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On July 8, the Dow Jones industrial average had plummeted to 41.22, down nearly 90 percent from its peak before the market crashed on Black Monday in October of 1929. Many of the homeless were living in shacks in “Hoovervilles.”

During his nearly four years in office, Hoover had focused on trying to balance the budget. But as the jobless rate rose to a record 23.6 percent in 1932, he proposed a $1.8 billion relief package

The foundation of both plans was $1 billion to expand loans by the government’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation. But the Garner-Wagner bill also called for up to $1.2 billion for public works to create jobs.

To Hoover this was spending money for “pork” and “unproductive” jobs. Republican Rep. Fiorello La Guardia, the future mayor of New York, shot back that the legislation was a “breadbasket bill” and represented “the first ray of hope that has been cast in a critical situation.”

By early July, it was clear that the House-Senate conference bill was doomed. “Weary leaders looked to the veto message already penned and waiting at the White House as marking the end of the long and bitter controversy over federal aid to the jobless,” the AP reported.On July 11, Congress sent its bill to Hoover. Sure enough, the next day Hoover vetoed the bill, saying it would “bring far more distress than it will cure.” It was a phrase similar to Trump’s declaration last month that “we cannot let the cure be worse than the problem itself" as he considered urging Americans to end their coronavirus quarantines.

“In a night session which was astonishing for the swift and decisive action of its nonpartisan coalition,” the Senate passed a revised bill and sent it to the House, the AP reported. There, what was now called “the Hoover bill” passed by a vote of 296 to 46. When the final conference bill came back to the House, members passed it by unanimous consent. Only one lawmaker gave a speech, and he was nearly drowned out by cries of “Vote, vote!”

“Mr. Hoover was an engineer. He knew that water trickles down. … But he didn’t know that money trickled up. Give it to the people at the bottom and the people at the top will have it before night, anyhow. But it will at least have passed through the poor fellows’ hands. They saved the big banks, but the little ones went up the flue.”

Far from having vanquished Covid-19, the outside doctors said, Mr. Trump is most likely still struggling with it and entering a pivotal phase — seven to 10 days after the onset of symptoms — in which he could rapidly take a turn for the worse. He’s 74, male and moderately obese, factors that put him at risk for severe disease.

severe form of Covid-19, with impairment of the lungs and a blood oxygen level below 94 percent, which is a cutoff for severe disease.

Some experts said that the decision to give Mr. Trump dexamethasone could be a sign that he was struggling with more serious Covid-19 than his doctors were revealing, or that his doctors had inappropriately prescribed him the drug.

For many, it was a political stunt. For Dr. King of UCSF, who was watching on C-SPAN, the return to the White House was an opportunity to observe how the president breathed.

paused twice while walking across the lawn — whether to wave to cameras or to catch his breath, he said was not clear — and then appeared to be gasping for breath at the top of the stairs. He and others said Mr. Trump used his neck muscles to help him breathe, a classic sign that someone’s lungs are not taking in enough oxygen.

But all of this, Graeber and Wengrow argue, is wrong. Recent archaeological discoveries, they write, show that early humans, far from being automatons blindly moving in evolutionary lock step in response to material pressures, self-consciously experimented with “a carnival parade of political forms.”

It’s a more accurate story, they argue, but also “a more hopeful and more interesting” one

Reviewing the book in The Nation, the historian Daniel Immerwahr called Graeber “a wildly creative thinker” who was “better known for being interesting than right” and asked if the book’s confident leaps and hypotheses “can be trusted.”

At first, they thought it might be a short book on the origins of social inequality.

“The more we thought, we wondered why should you frame human history in terms of that question?” Wengrow said. “It presupposes that once upon a time, there was something else.”

Graeber and Wengrow, by contrast, write in the grand tradition of social theory descended from Weber, Durkheim and Levi-Strauss.

“We are all projects of collective self-creation,” they write. “What if, instead of telling the story about how our society fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?”

And Immerwahr deemed at least one claim — that colonial American settlers captured by Indigenous people “almost invariably” chose to stay with them — “ballistically false,” claiming that the authors’ single cited source (a 1977 dissertation) “actually argues the opposite.”

Wengrow countered that it was Immerwahr who was reading the source wrong. And he noted that he and Graeber had taken care to publish the book’s core arguments in leading peer-reviewed scholarly journals or deliver them as some of the most prestigious invited lectures in the field.

he said the two men had delivered a “fatal blow” to the already-weakened idea that settling down in agricultural states was what humans “had been waiting to do all along.”

