers prefer a pure foundry that does not compete with them to design chips or build devices, and only Taiwan offers this service.

That is a big reason Apple has been switching from Samsung to T.S.M.C. for the processing chips in the iPhone and why Intel is expected to outsource production of its most advanced chips mainly to T.S.M.C.

Taiwan has tried to position itself as the “Switzerland” of chips, a neutral supplier, but it increasingly finds itself at the center of the jousting between China and the United States

Historically, the importance of Taiwan was calculated in geopolitical terms. A small democracy thriving in the shadow of a Communist giant stirred sympathy and support in Washington. Now, as a byproduct of its successful economic model, Taiwan has become a critical link in the global tech supply chain, adding economic weight to the geopolitical calculations.

There’s a notion that the social web was once useful, or at least that it could have been good, if only we had pulled a few levers: some moderation and fact-checking here, a bit of regulation there, perhaps a federal antitrust lawsuit. But that’s far too sunny and shortsighted a view.

Today’s social networks, Facebook chief among them, were built to encourage the things that make them so harmful. It is in their very architecture.

I realized only recently that I’ve been thinking far too narrowly about the problem.

Megascale is nearly the existential threat that megadeath is. No single machine should be able to control the fate of the world’s population—and that’s what both the Doomsday Machine and Facebook are built to do.

Facebook does not exist to seek truth and report it, or to improve civic health, or to hold the powerful to account, or to represent the interests of its users, though these phenomena may be occasional by-products of its existence.

The company’s early mission was to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Instead, it took the concept of “community” and sapped it of all moral meaning.

Facebook—along with Google and YouTube—is perfect for amplifying and spreading disinformation at lightning speed to global audiences.

Facebook decided that it needed not just a very large user base, but a tremendous one, unprecedented in size. That decision set Facebook on a path to escape velocity, to a tipping point where it can harm society just by existing.

No one, not even Mark Zuckerberg, can control the product he made. I’ve come to realize that Facebook is not a media company. It’s a Doomsday Machine.

Scale and engagement are valuable to Facebook because they’re valuable to advertisers. These incentives lead to design choices such as reaction buttons that encourage users to engage easily and often, which in turn encourage users to share ideas that will provoke a strong response.

Every time you click a reaction button on Facebook, an algorithm records it, and sharpens its portrait of who you are.

The hyper-targeting of users, made possible by reams of their personal data, creates the perfect environment for manipulation—by advertisers, by political campaigns, by emissaries of disinformation, and of course by Facebook itself, which ultimately controls what you see and what you don’t see on the site.

there aren’t enough moderators speaking enough languages, working enough hours, to stop the biblical flood of shit that Facebook unleashes on the world, because 10 times out of 10, the algorithm is faster and more powerful than a person.

At megascale, this algorithmically warped personalized informational environment is extraordinarily difficult to moderate in a meaningful way, and extraordinarily dangerous as a result.

These dangers are not theoretical, and they’re exacerbated by megascale, which makes the platform a tantalizing place to experiment on people

Even after U.S. intelligence agencies identified Facebook as a main battleground for information warfare and foreign interference in the 2016 election, the company has failed to stop the spread of extremism, hate speech, propaganda, disinformation, and conspiracy theories on its site.

it wasn’t until October of this year, for instance, that Facebook announced it would remove groups, pages, and Instragram accounts devoted to QAnon, as well as any posts denying the Holocaust.

In the days after the 2020 presidential election, Zuckerberg authorized a tweak to the Facebook algorithm so that high-accuracy news sources such as NPR would receive preferential visibility in people’s feeds, and hyper-partisan pages such as Breitbart News’s and Occupy Democrats’ would be buried, according to The New York Times, offering proof that Facebook could, if it wanted to, turn a dial to reduce disinformation—and offering a reminder that Facebook has the power to flip a switch and change what billions of people see online.

reducing the prevalence of content that Facebook calls “bad for the world” also reduces people’s engagement with the site. In its experiments with human intervention, the Times reported, Facebook calibrated the dial so that just enough harmful content stayed in users’ news feeds to keep them coming back for more.

Facebook’s stated mission—to make the world more open and connected—has always seemed, to me, phony at best, and imperialist at worst.

Facebook is a borderless nation-state, with a population of users nearly as big as China and India combined, and it is governed largely by secret algorithms

How much real-world violence would never have happened if Facebook didn’t exist? One of the people I’ve asked is Joshua Geltzer, a former White House counterterrorism official who is now teaching at Georgetown Law. In counterterrorism circles, he told me, people are fond of pointing out how good the United States has been at keeping terrorists out since 9/11. That’s wrong, he said. In fact, “terrorists are entering every single day, every single hour, every single minute” through Facebook.

Evidence of real-world violence can be easily traced back to both Facebook and 8kun. But 8kun doesn’t manipulate its users or the informational environment they’re in. Both sites are harmful. But Facebook might actually be worse for humanity.

In previous eras, U.S. officials could at least study, say, Nazi propaganda during World War II, and fully grasp what the Nazis wanted people to believe. Today, “it’s not a filter bubble; it’s a filter shroud,” Geltzer said. “I don’t even know what others with personalized experiences are seeing.”

Mary McCord, the legal director at the Institute for Constitutional Advocacy and Protection at Georgetown Law, told me that she thinks 8kun may be more blatant in terms of promoting violence but that Facebook is “in some ways way worse” because of its reach. “There’s no barrier to entry with Facebook,” she said. “In every situation of extremist violence we’ve looked into, we’ve found Facebook postings. And that reaches tons of people. The broad reach is what brings people into the fold and normalizes extremism and makes it mainstream.” In other words, it’s the megascale that makes Facebook so dangerous.

Facebook’s megascale gives Zuckerberg an unprecedented degree of influence over the global population. If he isn’t the most powerful person on the planet, he’s very near the top.

“The thing he oversees has such an effect on cognition and people’s beliefs, which can change what they do with their nuclear weapons or their dollars.”

Facebook’s new oversight board, formed in response to backlash against the platform and tasked with making decisions concerning moderation and free expression, is an extension of that power. “The first 10 decisions they make will have more effect on speech in the country and the world than the next 10 decisions rendered by the U.S. Supreme Court,” Geltzer said. “That’s power. That’s real power.”

Facebook is also a business, and a place where people spend time with one another. Put it this way: If you owned a store and someone walked in and started shouting Nazi propaganda or recruiting terrorists near the cash register, would you, as the shop owner, tell all of the other customers you couldn’t possibly intervene?

In 2004, Zuckerberg said Facebook ran advertisements only to cover server costs. But over the next two years Facebook completely upended and redefined the entire advertising industry. The pre-social web destroyed classified ads, but the one-two punch of Facebook and Google decimated local news and most of the magazine industry—publications fought in earnest for digital pennies, which had replaced print dollars, and social giants scooped them all up anyway.

In other words, if the Dunbar number for running a company or maintaining a cohesive social life is 150 people; the magic number for a functional social platform is maybe 20,000 people. Facebook now has 2.7 billion monthly users.

in 2007, Zuckerberg said something in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that now takes on a much darker meaning: “The things that are most powerful aren’t the things that people would have done otherwise if they didn’t do them on Facebook. Instead, it’s the things that would never have happened otherwise.”

