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The diversion was, for Biden, part of a regular effort to use outside experts, in private White House meetings, to help him work through his approach to multiple crises facing his presidency

The historians Biden has invited to the White House generally take a longer view, placing his presidency in the context of America’s path since its founding.

“They really wanted outside-the-box thinking of, is there any way that this war, which will be horrible for everyone involved, can be stopped? Can we stop it? How can we stop it?” Bremmer said. “All of my interactions [with the White House] in the last few years have been uniformly open, constructive and really wanting to get my best sense of where they’re getting it right and where they’re not.”

McFaul was among a socially distanced group that met to discuss Ukraine in the East Room earlier this year, along with former diplomat Richard Haass, journalist Fareed Zakaria, analyst Ian Bremmer, former National Security Council adviser Fiona Hill and retired Adm. James G. Stavridis, a former Supreme Allied Commander of NATO.

the Aug. 4 gathering was distinguished by its relatively small size and the focus of the participants on the rise of totalitarianism around the world and the threat to democracy at home. They included Biden’s occasional speechwriter Jon Meacham, journalist Anne Applebaum, Princeton professor Sean Wilentz, University of Virginia historian Allida Black and presidential historian Michael Beschloss.

Beschloss, a presidential historian who regularly appears on NBC and MSNBC, has recently become more outspoken about what he sees as the need for Biden to battle anti-democratic forces in the country.“I think he has got to talk tonight about the fact that we are all in existential danger of having our democracy and democracies around the world destroyed,”

Wilentz, prizewinning author of “The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln,” has also voiced alarm in recent months about the state of the country. “We’re on the verge of what Hamilton in ‘The Federalist’ called government by brute force,” Wilentz told the Hill last month.

Biden has continued to bring up such themes in his public speeches, most recently in a July address to a law enforcement group, where he criticized Trump for taking no immediate action as the rioters he had inspired attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021

“You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-democracy,” Biden told the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives. “You can’t be pro-insurrection and pro-American.”

As the historian Michael Beschloss said on MSNBC last night after the hearing, Trump “probably wanted to declare martial law.”

the insurrection was a close-run thing, noting that if “Trump and those rioters had been a little bit faster, we might be living in a country of unbelievable darkness and cruelty.”

But who cares? After all, inflation is too high, and gas is still too expensive, and that’s a bigger problem than the overthrow of the government, isn’t it?

In a country that still had a functional moral compass, citizens would watch the January 6 hearings, band together regardless of party or region, and refuse to vote for anyone remotely associated with Donald Trump, whom the committee has proved, I think, to be an enemy of the Constitution of the United States

His party, as an institution, supports him virtually unconditionally, and several GOP candidates around the country have already vowed to join Trump in his continuing attack on our democracy. To vote for any of these people is to vote against our constitutional order.

It’s that simple.

Lake is one of the most extreme election deniers and Trump sycophants in the GOP, but the Journal thinks she’d be great on the issue of school choice, as though the funding of education would be the big issue if Lake conspires with other Trump cultists across the United States to deliver the final blow to the notion of the peaceful and constitutional transfer of power.

To vote for anyone still loyal to a party led by the narcissistic sociopath who put our elected officials and our political system itself in peril is to abandon any pretense of caring whether the United States remains a constitutional democracy. The question is whether enough of us will care, in little more than three weeks from now, to make a difference.

In the 16th century, tikkun olam became part of Lurianic Kabbalah, but this was a very different idea, as well.  As Halkin explains, while the Lurianic tikkun “calls for mending the entire cosmos …  these efforts … are strictly spiritual, involving prayer, religious ritual, and meditation.”

Jonathan Krasner, in his 2014 article “The Place of Tikkun Olam in American Jewish Life,” identifies three distinct groups that transformed tikkun olam over the past 75 years.  The first were theologians who, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, looked for ways to re-imagine the covenantal relationship between humans and God.

Under tikkun olam, as used by these Jewish leaders, “the Jews were not merely partners with God but ‘senior partners in action,’ entirely responsible for the execution of the covenant.”

abbi Artz, in a 1967 address to Jewish educators, proclaimed, “The ultimate goal of man’s partnership with God is Tikkun olam.”