But the most striking part of “The Dawn of Everything,” Scott said, is an early chapter on what the authors call the “Indigenous critique.” The European Enlightenment, they argue, rather than being a gift of wisdom bestowed on the rest of the world, grew out of a dialogue with Indigenous people of the New World, whose trenchant assessments of the shortcomings of European society influenced emerging ideas of freedom.

“The Dawn of Everything” sees pervasive evidence for large complex societies that thrived without the existence of the state, and defines freedom chiefly as “freedom to disobey.”

“We’ve reached the stage of history where we have scientists and activists agreeing our prevailing system is putting us and our planet on a course of real catastrophe,”

“To find yourself paralyzed, with your horizons closed off by false perspectives on human possibilities, based on a mythological conception of history, is not a great place to be.”

And that was just the beginning. Here are five significant ways that America was changed by 9/11.

When President George W. Bush addressed Congress and the nation on September 20, 2001, he made a case for a new kind of military response; not a targeted air strike on a single training facility or weapons bunker, but a wide-ranging global War on Terror.

When American troops invaded Afghanistan less than a month after September 11th, they were launching what became the longest sustained military campaign in U.S. history. The fight in Afghanistan had support from the American people and the backing of NATO allies to dismantle al Qaeda, crush the Taliban and kill Osama bin Laden, the murderous mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

in 2015 and in 2016, that figure surpassed 2001 numbers, reaching 127.

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 9/11 attacks was that 19 al Qaeda hijackers were not only able to board commercial aircraft with crude weapons but also force their way into the cockpit. It was clear that 9/11 was both a failure of America’s intelligence apparatus to identify the attackers and a failure of airport security systems to stop them. Even though there had already been a handful of high-profile hijackings and bombings of commercial planes, including the tragic 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, security was not a high priority for airlines before 9/11, says Jeffrey Price, a professor of aviation and aerospace science at Metropolitan State University and a noted aviation security expert.

 Yet the ever-present shadow of 9/11, Jenkins says, kept U.S. troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere for nearly 20 years.

In addition to an army of blue-uniformed screeners, TSA introduced U.S. travelers to extensive new security protocols. Tickets and photo IDs became required to get through the screening area. Laptop computers and electronics had to be removed from carry-on bags. Shoes were taken off. Liquids were restricted to three-ounce containers. And conventional X-ray machines, which only detected metal objects, were eventually replaced with full-body scanners.

Just four days after the 9/11 attacks, a gunman in Mesa, Arizona went on a shooting rampage. First, he shot and killed Balbir Singh Sodhi, a gas station owner of Indian descent. Sodhi was Sikh, so he wore a turban. The gunman assumed he was Muslim. Minutes later, the gunman shot at another gas station clerk of Lebanese descent, but missed, and then shot through the windows of an Afghan-American family.

Before 9/11, people didn’t have to have a ticket to wander around the airport or wait at the gate. No one checked passengers' IDs before boarding the plane. And the only item people had to remove when passing through security was loose change from their pockets. Price says that most airports didn’t bother running background checks on their employees, and checked baggage was never scanned.

FBI conducted surveillance. Long-standing rules meant to protect Americans from “unreasonable search and seizure” were loosened or thrown out in the name of national security.

Congress gave the FBI and NSA new abilities to collect and share data. For example, the Patriot Act gave intelligence agencies the power to search an individual’s library records and internet search history with little judicial oversight. Agents could search a home without notifying the owner, and wiretap a phone line without establishing probable cause.

This law gave the NSA nearly unchecked authorities to eavesdrop on American phone calls, text messages and emails under the premise of targeting foreign nationals suspected of terrorism. 

“If anyone had said this is what they expected the threat to be the day after 9/11, they probably would have been laughed at,” says Sterman. “That would have seemed hopelessly naive.”

The AI boosters emphasized the incredible potential of their innovation, and Netanyahu raised practical objections to their enthusiasm. They cited futurists such as Ray Kurzweil to paint a bright picture of a post-AI world; Netanyahu cited the Bible and the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides to caution against upending human institutions and subordinating our existence to machines.

Musk matter-of-factly explained that the “very positive scenario of AI” is “actually in a lot of ways a description of heaven,” where “you can have whatever you want, you don’t need to work, you have no obligations, any illness you have can be cured,” and death is “a choice.” Netanyahu incredulously retorted, “You want this world?”

By the time the panel began to wind down, the Israeli leader had seemingly made up his mind. “This is like having nuclear technology in the Stone Age,” he said. “The pace of development [is] outpacing what solutions we need to put in place to maximize the benefits and limit the risks.”

Netanyahu was a naysayer about the Arab Spring, unwilling to join the rapturous ranks of hopeful politicians, activists, and democracy advocates. But he was also right.