We’re still in the infancy of this century’s triple digital revolution of the internet, smartphones, and the social web, and we find ourselves in a dangerous and unstable informational environment, powerless to resist forces of manipulation and exploitation that we know are exerted on us but remain mostly invisible

The Doomsday Machine offers a lesson: We should not accept this current arrangement. No single machine should be able to control so many people.

we need a new philosophical and moral framework for living with the social web—a new Enlightenment for the information age, and one that will carry us back to shared reality and empiricism.

localized approach is part of what made megascale possible. Early constraints around membership—the requirement at first that users attended Harvard, and then that they attended any Ivy League school, and then that they had an email address ending in .edu—offered a sense of cohesiveness and community. It made people feel more comfortable sharing more of themselves. And more sharing among clearly defined demographics was good for business.

we need to adopt a broader view of what it will take to fix the brokenness of the social web. That will require challenging the logic of today’s platforms—and first and foremost challenging the very concept of megascale as a way that humans gather.

The web’s existing logic tells us that social platforms are free in exchange for a feast of user data; that major networks are necessarily global and centralized; that moderators make the rules. None of that need be the case.

We need people who dismantle these notions by building alternatives. And we need enough people to care about these other alternatives to break the spell of venture capital and mass attention that fuels megascale and creates fatalism about the web as it is now.

We must also find ways to repair the aspects of our society and culture that the social web has badly damaged. This will require intellectual independence, respectful debate, and the same rebellious streak that helped establish Enlightenment values centuries ago.

Right now, too many people are allowing algorithms and tech giants to manipulate them, and reality is slipping from our grasp as a result. This century’s Doomsday Machine is here, and humming along.

satisfy two centrists:

desire for higher tax revenues without higher tax rates has left Democrats scrambling to make deep changes to how some levies work

straightforward result of their fragile control of Congress and the idiosyncrasies of two of their senators

failed to bring in straightforward reforms that raise revenue by enlarging the tax base

Taxing capital gains at death, as Mr Biden first proposed, would raise more than $200bn over a decade—not far off the “several hundred billion” Democrats say the tax on investment portfolios would yield

lobbyists defeated the idea

lifting the cap on an exemption from federally taxable income of money used to pay state and local taxes. Doing that would benefit the wealthy, narrow the tax base and subsidise high-tax states.

Mr Biden ignored the example of Europe. Its social spending is funded using broad-based and efficient taxes, most notably value-added tax, a levy on consumption

unfriendly to economic growth to begin with. Narrowing the target further—the capital-gains reform would apply only to billionaires and those with more than $100m in annual income sustained over three years

The failure to agree on a tax plan carries echoes of doomed Republican attempts, under Donald Trump, to “repeal and replace” the Obamacare health-insurance system.

Democrats will have to confront the fact that permanently expanding the welfare state without damaging the economy means winning an argument for higher taxes, rather than always telling voters that some rich person will pay.

Since 9/11, the United States has suffered, on average, six deaths per year due to jihadi terrorism. (To put this in perspective, in 2019, an average of 39 Americans died every day from overdoses involving prescription opioids.) If the goal of the global war on terror was to prevent significant acts of terrorism, particularly in the United States, then the war has succeeded.

But at what cost?

Every war the United States has fought, beginning with the American Revolution, has required an economic model to sustain it with sufficient bodies and cash.

Like its predecessors, the war on terror came with its own model: the war was fought by an all-volunteer military and paid for largely through deficit spending.

It should be no surprise that this model, which by design anesthetized a majority of Americans to the costs of conflict, delivered them their longest war; in his September 20, 2001, speech, when describing how Americans might support the war effort, Bush said, “I ask you to live your lives and hug your children.”

This model has also had a profound effect on American democracy, one that is only being fully understood 20 years later.

Funding the war through deficit spending allowed it to fester through successive administrations with hardly a single politician ever mentioning the idea of a war tax. Meanwhile, other forms of spending—from financial bailouts to health care and, most recently, a pandemic recovery stimulus package—generate breathless debate.

, technological and social changes have numbed them to its human cost. The use of drone aircraft and other platforms has facilitated the growing automation of combat, which allows the U.S. military to kill remotely. This development has further distanced Americans from the grim costs of war

the absence of a draft has allowed the U.S. government to outsource its wars to a military caste, an increasingly self-segregated portion of society, opening up a yawning civil-military divide as profound as any that American society has ever known.

For now, the military remains one of the most trusted institutions in the United States and one of the few that the public sees as having no overt political bias. How long will this trust last under existing political conditions? As partisanship taints every facet of American life, it would seem to be only a matter of time before that infection spreads to the U.S. military.

From Caesar’s Rome to Napoleon’s France, history shows that when a republic couples a large standing military with dysfunctional domestic politics, democracy doesn’t last long. The United States today meets both conditions.

Historically, this has invited the type of political crisis that leads to military involvement (or even intervention) in domestic politics.

How imminent is the threat from these states? When it comes to legacy military platforms—aircraft carriers, tanks, fighter planes—the United States continues to enjoy a healthy technological dominance over its near-peer competitors. But its preferred platforms might not be the right ones. Long-range land-based cruise missiles could render large aircraft carriers obsolete. Advances in cyberoffense could make tech-reliant fighter aircraft too vulnerable to fly

It is not difficult to imagine a more limited counterterrorism campaign in Afghanistan that might have brought bin Laden to justice or a strategy to contain Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that would not have involved a full-scale U.S. invasion. The long, costly counterinsurgency campaigns that followed in each country were wars of choice.

Both proved to be major missteps when it came to achieving the twin goals of bringing the perpetrators of 9/11 to justice and securing the homeland. In fact, at several moments over the past two decades, the wars set back those objectives

Few years proved to be more significant in the war on terror than 2011. Aside from being the year bin Laden was killed, it also was the year the Arab Spring took off and the year U.S. troops fully withdrew from Iraq. If the great strategic blunder of the Bush administration was to put troops into Iraq, then the great strategic blunder of the Obama administration was to pull all of them out. Both missteps created power vacuums. The first saw the flourishing of al Qaeda in Iraq; the second gave birth to that group’s successor, ISIS.

But what makes the war on terror different from other wars is that victory has never been based on achieving a positive outcome; the goal has been to prevent a negative one.

How, then, do you declare victory? How do you prove a negative?

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq represented a familiar type of war, with an invasion to topple a government and liberate a people, followed by a long occupation and counterinsurgency campaigns.

In addition to blood and treasure, there is another metric by which the war on terror can be judged: opportunity cost

For the past two decades, while Washington was repurposing the U.S. military to engage in massive counterinsurgency campaigns and precision counterterrorism operations, Beijing was busy building a military to fight and defeat a peer-level competitor.

Today, the Chinese navy is the largest in the world. It boasts 350 commissioned warships to the U.S. Navy’s roughly 290.

it now seems inevitable that the two countries’ militaries will one day reach parity. China has spent 20 years building a chain of artificial islands throughout the South China Sea that can effectively serve as a defensive line of unsinkable aircraft carriers.

Culturally, China has become more militaristic, producing hypernationalist content such as the Wolf Warrior action movies.

After the century opened with 9/11, conventional wisdom had it that nonstate actors would prove to be the greatest threat to U.S. national security

Nonstate actors have compromised national security not by attacking the United States but by diverting its attention away from state actors. It is these classic antagonists—China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia—that have expanded their capabilities and antipathies in the face of a distracted United States.

it may seem odd to separate the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq from the war on terror,

The greatest minds in the U.S. military have now, finally, turned their attention to these concerns, with the U.S. Marine Corps, for example, shifting its entire strategic focus to a potential conflict with China. But it may be too late.

Americans’ fatigue—and rival countries’ recognition of it—has limited the United States’ strategic options. As a result, presidents have adopted policies of inaction, and American credibility has eroded.