Beginning in the 1970’s, a number of progressive rabbis and community leaders began appropriating tikkun olam for their publications and programs

“The platform asserted that ‘many of us base our convictions on the Jewish religious concept of tikun olam (the just ordering of human society and the world) and the prophetic traditions of social justice.’”

In the early ’90’s, says Krasner, “others took up the effort to shape a progressive Jewish politics around tikkun olam.”  Among these was Michael Lerner, who founded Tikkun, a left-wing alternative to Commentary magazine.  “Lerner hoped to energize alienated Jews with a model of Judaism that rejected the crass materialism and hypocrisy of middle class suburban Jewish life in favor of a Jewishly grounded ethic of social justice.”

Today, tikkun olam is part of modern, liberal discourse, even though its popularized connotation has little to do with its traditional meaning. 

“It has become a watchword for any value, even if a particular value — worthwhile as it may be — is not rooted in Jewish tradition.”

This brings us back to the tradition — the Talmud — in which tikkun olam served a very important, but specific, role when applying rules of morality and justice in certain circumstances.

The Talmud, I’ve learned, is more than amazing — parsing in minute detail the many moral and judicial issues that inevitably come up in the normal course of life.  The focus is primarily on what’s right and just for those directly involved.

In several limited instances, the rabbis had a wider perspective to keep an eye on the effects on the community as a whole and to adjust specific rules as needed — mi’pnei tikkun ha-olam

The idea of “social justice” may, for many, still be worthwhile, but, according to the Talmud, tikkun olam it is not.

Mr. Clark and Mr. Vought are promoting a legal rationale that would fundamentally change the way presidents interact with the Justice Department. They argue that U.S. presidents should not keep federal law enforcement at arm’s length but instead should treat the Justice Department no differently than any other cabinet agency.

They are condemning Mr. Biden and Democrats for what they claim is the politicization of the justice system, but at the same time pushing an intellectual framework that a future Republican president might use to justify directing individual law enforcement investigations.

Like other conservatives, Mr. Clark adheres to the so-called unitary executive theory, which holds that the president of the United States has the power to directly control the entire federal bureaucracy and Congress cannot fracture that control by giving some officials independent decision-making authority.

Mr. Trump often exploited gaps between what the rules technically allow and the norms of self-restraint that guided past presidents of both parties. In 2021, House Democrats passed the Protecting Our Democracy Act, a legislative package intended to codify numerous previous norms as law, including requiring the Justice Department to give Congress logs of its contacts with White House officials. But Republicans portrayed the bill as an attack on Mr. Trump and it died in the Senate.

The modern era for the Justice Department traces back to the Watergate scandal and the period of government reforms that followed President Richard M. Nixon’s abuses. The norm took root that the president can set broad policies for the Justice Department — directing it to put greater resources and emphasis on particular types of crimes or adopting certain positions before the Supreme Court — but should not get involved in specific criminal case decisions absent extraordinary circumstances, such as if a case has foreign policy implications.

Since then, it has become routine at confirmation hearings for attorney general nominees to have senators elicit promises that they will resist any effort by the president to politicize law enforcement by intruding on matters of prosecutorial judgment and discretion.

Mr. Trump’s top rival for the Republican nomination, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, also rejects the norm that the Justice Department should be independent.

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the D.O.J. and F.B.I. are — quote — ‘independent,’” Mr. DeSantis said in May on Fox News. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected president of the United States.”

The most powerful conservative think tanks are working on plans that would go far beyond “reforming” the F.B.I., even though its Senate-confirmed directors in the modern era have all been Republicans. They want to rip it up and start again.

“The F.B.I. has become a political weapon for the ruling elite rather than an impartial, law-enforcement agency,” said Kevin D. Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, a mainstay of the conservative movement since the Reagan years. He added, “Small-ball reforms that increase accountability within the F.B.I. fail to meet the moment. The F.B.I. must be rebuilt from the ground up — reforming it in its current state is impossible.”

Conservative media channels and social media influencers have been hammering the F.B.I. and the Justice Department for months since the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago, following a playbook they honed while defending Mr. Trump during the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with the Russian government to influence the 2016 election.

On its most-watched nighttime programs, Fox News has been all-in on attacks against the Justice Department, including the accusation, presented without evidence, that Mr. Biden had directed the prosecution of Mr. Trump. As the former president addressed his supporters on Tuesday night at his Bedminster club, Fox News displayed a split screen — Mr. Trump on the right and Mr. Biden on the left. The chyron on the bottom of the screen read: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.”