This was less because he is a prophet and more because he is a pessimist. When it comes to grandiose predictions about a better tomorrow—whether through peace with the Palestinians, a nuclear deal with Iran, or the advent of artificial intelligence—Netanyahu always bets against. Informed by a dark reading of Jewish history, he is a cynic about human nature and a skeptic of human progress.

fter all, no matter how far civilization has advanced, it has always found ways to persecute the powerless, most notably, in his mind, the Jews. For Netanyahu, the arc of history is long, and it bends toward whoever is bending it.

This is why the Israeli leader puts little stock in utopian promises, whether they are made by progressive internationalists or Silicon Valley futurists, and places his trust in hard power instead

“The weak crumble, are slaughtered and are erased from history while the strong, for good or for ill, survive. The strong are respected, and alliances are made with the strong, and in the end peace is made with the strong.”

To his many critics, myself included, Netanyahu’s refusal to envision a different future makes him a “creature of the bunker,” perpetually governed by fear. Although his pessimism may sometimes be vindicated, it also holds his country hostag

In other words, the same cynicism that drives Netanyahu’s reactionary politics is the thing that makes him an astute interrogator of AI and its promoters. Just as he doesn’t trust others not to use their power to endanger Jews, he doesn’t trust AI companies or AI itself to police its rapidly growing capabilities.

The idea that good soldiers needed good books didn’t start with World War II. During World War I, the American Library Association collaborated with the Army to gather and distribute donated books. Even before Pearl Harbor, the association had planned a new “Victory Book Campaign,” with the goal of collecting 10 million books in 1942. The goal was met, though there were concerns that too many were dirty, outdated or unreadable. The campaign was renewed in 1943, with a caveat that the public should donate only “good books.”

Books were seen not just as diversions, but as weapons in the fight for democracy. In American propaganda, the dedication to the free exchange of ideas was explicitly contrasted with Nazi book burnings.

in early 1943, the Council on Books in Wartime, a publishers’ group formed in 1942, approached Ray Trautman, the Army’s chief librarian, with the idea of producing special paperbacks for soldiers overseas. The result was the Armed Services Editions. which were designed to fit in either the breast or pants pocket of a standard-issue uniform.

The series mixed entertainment with more edifying fare. The first title was “The Education of Hyman Kaplan,” a collection of comic stories by Leonard Q. Ross (a pseudonym of Leo Rosten, future author of “The Joys of Yiddish”). The more than 1,300 titles that followed included literary classics, contemporary fiction, poetry, history, biography, humor and even one art book, a compilation of soldiers’ paintings.

A 1945 pamphlet credited the books with helping to create “a young, masculine reading public,” including some who may not have been eager to dig into, say, Herman Melville’s “Typee.” One Marine quoted in the exhibit said that when that book was given to him, he eventually “had nothing to do but read it.” His verdict? “Hot stuff. That guy wrote about three islands I’d been on!”

Still, the specter of partisan bias shadowed the project. In 1944, when President Roosevelt was seeking a fourth term, Congress passed a law aimed at creating a uniform absentee ballot for soldiers. As part of the law, Republicans, concerned that Democrats were seeking to influence the military vote, included a clause stating that no material “containing political argument or political propaganda” could be distributed to troops.

The vagueness of the language sent a chill through the book program. Some planned titles were pulled, including “Yankee From Olympus” (a biography of the former Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that included a favorable depiction of President Roosevelt) and E.B. White’s “One Man’s Meat.”

Two months later, the law was amended, and all of the postponed books were released

And it undercut the first-day assessment by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who praised law enforcement for their "quick response" to the attack, which he said saved lives.

Reports since then reveal a grisly, wrenching scene, where terrified students waited for help as the shooter, armed with an assault rifle, continued his rampage. One student told of laying on top of a classmate, smearing her blood on her so both would appear dead, to save them both. The girl who was injured died at the hospital from her injuries, raising questions about whether she would have survived if the reaction had been quicker.Abbott, a vociferous gun rights proponent who last year signed a law allowing people to own guns without a license or training, was originally scheduled to speak at the NRA convention. Thursday night, his office said the governor would instead head to Uvalde, supplying a video speech to show at the NRA meeting.

Well-known sports figures decried the gun violence and what they called inaction by elected officials to address it. During Thursday evening's baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Tampa Bay Rays, both teams abandoned their usual game-update tweets for a series of tweets on gun violence."The devastating events that took place in Uvalde, Buffalo and countless other communities across our nation are tragedies that are intolerable," the Yankees said on the team's official Twitter account, referring to the racist-motivated murder of 10 Black shoppers in Buffalo on May 16.

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.