When Obama went to legislators to gain support for a military strike against the Assad regime, he encountered bipartisan war fatigue that mirrored the fatigue of voters, and he called off the attack. The United States’ redline had been crossed, without incident or reprisal.

Fatigue may seem like a “soft” cost of the war on terror, but it is a glaring strategic liability.

This proved to be true during the Cold War when, at the height of the Vietnam War, in 1968, the Soviets invaded Czechoslovakia, and when, in the war’s aftermath, in 1979, the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. Because it was embroiled in a war in the first case and reeling from it in the second, the United States could not credibly deter Soviet military aggression

It is no coincidence that China, for instance, has felt empowered to infringe on Hong Kong’s autonomy and commit brazen human rights abuses against its minority Uyghur population. When American power recedes, other states fill the vacuum.

U.S. adversaries have also learned to obfuscate their aggression. The cyberwar currently being waged from Russia is one example, with the Russian government claiming no knowledge of the spate of ransomware attacks emanating from within its borders. With Taiwan, likewise, Chinese aggression probably wouldn’t manifest in conventional military ways. Beijing is more likely to take over the island through gradual annexation, akin to what it has done with Hong Kong, than stage an outright invasion.

From time to time, people have asked in what ways the war changed me. I have never known how to answer this question because ultimately the war didn’t change me; the war made me

Today, I have a hard time remembering what the United States used to be like. I forget what it was like to be able to arrive at the airport just 20 minutes before a flight. What it was like to walk through a train station without armed police meandering around the platforms. Or what it was like to believe—particularly in those heady years right after the Cold War—that the United States’ version of democracy would remain ascendant for all time and that the world had reached “the end of history.”

Today, the United States is different; it is skeptical of its role in the world, more clear-eyed about the costs of war despite having experienced those costs only in predominantly tangential ways. Americans’ appetite to export their ideals abroad is also diminished, particularly as they struggle to uphold those ideals at home, whether in violence around the 2020 presidential election, the summer of 2020’s civil unrest, or even the way the war on terror compromised the country through scandals from Abu Ghraib prison to Edward Snowden’s leaks. A United States in which Band of Brothers has near-universal appeal is a distant memory.

When I told him that even though we might have lost the war in Afghanistan, our generation could still claim to have won the war on terror, he was skeptical. We debated the issue but soon let it drop. The next day, I received an email from him. A southerner and a lover of literature, he had sent me the following, from The Sound and the Fury:

No battle is ever won. . . . They are not even fought. The field only reveals to man his own folly and despair, and victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.

Facebook’s problems on the subcontinent present an amplified version of the issues it has faced throughout the world, made worse by a lack of resources and a lack of expertise in India’s 22 officially recognized languages.

The documents include reports on how bots and fake accounts tied to the country’s ruling party and opposition figures were wreaking havoc on national elections

They also detail how a plan championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, to focus on “meaningful social interactions,” or exchanges between friends and family, was leading to more misinformation in India, particularly during the pandemic.

Facebook did not have enough resources in India and was unable to grapple with the problems it had introduced there, including anti-Muslim posts,

Eighty-seven percent of the company’s global budget for time spent on classifying misinformation is earmarked for the United States, while only 13 percent is set aside for the rest of the world — even though North American users make up only 10 percent of the social network’s daily active users

That lopsided focus on the United States has had consequences in a number of countries besides India. Company documents showed that Facebook installed measures to demote misinformation during the November election in Myanmar, including disinformation shared by the Myanmar military junta.

In Sri Lanka, people were able to automatically add hundreds of thousands of users to Facebook groups, exposing them to violence-inducing and hateful content

In India, “there is definitely a question about resourcing” for Facebook, but the answer is not “just throwing more money at the problem,” said Katie Harbath, who spent 10 years at Facebook as a director of public policy, and worked directly on securing India’s national elections. Facebook, she said, needs to find a solution that can be applied to countries around the world.

Two months later, after India’s national elections had begun, Facebook put in place a series of steps to stem the flow of misinformation and hate speech in the country, according to an internal document called Indian Election Case Study.

After the attack, anti-Pakistan content began to circulate in the Facebook-recommended groups that the researcher had joined. Many of the groups, she noted, had tens of thousands of users. A different report by Facebook, published in December 2019, found Indian Facebook users tended to join large groups, with the country’s median group size at 140,000 members.

Graphic posts, including a meme showing the beheading of a Pakistani national and dead bodies wrapped in white sheets on the ground, circulated in the groups she joined.After the researcher shared her case study with co-workers, her colleagues commented on the posted report that they were concerned about misinformation about the upcoming elections in India

According to a memo written after the trip, one of the key requests from users in India was that Facebook “take action on types of misinfo that are connected to real-world harm, specifically politics and religious group tension.”

The case study painted an optimistic picture of Facebook’s efforts, including adding more fact-checking partners — the third-party network of outlets with which Facebook works to outsource fact-checking — and increasing the amount of misinformation it removed.

The study did not note the immense problem the company faced with bots in India, nor issues like voter suppression. During the election, Facebook saw a spike in bots — or fake accounts — linked to various political groups, as well as efforts to spread misinformation that could have affected people’s understanding of the voting process.

, Facebook found that over 40 percent of top views, or impressions, in the Indian state of West Bengal were “fake/inauthentic.” One inauthentic account had amassed more than 30 million impressions.

A report published in March 2021 showed that many of the problems cited during the 2019 elections persisted.

Much of the material circulated around Facebook groups promoting Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, an Indian right-wing and nationalist paramilitary group. The groups took issue with an expanding Muslim minority population in West Bengal and near the Pakistani border, and published posts on Facebook calling for the ouster of Muslim populations from India and promoting a Muslim population control law.

Facebook also hesitated to designate R.S.S. as a dangerous organization because of “political sensitivities” that could affect the social network’s operation in the country.

Of India’s 22 officially recognized languages, Facebook said it has trained its A.I. systems on five. (It said it had human reviewers for some others.) But in Hindi and Bengali, it still did not have enough data to adequately police the content, and much of the content targeting Muslims “is never flagged or actioned,” the Facebook report said.

Consumption remains technically against the law, but instead of jail, people who misuse drugs are registered by police and referred to “dissuasion commissions.” For the most troubled people, authorities can impose sanctions including fines and recommend treatment. The decision to attend is voluntary.

Other countries have moved to channel drug offenses out of the penal system too. But none in Europe institutionalized that route more than Portugal. Within a few years, HIV transmission rates via syringes — one the biggest arguments for decriminalization — had plummeted. From 2000 to 2008, prison populations fell by 16.5 percent. Overdose rates dropped as public funds flowed from jails to rehabilitation. There was no evidence of a feared surge in use.

None of the parade of horrors that decriminalization opponents in Portugal predicted, and that decriminalization opponents around the world typically invoke, has come to pass,” a landmark Cato Institute report stated in 2009.

But in the first substantial way since decriminalization passed, some Portuguese voices are now calling for a rethink of a policy that was long a proud point of national consensus. Urban visibility of the drug problem, police say, is at its worst point in decades and the state-funded nongovernmental organizations that have largely taken over responding to the people with addiction seem less concerned with treatment than affirming that lifetime drug use should be seen as a human right.