As president, Mr. Trump saw his attorney general as simply another one of his personal lawyers. He was infuriated when his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, recused himself from the Russia investigation — and then refused to reverse that decision to shut down the case.

After firing Mr. Sessions, Mr. Trump believed he had found someone who would do his bidding in William P. Barr, who had been in the role during George H.W. Bush’s presidency

Under Mr. Barr, the Justice Department overruled career prosecutors’ recommendations on the length of a sentence for Mr. Trump’s longest-serving political adviser, Roger J. Stone Jr., and sought to shut down a case against Mr. Trump’s first national security adviser, Michael Flynn, who had already pleaded guilty. Both cases stemmed from the Russia investigation.

But when Mr. Trump wanted to use the Justice Department to stay in power after he lost the election, he grew enraged when Mr. Barr refused to comply. Mr. Barr ultimately resigned in late 2020.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,”

Biden’s approval ratings are stubbornly low. In a recent ABC poll, only 30 percent of voters approve of his handling of the economy and only 23 percent approve of his handling of immigration at the southern border. Roughly three-quarters of American voters say that Biden, at 80, is too old to seek a second term. There have been a string of polls showing that large majorities in his own party don’t want him to run again. In one survey from 2022, an astounding 94 percent of Democrats under 30 said they wanted a different nominee.

I thought Biden’s favorability ratings would climb as economic growth has remained relatively strong and as inflation has come down. But it just hasn’t happened.

What about four or five years from now, at the end of a second term? Will he still be competent enough to lead? Biden is fit, does not smoke or drink alcohol, exercises frequently and has no serious health conditions, according to the White House

The Republicans who portray him as a doddering old man based on highly selective YouTube clips are wrong. In my interviews with him, he’s like a pitcher who used to throw 94 miles an hour who now throws 87. He is clearly still an effective pitcher.

People who work with him allow that he does tire more easily, but they say that he is very much the dynamic force driving this administration

In fact, I’ve noticed some improvements in his communication style as he’s aged. He used to try to cram every fact in the known universe into every answer; now he’s more disciplined. When he’s describing some national problem, he is more crisp and focused than he used to be, clearer on what is the essential point here — more confidence-inspiring, not less.

don’t find this passive fatalism compelling. The party’s elected officials are basically urging rank-and-file Democrats not to be anxious about a situation that is genuinely anxiety-inducing. Last month Gov. Phil Murphy of New Jersey told The Times, “This is only a matter of time until the broad party, and broadly speaking, Americans, converge with the opinions of folks like myself.” Really? Surely if there’s a lesson we should have learned from the last decade, it’s that we should all be listening harder to what the electorate is trying to say.

A study in The Journal on Active Aging of Biden’s and Trump’s health records from before the 2020 elections found that both men could qualify as “super-agers” — the demographic that maintains physical and mental functioning beyond age 80.

if the president I see in interviews and at speeches is out campaigning next year against an overweight man roughly his own age, then my guess is that public anxieties on this front will diminish.

To me, age isn’t Biden’s key weakness. Inflation is. I agree with what Michael Tomasky wrote in The New Republic: Biden’s domestic legislative accomplishments are as impressive as any other president’s in my adult life. Exactly as he should have, he has directed huge amounts of resources to the people and the places that have been left behind by the global economy. By one Treasury Department estimate, more than 80 percent of the investments sparked by the Inflation Reduction Act are going to counties with below-average college graduation rates and nearly 90 percent are being made in counties with below-average wages. That was the medicine a riven country needed.

it is also true that Biden’s team overlearned the lessons of the Obama years. If Barack Obama didn’t stimulate the economy enough during the Great Recession, Biden stimulated it too much, contributing to inflation and the sticker shock people are feeling.

Anger about inflation is ripping across the world, and has no doubt helped lower the approval ratings of leaders left, right and center. Biden’s 40 percent approval rating may look bad, but in Canada, Justin Trudeau’s approval rating is 36; in Germany Olaf Scholz is at 29; in Britain Rishi Sunak is at 28; in France Emmanuel Macron is at 23; and in Japan Fumio Kishida is also at 23. This is a global phenomenon

“Inflation is the reason Biden could not deliver on his core promise to return the country to normal and the main reason his poll numbers are bad.”

voters are looking back and retroactively elevating their opinion of Trump’s presidency. When he left office only 38 percent of Americans approved of his performance as president. Today, 48 percent do, his high-water mark.