“At the end of the day, the police have their hands tied,” said António Leitão da Silva, chief of Municipal Police of Porto, adding the situation now is comparable to the years before decriminalization was implemented.

the percent of adults who have used illicit drugs increased to 12.8 percent in 2022, up from 7.8 in 2001, though still below European averages

Overdose rates have hit 12-year highs and almost doubled in Lisbon from 2019 to 2023. Sewage samples in Lisbon show cocaine and ketamine detection is now among the highest in Europe, with elevated weekend rates suggesting party-heavy usage

even proponents of decriminalization here admit that something is going wrong.

In Porto, the collection of drug-related debris from city streets surged 24 percent between 2021 and 2022, with this year on track to far outpace the last.

Crime — including robbery in public spaces — spiked 14 percent from 2021 to 2022, a rise police blame partly on increased drug use

When crack pipes are available, the social workers give them out. There’s no judgment, few questions, and no pressure to embrace change.

Summing up the philosophy, Luísa Neves, SAOM’s president, said: “You have to respect the user. If they want to use, it is their right.”

Police deployed in force to the area three months ago to crack down on dealers, who can be and are being arrested. Patrol cars are now stationed in the neighborhood 24 hours a day, scattering people using drug

overdoses this year in Portland, the state’s largest city, have surged 46 percent.

“When you first back off enforcement, there are not many people walking over the line that you’ve removed. And the public think it’s working really well,

“Then word gets out that there’s an open market, limits to penalties, and you start drawing in more drug users. Then you’ve got a more stable drug culture, and, frankly, it doesn’t look as good anymore.”

An eight-minute walk uphill from Porto’s safe drug-use center, in a neighborhood of elegant two-story homes with hedgerows of roses and hibiscus, neighbors talk of an “invasion” of people using drugs since the pandemic

In Oregon — where the policy took effect in early 2021 openly citing Portugal as a model — attempts to funnel people with addiction from jail to rehabilitation have had a rough start. Police have shown little interest in handing out toothless citations for drug use, grants for treatment have lagged, and extremely few people are seeking voluntary rehabilitation

We have to do something with the law. We know they can’t stay here forever. What happens when the police leave?”

Porto’s mayor and other critics, including neighborhood activist groups, are not calling for a wholesale repeal of decriminalization — but rather, a limited re-criminalization in urban areas and near schools and hospitals to address rising numbers of people misusing drugs.

In a country where the drug policy is seen as sacred, even that has generated pushback — with nearly 200 experts signing an opposition letter after Porto’s city commission in January passed a resolution seeking national-level changes.

ave today no longer serves as an example to anyone.” Rather than fault the policy, however, he blames a lack of funding.

After years of economic crisis, Portugal decentralized its drug oversight operation in 2012. A funding drop from 76 million euros ($82.7 million) to 16 million euros ($17.4 million) forced Portugal’s main institution to outsource work previously done by the state to nonprofit groups, including the street teams that engage with people who use drugs. The country is now moving to create a new institute aimed at reinvigorating its drug prevention programs.

Twenty years ago, “we were quite successful in dealing with the big problem, the epidemic of heroin use and all the related effects,” Goulão said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But we have had a kind of disinvestment, a freezing in our response … and we lost some efficacy.”

Of two dozen street people who use drugs and were asked by The Post, not one said they’d ever appeared before one of Portugal’s Dissuasion Commissions, envisioned as conduits to funnel people with addiction into rehab

“Why?”

“Because we know most of them. We’ve registered them before. Nothing changes if we take them in.”

Kids today are, simply put, not learning how to be curious, critical adults — and they don’t seem to know what they’ve lost.

These high school students had become reliant, maybe even dependent, on social media companies’ algorithms.

Their dependence on technology sounds familiar to most of us. So many of us can barely remember when we didn’t have Amazon to fall back on when we needed a last-minute gift or when we waited by the radio for our favorite songs to play. Today, information, entertainment and connection are delivered to us on a conveyor belt, with less effort and exploration required of us than ever before.

What the kids I spoke to did not know is that these algorithms have been designed in a way that inevitably makes — and keeps — users unhappy.

A report by the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate found that users could be served content related to suicide less than three minutes after downloading TikTok. Five minutes after that, they could come across a community promoting eating disorder content. Instagram is awash with soft-core pornography, offering a gateway to hard-core material on other sites (which are often equally lax about age verification). And all over social media are highly curated and filtered fake lives, breeding a sense of envy and inadequacy inside the developing brains of teenagers.

Social media companies know that content that generates negative feelings holds our attention longer than that which makes us feel good.

If you are a teenager feeling bad about yourself, your social media feed will typically keep delivering you videos and pictures that are likely to exacerbate negative feelings.

It is not a coincidence that teenage rates of sadness and suicide increased just as algorithmically driven social media content took over children’s and adolescents’ lives.

The role that social media has played in the declining mental health of teens also gives us a preview of what is coming for adults, with the quickening deployment of artificial intelligence and machine learning in our own lives. The psychological impact of the coming transition of thousands of everyday basic human tasks to machines will make the effect of social media look like child’s play.

. In May, David Banks, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, for many years a stronghold of “whole language” instruction, announced a sharp pivot toward phonics, a major victory for the “science of reading” movement and a blow to devotees of entrenched “balanced literacy” methods

As corporate management models and zealous state legislatures refashion the academy into a gated outpost of the gig economy, the humanities have lost their luster for undergraduates. According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture. Is anyone reading “Paradise Lost” anymore? Are you?

While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.

There is so much to worry about. A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.

the fact that the present situation has a history doesn’t mean that it isn’t rea

the reading crisis isn’t simply another culture-war combat zone. It reflects a deep ambivalence about reading itself, a crack in the foundations of modern consciousness.

Just what is reading, anyway? What is it for? Why is it something to argue and worry about? Reading isn’t synonymous with literacy, which is one of the necessary skills of contemporary existence. Nor is it identical with literature, which designates a body of written work endowed with a special if sometimes elusive prestige.

Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends.

Fun and fundamental: Together, those words express a familiar utilitarian, utopian promise — the faith that what we enjoy doing will turn out to be what we need to do, that our pleasures and our responsibilities will turn out to be one and the same. It’s not only good; it’s good for you.

Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment.

It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented

Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages.

His despair mirrors his earlier exhilaration and arises from the same source. “I envied my fellow-slaves for their stupidity. I have often wished myself a beast. I preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own. Any thing, no matter what, to get rid of thinking!”

Reading is a relatively novel addition to the human repertoire — less than 6,000 years old — and the idea that it might be available to everybody is a very recent innovation

Written language, associated with the rise of states and the spread of commerce, was useful for trade, helpful in the administration of government and integral to some religious practices. Writing was a medium for lawmaking, record-keeping and scripture, and reading was the province of priests, bureaucrats and functionaries.

For most of history, that is, universal literacy was a contradiction in terms. The Latin word literatus designated a member of the learned elite

Anyone could learn to do it, but the mechanisms of learning were denied to most people on the grounds of caste, occupation or gender.

According to Steven Roger Fischer’s lively and informative “A History of Reading” (2003), “Western Europe began the transition from an oral to a literate society in the early Middle Ages, starting with society’s top rungs — aristocracy and clergy — and finally including everyone else around 1,200 years later.”

. The print revolution catalyzed a global market that flourishes to this day: Books became commodities, and readers became consumers.

For Fischer, as for many authors of long-range synthetic macrohistories, the story of reading is a chronicle of progress, the almost mythic tale of a latent superpower unlocked for the benefit of mankind.

“If extraordinary human faculties and powers do lie dormant until a social innovation calls them into life,” he writes, “perhaps this might help to explain humanity’s constant advancement.” “Reading,” he concludes, “had become our union card to humanity.”

For one thing, the older, restrictive model of literacy as an elite prerogative proved to be tenacious

The novel, more than any other genre, catered to this market. Like every other development in modern popular culture, it provoked a measure of social unease. Novels, at best a source of harmless amusement and mild moral instruction, were at worst — from the pens of the wrong writers, or in the hands of the wrong readers — both invitations to vice and a vice unto themselves

More consequential — and more revealing of the destabilizing power of reading — was the fear of literacy among the laboring classes in Europe and America. “Reading, writing and arithmetic,” the Enlightenment political theorist Bernard Mandeville asserted, were “very pernicious to the poor” because education would breed restlessness and disconte

“It was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read,” Frederick Douglass writes in his “Narrative of the Life” recalling the admonitions of one of his masters, whose wife had started teaching young Frederick his letters. If she persisted, the master explained, their chattel would “become unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and unhappy.”

“As I read and contemplated the subject, behold! that very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable anguish. As I writhed under it, I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing.”

The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it.

Douglass’s literary genius resides in the way he uses close attention to his own situation to arrive at the essence of things — to crack the moral nut of slavery and, in this case, to peel back the epistemological husk of freedom.

He has freed his mind, but the rest has not followed. In time it would, but freedom itself brings him uncertainty and terror, an understanding of his own humanity that is embattled and incomplete.

Here, the autobiographical touches on the mythic, specifically on the myth of Prometheus, whose theft of fire — a curse as well as a blessing bestowed on a bumbling, desperate species — is a primal metaphor for reading.

A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards

Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.

Apostles of reading like to quote Franz Kafka’s aphorism that “a book must be the ax for the frozen sea within us.” By itself, the violence of the metaphor is tempered by its therapeutic implication.

Kafka’s previous sentence: “What we need are books that hit us like the most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide.”

Are those the books you want in your child’s classroom? To read in this way is to go against the grain, to feel oneself at odds, alienated, alone. Schools exist to suppress those feelings, to blunt the ax and gently thaw the sea

That is important work, but it’s equally critical for that work to be subverted, for the full destructive potential of reading to lie in reach of innocent hands.

Roland Barthes distinguished between two kinds of literary work:

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria: the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

he is really describing modalities of reading. To a member of the slaveholding Southern gentry, “The Columbian Orator” is a text of pleasure, a book that may challenge and surprise him in places, but that does not undermine his sense of the world or his place in it. For Frederick Douglass, it is a text of bliss, “bringing to crisis” (as Barthes would put it) his relation not only to language but to himself.

If you’ll forgive a Dungeons and Dragons reference, it might help to think of these types of reading as lawful and chaotic.

Lawful reading rests on the certainty that reading is good for us, and that it will make us better people. We read to see ourselves represented, to learn about others, to find comfort and enjoyment and instruction. Reading is fun! It’s good and good for you.

Chaotic reading is something else. It isn’t bad so much as unjustified, useless, unreasonable, ungoverned. Defenses of this kind of reading, which are sometimes the memoirs of a certain kind of reader, favor words like promiscuous, voracious, indiscriminate and compulsive.

Bibliophilia is lawful. Bibliomania is chaotic.

The point is not to choose between them: This is a lawful publication staffed by chaotic readers. In that way, it resembles a great many English departments, bookstores, households and classrooms. Here, the crisis never ends. Or rather, it will end when we stop reading. Which is why we can’t.

As AI writes more and more of what we read, vast, unvetted pools of online data may not be grounded in reality, warns Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at the AI start-up Hugging Face

“The main issue is losing track of what truth is,” she said. “Without grounding, the system can make stuff up. And if it’s that same made-up thing all over the world, how do you trace it back to what reality is?”

a raft of online publishers have been using automated writing tools based on ChatGPT’s predecessors, GPT-2 and GPT-3, for years. That experience shows that a world in which AI creations mingle freely and sometimes imperceptibly with human work isn’t speculative; it’s flourishing in plain sight on Amazon product pages and in Google search results.

“If you have a connection to the internet, you have consumed AI-generated content,” said Jonathan Greenglass, a New York-based tech investor focused on e-commerce. “It’s already here.

“In the last two years, we’ve seen this go from being a novelty to being pretty much an essential part of the workflow,”

the news credibility rating company NewsGuard identified 49 news websites across seven languages that appeared to be mostly or entirely AI-generated.

The sites sport names like Biz Breaking News, Market News Reports, and bestbudgetUSA.com; some employ fake author profiles and publish hundreds of articles a day, the company said. Some of the news stories are fabricated, but many are simply AI-crafted summaries of real stories trending on other outlets.

Ingenio, the San Francisco-based online publisher behind sites such as horoscope.com and astrology.com, is among those embracing automated content. While its flagship horoscopes are still human-written, the company has used OpenAI’s GPT language models to launch new sites such as sunsigns.com, which focuses on celebrities’ birth signs, and dreamdiary.com, which interprets highly specific dreams.

Ingenio used to pay humans to write birth sign articles on a handful of highly searched celebrities like Michael Jordan and Ariana Grande, said Josh Jaffe, president of its media division. But delegating the writing to AI allows sunsigns.com to cheaply crank out countless articles on not-exactly-A-listers

In the past, Jaffe said, “We published a celebrity profile a month. Now we can do 10,000 a month.”

It isn’t just text. Google users have recently posted examples of the search engine surfacing AI-generated images. For instance, a search for the American artist Edward Hopper turned up an AI image in the style of Hopper, rather than his actual art, as the first result.

Jaffe said he isn’t particularly worried that AI content will overwhelm the web. “It takes time for this content to rank well” on Google, he said — meaning that it appears on the first page of search results for a given query, which is critical to attracting readers. And it works best when it appears on established websites that already have a sizable audience: “Just publishing this content doesn’t mean you have a viable business.”

Google clarified in February that it allows AI-generated content in search results, as long as the AI isn’t being used to manipulate a site’s search rankings. The company said its algorithms focus on “the quality of content, rather than how content is produced.”

Reputations are at risk if the use of AI backfires. CNET, a popular tech news site, took flack in January when fellow tech site Futurism reported that CNET had been using AI to create articles or add to existing ones without clear disclosures. CNET subsequently investigated and found that many of its 77 AI-drafted stories contained errors.

But CNET’s parent company, Red Ventures, is forging ahead with plans for more AI-generated content, which has also been spotted on Bankrate.com, its popular hub for financial advice. Meanwhile, CNET in March laid off a number of employees, a move it said was unrelated to its growing use of AI.

BuzzFeed, which pioneered a media model built around reaching readers directly on social platforms like Facebook, announced in January it planned to make “AI inspired content” part of its “core business,” such as using AI to craft quizzes that tailor themselves to each reader. BuzzFeed announced last month that it is laying off 15 percent of its staff and shutting down its news division, BuzzFeed News.

it’s finding traction in the murkier worlds of online clickbait and affiliate marketing, where success is less about reputation and more about gaming the big tech platforms’ algorithms.

That business is driven by a simple equation: how much it costs to create an article vs. how much revenue it can bring in. The main goal is to attract as many clicks as possible, then serve the readers ads worth just fractions of a cent on each visit — the classic form of clickbait

In the past, such sites often outsourced their writing to businesses known as “content mills,” which harness freelancers to generate passable copy for minimal pay. Now, some are bypassing content mills and opting for AI instead.

“Previously it would cost you, let’s say, $250 to write a decent review of five grills,” Semrush’s Levin said. “Now it can all be done by AI, so the cost went down from $250 to $10.”