Bitterness, cynicism and distrust pervade the body politic. People perceive reality through negative lenses, seeing everything as much worse than it is. At 3.8 percent, America’s unemployment rate is objectively low, but 57 percent of voters say that the unemployment rate is “not so good” or “poor.”

The nation’s bitter state of mind is a self-perpetuating negativity machine. Younger people feel dismissed; the older generations are hogging power. Faith in major institutions is nearing record lows. The country is hungry for some kind of change but is unclear about what that might look like. As the incumbent, Biden will be tasked with trying to tell a good news story of American revival, which is just a tough story to sell in this environment. And Biden is not out there selling it convincingly.

The bracing reality is that Trump’s cynicism and fury match the national mood more than Biden’s faithful optimism.

“They seem hell bent on nominating the one Democrat who would lose to Donald Trump,” Karl Rove told me recently. “They’ve got a lot of talent on their side, let’s not kid ourselves,” he continued, pointing to younger Democrats like Gretchen Whitmer, Mitch Landrieu, Gavin Newsom and Cory Booker.

A lot of the dump-Biden conversations are based on a false premise: that the Democratic Party brand and agenda are somehow strong and popular enough that any number of younger candidates could win the White House in 2024, and that if Biden were just to retire, all sorts of obstacles and troubles would go with him.

But Biden is not the sole or even primary problem here. To the extent that these things are separable, it’s the Democratic Party as a whole that’s ailing. The generic congressional ballot is a broad measure of the strength of the congressional party. Democrats are now behind. According to a Morning Consult poll, Americans rate the Democratic Party as a whole as the more ideologically extreme party by a nine-point margin.

When pollsters ask which party is best positioned to address your concerns, here too, Democrats are trailing. In a recent Gallup poll 53 percent of Americans say Republicans will do a better job of keeping America prosperous over the short term while only 39 percent thought that of the Democrats.

Fifty-seven percent of Americans said that the Republicans would do a better job keeping America safe, while only 35 percent favor the Democrats. These are historically high Republican advantages.

Here are the hard, unpleasant facts: The Republicans have a likely nominee who is facing 91 charges. The Republicans in Congress are so controlled by a group of performative narcissists, the whole House has been reduced to chaos. And yet they are still leading the Democrats in these sorts of polling measures

There is no other potential nominee who is so credibly steeped in knowing what life is like for working- and middle-class people, just as there was no other potential nominee in 2020. After watching him for a quarter-century, I think he is genuinely most comfortable when he is hanging around the kinds of people he grew up with. He doesn’t send out any off-putting faculty lounge vibes. On cultural matters he is most defined by what he doesn’t do — needlessly offend people with overly academic verbiage and virtue signaling. That is why I worry when he talks too stridently about people on the right, when he name-calls and denounces wide swaths of people as MAGA.

Over the last half-century, the Democrats have become increasingly the party of the well-educated metropolitan class.

today, the party is bleeding working-class voters of all varieties. As John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira point out in their forthcoming book, “Where Have All the Democrats Gone?” Democrats have been losing ground among Hispanics for the last few years. In 2012, Barack Obama carried nonwhite voters without a college degree by a 67-point margin. In 2020, Biden carried this group with a 48-point margin. Today, the Democratic ticket leads among this group by a paltry 16 points

But Democrats are losing something arguably more important than a reliable base of supporters. The party is in danger of letting go of an ethos, a heritage, a tradition. The working-class heart and soul the Democrats cultivated through the Roosevelt, Truman and Kennedy years rooted Democratic progressivism in a set of values that emphasized hard work, neighborhood, faith, family and flag. Being connected to Americans’ everyday experiences kept the party pinioned to the mainstream.

. It grew prone to taking flights of fancy in policy and rhetoric, be it Medicare for All or “defund the police,” going to places where middle-of-the-road voters would not follow. It became more vulnerable to the insular outlooks of its most privileged and educated members.

And that is the fact I keep returning to. Biden is not what ails the party. As things stand, he is the Democrats’ best shot at curing what ails the party.

This is about something deeper than Joe Biden’s age. More and more people are telling pollsters that the Republicans, not the Democrats, care about people like me.