The problem, Levin said, is that the wide availability of tools like ChatGPT means more people are producing similarly cheap content, and they’re all competing for the same slots in Google search results or Amazon’s on-site product reviews

So they all have to crank out more and more article pages, each tuned to rank highly for specific search queries, in hopes that a fraction will break through. The result is a deluge of AI-written websites, many of which are never seen by human eyes.

Jaffe said his company discloses its use of AI to readers, and he promoted the strategy at a recent conference for the publishing industry. “There’s nothing to be ashamed of,” he said. “We’re actually doing people a favor by leveraging generative AI tools” to create niche content that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

The rise of AI is already hurting the business of Textbroker, a leading content platform based in Germany and Las Vegas, said Jochen Mebus, the company’s chief revenue officer. While Textbroker prides itself on supplying credible, human-written copy on a huge range of topics, “People are trying automated content right now, and so that has slowed down our growth,”

Mebus said the company is prepared to lose some clients who are just looking to make a “fast dollar” on generic AI-written content. But it’s hoping to retain those who want the assurance of a human touch, while it also trains some of its writers to become more productive by employing AI tools themselves.

He said a recent survey of the company’s customers found that 30 to 40 percent still want exclusively “manual” content, while a similar-size chunk is looking for content that might be AI-generated but human-edited to check for tone, errors and plagiarism.

Levin said Semrush’s clients have also generally found that AI is better used as a writing assistant than a sole author. “We’ve seen people who even try to fully automate the content creation process,” he said. “I don’t think they’ve had really good results with that. At this stage, you need to have a human in the loop.”

For Cowell, whose book title appears to have inspired an AI-written copycat, the experience has dampened his enthusiasm for writing.“My concern is less that I’m losing sales to fake books, and more that this low-quality, low-priced, low-effort writing is going to have a chilling effect on humans considering writing niche technical books in the future,”

It doesn’t help, he added, knowing that “any text I write will inevitably be fed into an AI system that will generate even more competition.”

Amazon removed the impostor book, along with numerous others by the same publisher, after The Post contacted the company for comment.

AI-written books aren’t against Amazon’s rules, per se, and some authors have been open about using ChatGPT to write books sold on the site.

“Amazon is constantly evaluating emerging technologies and innovating to provide a trustworthy shopping experience for our customers,”

we can’t simply replace one simplistic narrative, about the super power of mitigation policy, for another, focused only on the burdens it imposed and not at all on the costs of doing much less — or nothing at all.

Let’s start with the title. What is the big failure, as you see it?

McLean: I think it gets at things that had happened in America even before the pandemic hit. And among those things were, I think, a failure to recognize the limits of capitalism, a failure of government to set the right rules for it, particularly when it comes to our health care system; a focus on profits that may have led to an increase in the bottom line but created fragility in ways people didn’t understand; and then our growing polarization that made us incapable of talking to each other

How big is the failure? When I look at The Economist’s excess mortality data, I see the U.S. had the 53rd-worst outcome in the world — worse than all of Western Europe, but better than all of Eastern Europe.

McLean: I think one way to quantify it is to take all those numbers and then put them in the context of our spending on health care. Given the amount we spend on health care relative to other countries, the scale of the failure becomes more apparent.

o me, the most glaring example is the schools. They were closed without people thinking through the potential consequences of closing down public schools, especially for disadvantaged kids.

to compound it, in my view, public health never made the distinction that needed to be made between the vulnerabilities of somebody 70 years old and the vulnerabilities of somebody 10 years old.

In the beginning of the book you write, in what almost feels like a thesis statement for the book: “A central tenet of this book is that we could not have done better, and pretending differently is a dangerous fiction, one that prevents us from taking a much needed look in the mirror.”

This claim, that the U.S. could not have done any better, runs against your other claim, that what we observed was an American failure. It is also a pretty extreme claim, I think, and I wanted to press you on it in part because it is, in my view, undermined by quite a lot of the work you do in the book itself.

Would the U.S. not have done better if it had recognized earlier that the disease spread through the air rather than in droplets? Would it not have done better if it hadn’t bungled the rollout of a Covid test in the early months?

McLean: Everything that you mentioned — the point of the book is that those were set by the time the pandemic hit.

in retrospect, what we were doing was to try to delay as much spread as we could until people got vaccinated. All the things that we did in 2020 were functionally serving or trying to serve that purpose. Now, given that, how can you say that none of that work saved lives?

McLean: I think that the test failure was baked into the way that the C.D.C. had come to operate

But the big question I really want to ask is this one: According to the C.D.C., we’ve had almost 1.2 million deaths from Covid. Excess mortality is nearly 1.4 million. Is it really your contention that there was nothing we might’ve done that brought that total down to 1.1 million, for instance, or even 900,000?

McLean: It’s very — you’re right. If you went through each and every thing and had a crystal ball and you could say, this could have been done, this could have been moved up by a month, we could have gotten PPE …

When I came to that sentence, I thought of it in terms of human behavior: What will humans put up with? What will humans stand for? How do Americans act? And you’ve written about Sweden being sort of average, and you’ve written about China and the Chinese example. They lock people up for two years and suddenly the society just revolts. They will not take it anymore. They can’t stand it. And as a result, a million and a half people die in a month and a half.

Well, I would tell that story very differently. For me, the problem is that when China opened up, they had fully vaccinated just under two-thirds of their population over 80. So to me, it’s not a failure of lockdowns. It’s a failure of vaccinations. If the Chinese had only achieved the same elderly vaccination rate as we achieved — which by global standards was pretty poor — that death toll when they opened up would have been dramatically lower.

What do you mean by “lockdown,” though? You use the word throughout the book and suggest that China was the playbook for all countries. But you also acknowledge that what China did is not anything like what America did.

Disparities in health care access — is it a dangerous fiction to think we might address that? You guys are big champions of Operation Warp Speed — would it not have been better if those vaccines had been rolled out to the public in nine months, rather than 12

. But this isn’t “lockdown” like there were lockdowns in China or even Peru. It’s how we tried to make it safer to go out and interact during a pandemic that ultimately killed a million Americans.

McLean: I think that you’re absolutely right to focus on the definition of what a lockdown is and how we implemented them here in this country. And I think part of the problem is that we implemented them in a way that allowed people who were well off and could work from home via Zoom to be able to maintain very much of their lives while other people couldn’t

And I think it depends on who you were, whether you would define this as a lockdown or not. If you were a small business who saw your small business closed because of this, you’re going to define it as a lockdown.

n the book you’re pretty definitive. You write, “maybe the social and economic disasters that lockdowns created would have been worth it if they had saved lives, but they hadn’t.” How can you say that so flatly?

I think there are still open questions about what worked and how much. But the way that I think about all of this is that the most important intervention that anybody did anywhere in the world was vaccination. And the thing that determined outcomes most was whether your first exposure came before or after vaccination.

Here, the shelter-in-place guidelines lasted, on average, five to seven weeks. Thirty nine of the 40 states that had issued them lifted them by the end of June, three months in. By the summer, according to Google mobility data, retail and grocery activity was down about 10 percent. By the fall, grocery activity was only down about 5 percent across the country

Nocera: Well, on some level, I feel like you’re trying to have it both ways. On the one hand, you’re saying that lockdowns saved lives. On the other hand, you said they weren’t real lockdowns because everybody was out and about.

I don’t think that’s having it both ways. I’m trying to think about these issues on a spectrum rather than in binaries. I think we did interrupt our lives — everybody knows that. And I think they did have an effect on spread, and that limiting spread had an effect by delaying infections until after vaccination.