These cultural and spiritual roots give him not just a style but a governing agenda. He has used the presidency to direct resources to those who live in the parts of the country where wages are lower, where education levels are lower, where opportunities are skimpier. Biden’s ethos harks back to the ethos of the New Deal Democratic Party, but it also harks forward to something — to a form of center-left politics that is culturally moderate and economically aggressive

Something almost spiritual is at play here, not just about whether the Democrats can win in 2024, but who the Democrats are.

I also find myself arriving foursquare at the conclusion that rejecting the president now would be, in the first place, a mistake. He offers the most plausible route toward winning the working- and middle-class groups the Democrats need, the most plausible route toward building a broad-based majority party

But it would be worse than a mistake. It would be a renunciation of the living stream of people, ideas and values that flow at the living depths of the party, a stream that propelled its past glories and still points toward future ones.

But researchers say that’s not how supervolcanoes work and cast doubts for a prophetic outburst.

“When a volcano is called a supervolcano, what we really mean is it had a super eruption once, at least, in the past,”

The last V8 eruption occurred around 27,000 years ago in Taupo, New Zealand.

Scientists can’t see what is stirring below the surface of Campi Flegrei with their naked eyes, but Kilburn said the recent activity could be underground molten rock and fluids readjusting themselves. Those movements appear as earthquakes on the surface.

Out of more than 1,000 known volcanoes in the world, only about 20 are supposedly supervolcanoes. Technically, they are defined as those that register the highest on the volcanic explosivity index, which runs from V1 (nonexplosive) to V8 (colossal eruption

“But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to have other super eruptions in the future. … Very, very, very large eruptions are much, much rarer.”

Such a super eruption ejects a volume of around 1,000-cubic kilometers or more — about a thousand times bigger than Mount St. Helens (V5), which caused mudslides, fires, floods and more than 50 deaths in 1980.

Yellowstone, one of the world’s most famous supervolcanoes, measures 30 by 45 miles and welcomes millions of tourists to its park. Its largest eruption occurred 2.1 million years ago, ejecting more than 2,400 cubic kilometers of material. Like many caldera systems, the majority of Yellowstone’s eruptions have since been much smaller.

Supervolcano is “a made-up word,” said volcanologist Michael Poland, scientist in charge at the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory. “I think it’s misleading. I think it’s misapplied. I can’t stand that term. I wish it would go into the dustbin, but it’s too sexy.”

It implies an apocalyptic-like explosion, but no volcanic eruption has caused a mass extinction to our knowledge

The largest volcanic explosion in the geologic record is thought to have occurred in Toba, Indonesia, around 74,000 years ago, registering a V8 on the volcanic explosivity index. S

scientists initially speculated that the eruption almost wiped out humanity because populations declined shortly after, but archaeological evidence showed Homo sapiens farther away were thriving after the eruption.

“No explosive volcanic eruption that we know of has ever been associated with a mass extinction of plant or animal life,” said Poland, who’s also a scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). “That’s not to say it wouldn’t be devastating or hard to live.”

Friedman’s thought, she argues, is more complex and subtle than has been understood: He raised pressing questions about the market, individualism, and the role of the state that will be with us for as long as capitalism endures.

Just as important, his time at Chicago taught Friedman about the intertwining of political, intellectual, and personal loyalties. He became a regular in an informal group of graduate students and junior faculty trying to consolidate the department as a center of free-market thought

by the 1930s, the leading figures at the University of Chicago were deeply committed to what had become known as price theory, which analyzed economic behavior in terms of the incentives and information reflected in prices. The economists who left their mark on Friedman sought to create predictive models of economic decision making, and they were politically invested in the ideal of an unencumbered marketplace.

Friedman was also shaped by older traditions of economic thought, in particular the vision of political economy advanced by thinkers such as Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. For them, as for him, economics was not a narrow social science, concerned with increasing productivity and efficiency. It was closely linked to a broader set of political ideas and values, and it necessarily dealt with basic questions of justice, freedom, and the best way to organize society.

His libertarian ethos helped seed the far more openly hierarchical social and political conservatism that fuels much of our present-day political dysfunction.