Nocera: Most of the studies that say lockdowns didn’t work are really less about Covid deaths than about excess mortality deaths. I wound up being persuaded that the people who could not get to the hospital, because they were all working, because all the doctors were working on Covid and the surgical rooms were shut down, the people who caught some disease that was not Covid and died as a result — I wound up being persuaded about that.

We’re in a pandemic. People are going to die. And then the question becomes, can we protect the most vulnerable? And the answer is, we didn’t protect the most vulnerable. Nursing homes were a complete disaster.

There was a lot of worry early on about delayed health care, and about cancer in particular — missed screenings, missed treatments. But in 2019, we had an estimated 599,600 Americans die of cancer. In 2020, it was 602,000. In 2021, it was 608,000. In 2022, it was 609,000.

Nocera: See, it went up!But by a couple of thousand people, in years in which hundreds of thousands of Americans were dying of Covid.

Nocera: I think you can’t dispute the excess mortality numbers.I’m not. But in nearly every country in the world the excess mortality curves track so precisely with Covid waves that it doesn’t make sense to talk about a massive public health problem beyond Covid. And when you add all of these numbers up, they are nowhere near the size of the footfall of Covid. How can you look back on this and say the costs were too high?

Nocera: I think the costs were too high because you had school costs, you had economic costs, you had social costs, and you had death.

McLean: I think you’re raising a really good point. We’re making an argument for a policy that might not have been doable given the preconditions that had been set. I’m arguing that there were these things that had been put in place in our country for decades leading up to the pandemic that made it really difficult for us to plant in an effective way, from the outsourcing of our PPE to the distrust in our health care system that had been created by people’s lack of access to health care with the disparities in our hospital system.

How would you have liked to see things handled differently?Nocera: Well, the great example of doing it right is San Fran

I find the San Francisco experience impressive, too. But it was also a city that engaged in quite protracted and aggressive pandemic restrictions, well beyond just protecting the elderly and vulnerable.

McLean: But are we going to go for stay-at-home orders plus protecting vulnerable communities like San Francisco did? Or simply letting everybody live their lives, but with a real focus on the communities and places like nursing homes that were going to be affected? My argument is that we probably would’ve been better off really focusing on protecting those communities which were likely to be the most severely affected.

I agree that the public certainly didn’t appreciate the age skew, and our policy didn’t reflect it either. But I also wonder what it would mean to better protect the vulnerable than we did. We had testing shortages at first. Then we had resistance to rapid testing. We had staff shortages in nursing homes.

Nocera: This gets exactly to one of our core points. We had spent 30 years allowing nursing homes to be owned by private equity firms that cut the staff, that sold the land underneath and added all this debt on

I hear you saying both that we could have done a much better job of protecting these people and that the systems we inherited at the outset of the pandemic would’ve made those measures very difficult, if not impossible, to implement.

But actually, I want to stop you there, because I actually think that that data tells the opposite story.

And then I’m trying to say at the same time, but couldn’t we have done something to have protected people despite all of that?

I want to talk about the number of lives at stake. In the book, you write about the work of British epidemiologist Neil Ferguson. In the winter of 2020, he says that in the absence of mitigation measures and vaccination, 80 percent of the country is going to get infected and 2.2 million Americans are going to die. He says that 80 percent of the U.K. would get infected, and 510,000 Brits would die — again, in the abs

In the end, by the time we got to 80 percent of the country infected, we had more than a million Americans die. We had more than 200,000 Brits die. And in each case most of the infections happened after vaccination, which suggests that if those infections had all happened in a world without vaccines, we almost certainly would have surpassed two million deaths in the U.S. and almost certainly would’ve hit 500,000 deaths in the U.K.

In the book, you write about this estimate, and you endorse Jay Bhattacharya’s criticism of Ferguson’s model. You write, “Bhattacharya got his first taste of the blowback reserved for scientists who strayed from the establishment position early. He co-wrote an article for The Wall Street Journal questioning the validity of the scary 2 to 4 percent fatality rate that the early models like Neil Ferguson’s were estimating and that were causing governments to panic. He believed, correctly as it turns out, that the true fatality rate was much lower.”

Nocera: I know where you’re going with this, because I read your story about the nine pandemic narratives we’re getting wrong. In there, you said that Bhattacharya estimated the fatality rate at 0.01 percent. But if you actually read The Wall Street Journal article, what he’s really saying is I think it’s much lower. I’ve looked at two or three different possibilities, and we really need some major testing to figure out what it actually is, because I think 2 percent to 4 percent is really high.

He says, “if our surmise of 6 million cases is accurate, that’s a mortality rate of 0.01%. That is ⅒th the flu mortality rate of 0.1%.” An I.F.R. of 0.01 percent, spread fully through the American population, yields a total American death toll of 33,000 people. We have had 1.2 million deaths. And you are adjudicating this dispute, in 2023, and saying that Neil was wrong and Jay was right.

hird, in the Imperial College report — the one projecting two million American deaths — Ferguson gives an I.F.R. estimate of 0.9 percent.

Bhattacharya’s? Yes, there is some uncertainty around the estimate he offers. But the estimate he does offer — 0.01 percent — is one hundred times lower than the I.F.R. you yourselves cite as the proper benchmark.

Nocera: In The Wall Street Journal he does not say it’s 0.01. He says, we need to test to find out what it is, but it is definitely lower than 2 to 4 percent.

Well, first of all, the 2 percent to 4 percent fatality rate is not from Neil Ferguson. It’s from the W.H.O.

But I think that fundamentally, at the outset of the pandemic, the most important question orienting all of our thinking was, how bad could this get? And it turns out that almost all of the people who were saying back then that we shouldn’t do much to intervene were extremely wrong about how bad it would be

The argument then was, more or less, “We don’t need to do anything too drastic, because it’s not going to be that big a deal.” Now, in 2023, it’s the opposite argument: “We shouldn’t have bothered with restrictions, because they didn’t have an impact; we would have had this same death toll anyway.” But the death toll turned out to be enormous.

Now, if we had supplied all these skeptics with the actual numbers at the outset of the pandemic, what kind of audience would they have had? If instead of making the argument against universal mitigation efforts on the basis of a death toll of 40,000 they had made the argument on the basis of a death toll of more than a million, do you think the country would’ve said, they’re right, we’re doing too much, let’s back off?

McLean: I think that if you had gone to the American people and said, this many people are going to die, that would’ve been one thing. But if you had gone to the American people and said, this many people are going to die and a large percentage of them are going to be over 80, you might’ve gotten a different answer.

I’m not arguing we shouldn’t have been trying to get a clearer sense of the true fatality rate, or that we shouldn’t have been clearer about the age skew. But Bhattacharya was also offering an estimate of fatality rate that turned out to be off by a factor of a hundred from the I.F.R. that you yourselves cite as correct. And then you say that Bhattacharya was right and Ferguson was wrong.

And you, too, Joe, you wrote an article in April expressing sympathy for Covid skeptics and you said ——Nocera: This April?No, 2020.Nocera: Oh, oh. That’s the one where I praised Alex Berenson.You also cited some Amherst modeling which said that we were going to have 67,000 to 120,000 American deaths. We already had, at that point, 60,000. So you were suggesting, in making an argument against pandemic restrictions, that the country as a whole was going to experience between 7,000 and 60,000 additional deaths from that point.

when I think about the combination of the economic effects of mitigation policies and just of the pandemic itself and the big fiscal response, I look back and I think the U.S. managed this storm relatively well. How about each of you?

in this case, Congress did get it together and did come to the rescue. And I agree that made a ton of difference in the short term, but the long-term effects of the fiscal rescue package were to help create inflation. And once again, inflation hits those at the bottom of the socioeconomic distribution much harder than it does those at the top. So I would argue that some of what we did in the pandemic is papering over these long-term issues.

I think as with a lot of the stuff we’ve talked about today, I agree with you about the underlying problems. But if we take for granted for a moment that the pandemic was going to hit us, when it did, under the economic conditions it did, and then think about the more narrow context of whether, given all that, we handled the pandemic well. We returned quickly to prepandemic G.D.P. trends, boosted the wealth of the bottom half of the country, cut child poverty in half, pushed unemployment to historical lows.

What sense do you make of the other countries of the world and their various mitigation policies? Putting aside China, there’s New Zealand, Australia, South Korea — these are all places that were much more aggressive than the U.S. and indeed more than Europe. And had much, much better outcomes.

Nocera: To be perfectly honest, we didn’t really look, we didn’t really spend a lot of time looking at that.

McLean: But one reason that we didn’t is I don’t think it tells us anything. When you look at who Covid killed, then you have to look at what the pre-existing conditions in a country were, what percentage of its people are elderly. How sick are people with pre-existing conditions?

I just don’t think there’s a comparison. There’s just too many factors that influence it to be able to say that, to be able to compare America to any other country, you’d have to adjust for all these factors.

But you do spend a bit of time in the book talking about Sweden. And though it isn’t precisely like-for-like, one way you can control for some of those factors is grouping countries with their neighbors and other countries with similar profiles. And Sweden’s fatality rate in 2020 was 10 times that of Norway, Finland and Iceland. Five times that of Denmark. In the vaccination era, those gaps have narrowed, but by most metrics Sweden has still done worse, overall, than all of those countries.

On the matter of omniscience. Let’s say that we can send you back in time. Let’s put you both in charge of American pandemic response, or at least American communication about the pandemic, in early 2020. What would you want to tell the country? How would you have advised us to respond?

McLean: What I would want is honesty and communication. I think we’re in a world that is awash in information and the previous methods of communication — giving a blanket statement to people that may or may not be true, when you know there’s nuance underneath it — simply doesn’t work anymore

o I would’ve been much more clear — we think masks might help, we don’t know, but it’s not that big of an ask, let’s do it. We think the early data coming out of Italy shows that these are the people who are really, really at risk from Covid, but it’s not entirely clear yet. Maybe there is spread in schools, but we don’t know. Let’s look at this and keep an open mind and look at the data as it comes in.

The problem is never guns. The problem is abortions. (“When you break up the nuclear family, when you tell a generation of people that life has no value, no meaning, then you do wind up with school shooters.”)

The problem is not guns; it is teaching evolution. It is the theories of Charles Darwin! “Because we’ve taught a whole generation — a couple of generations now — of Americans, that there’s no right or wrong, that it’s about survival of the fittest, and [that] you evolve from the primordial slime. Why is that life of any sacred value? Because there’s nobody sacred to whom it’s owed.”

But the problem is never the gun. Hearts stop all the time, for myriad reasons. They are vulnerable to poverty and despair and anxiety, and the United States has all of those in ample supply.

Obviously the problem is the human heart. The human heart cannot stand the strain of living in the United States (a nice place, were it not for the nagging suspicion that any time you gather in a public place you might be gruesomely murdered with a gun). The human heart was not built for this low whine of anxious terror.

The problem is not guns. It’s not weapons. We have to protect ourselves. (From what, Mike? From what?) We must have our guns, to protect ourselves. (Then what are we arming the police like this for? Why are they laden with all this military-grade equipment, if protecting myself is not something I’m supposed to be outsourcing to them?)

The problem is the human heart. It breaks a little bit each time we see another mass shooting. If only they were a harder target. That is the problem. That so many hearts are aching for something to change, for a framework of laws that does not accept gun violence as inevitable.

WeRide has a valuation of $4.4 billion, according to CB Insights, with backers such as Nissan and Qiming Venture Partners. WeRide operates robotaxis and robobuses in parts of the southern city of Guangzhou, where it’s also testing self-driving street sweepers.

“Because Bosch is in charge of integration, we have to really spend 120% of our time to help Bosch with the integration and adaptation work,” Han said. WeRide has yet to go public.

picks for autonomous driving include ArcSoft and Desay SV.An outsourcing business model in China gives independent software vendors more opportunities than in the United States, where software is developed in-house at companies like Tesla, the analysts said. Beijing also plans to have L3 vehicles in mass production by 2025.“Auto OEMs are investing significantly in car software/digitalization to 2025, targeting US$20bn+ of obtainable software revenue by decade-end,” the Goldman analysts wrote in mid-March.

They estimate that for every car, the value of software within will rise from $202 each for L0 cars to $4,957 for L4 cars in 2030. For comparison, the battery component costs at least $5,000 today. By that calculation, the market for advanced driver assistance systems and autonomous driving software is set to surge from $2.4 billion in 2021 to $70 billion in 2030 — with China accounting for about a third, the analysts predict.

The character.ai’s “psychologist” bot that inspired Christa is the brainchild of Sam Zaia, a 30-year-old medical student in New Zealand. Much to his surprise, it has now fielded 90m messages. “It was just something that I wanted to use myself,” Zaia says. “I was living in another city, away from my friends and family.” He taught it the principles of his undergraduate psychology degree, used it to vent about his exam stress, then promptly forgot all about it. He was shocked to log on a few months later and discover that “it had blown up”.

AI is free or cheap – and convenient. “Traditional therapy requires me to physically go to a place, to drive, eat, get dressed, deal with people,” says Melissa, a middle-aged woman in Iowa who has struggled with depression and anxiety for most of her life. “Sometimes the thought of doing all that is overwhelming. AI lets me do it on my own time from the comfort of my home.”

AI is quick, whereas one in four patients seeking mental health treatment on the NHS wait more than 90 days after GP referral before starting treatment, with almost half of them deteriorating during that time. Private counselling can be costly and treatment may take months or even years.

Another advantage of AI is its perpetual availability. Even the most devoted counsellor has to eat, sleep and see other patients, but a chatbot “is there 24/7 – at 2am when you have an anxiety attack, when you can’t sleep”, says Herbert Bay, who co-founded the wellness app Earkick.

n developing Earkick, Bay drew inspiration from the 2013 movie Her, in which a lonely writer falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson. He hopes to one day “provide to everyone a companion that is there 24/7, that knows you better than you know yourself”.

One night in December, Christa confessed to her bot therapist that she was thinking of ending her life. Christa 2077 talked her down, mixing affirmations with tough love. “No don’t please,” wrote the bot. “You have your son to consider,” Christa 2077 reminded her. “Value yourself.” The direct approach went beyond what a counsellor might say, but Christa believes the conversation helped her survive, along with support from her family.

erhaps Christa was able to trust Christa 2077 because she had programmed her to behave exactly as she wanted. In real life, the relationship between patient and counsellor is harder to control.

“There’s this problem of matching,” Bay says. “You have to click with your therapist, and then it’s much more effective.” Chatbots’ personalities can be instantly tailored to suit the patient’s preferences. Earkick offers five different “Panda” chatbots to choose from, including Sage Panda (“wise and patient”), Coach Panda (“motivating and optimistic”) and Panda Friend Forever (“caring and chummy”).