But his fundamental commitments were consistent. In his early work on consumption habits, Friedman sought to puncture the arrogance of the postwar Keynesian economists, who claimed to be able to manipulate the economy from above, using taxes and spending to turn investment, consumption, and demand on and off like so many spigots

Instead, he believed that consumption patterns were dependent on local conditions and on lifetime expectations of income. The federal government, he argued, could do much less to affect economic demand—­and hence to fight recessions—­than the Keynesian consensus suggested.

In 1946, Friedman was hired by the University of Chicago, where he shut down efforts to recruit economists who didn’t subscribe to free-market views.

He was also legendary for his brutal classroom culture. One departmental memo, trying to rectify the situation, went so far as to remind faculty to please not treat a university student “like a dog.” What had started as a freewheeling, rebellious culture among the economists in Room Seven wound up as doctrinal rigidity.

Evidence leads her to argue more pointedly that Rose (credited only with providing “assistance”) essentially co-wrote Capitalism and Freedom (1962).

Burns implicitly exposes some of the limitations of Friedman’s focus on the economic benefits of innate individual talent. He had more than nature to thank for producing associates of such high caliber, ready to benefit him in his career. Culture and institutions clearly played a large role, and sexual discrimination during the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s ensured that professional paths were anything but fair.

The state, he acknowledged, would have to take some responsibility for managing economic life—­and thus economists would be thrust into a public role. The question was what they would do with this new prominence.

Almost as soon as the Second World War ended, Friedman began to stake out a distinctive rhetorical position, arguing that the policy goals of the welfare state could be better accomplished by the free market

in Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman made the case that the real problem lay in the methods liberals employed, which involved interfering with the competitive price mechanism of the free market. Liberals weren’t morally wrong, just foolish, despite the vaunted expertise of their economic advisers.

In a rhetorical move that seemed designed to portray liberal political leaders as incompetent, he emphasized efficiency and the importance of the price system as a tool for social policy

For Friedman, the competitive market was the realm of innovation, creativity, and freedom. In constructing his arguments, he envisioned workers and consumers as individuals in a position to exert decisive economic power, always able to seek a higher wage, a better price, an improved product

The limits of this notion emerged starkly in his contorted attempts to apply economic reasoning to the problem of racism, which he described as merely a matter of taste that should be free from the “coercive power” of the law:

Although he personally rejected racial prejudice, he considered the question of whether Black children could attend good schools—and whether, given the “taste” for prejudice in the South, Black adults could find remunerative jobs—less important than the “right” of white southerners to make economic decisions that reflected their individual preferences. In fact, Friedman compared fair-employment laws to the Nuremberg Race Laws of Nazi Germany. Not only was this tone-deaf in the context of the surging 1960s civil-rights movement; it was a sign of how restricted his idea of freedom really was.

s the conservative movement started to make electoral gains in the ’70s, Friedman emerged as a full-throated challenger of liberal goals, not just methods

He campaigned for “tax limitation” amendments that would have restricted the ability of state governments to tax or spend

n a famous New York Times Magazine essay, he suggested that corporations had no “social responsibility” at all; they were accountable only for increasing their own profit

Friedman’s free-market certainties went on to win over neoliberals. By the time he and Rose published their 1998 memoir, Two Lucky People, their ideas, once on the margin of society, had become the reigning consensus.

That consensus is now in surprising disarray in the Republican Party that was once its stronghold. The startling rise in economic inequality and the continued erosion of middle-class living standards have called into question the idea that downsizing the welfare state, ending regulations, and expanding the reach of the market really do lead to greater economic well-being—let alone freedom.

Friedman—despite being caricatured as a key intellectual architect of anti-government politics—had actually internalized an underlying assumption of the New Deal era: that government policy should be the key focus of political action. Using market theory to reshape state and federal policy was a constant theme of his career.

Still, Friedman—­and the libertarian economic tradition he advanced—­bears more responsibility for the rise of a far right in the United States than Burns’s biography would suggest. His strategy of goading the left, fully on display in the various provocations of Free to Choose and even Capitalism and Freedom, has been a staple for conservatives ever since

He zealously promoted the kind of relentless individualism that undergirds parts of today’s right, most notably the gun lobby. The hostile spirit that he brought to civil-rights laws surfaces now in the idea that reliance on court decisions and legislation to address racial hierarchy itself hems in freedom

The opposition to centralized government that he championed informs a political culture that venerates local authority and private power, even when they are oppressive

his insistence (to quote Capitalism and Freedom) that “any … use of government is fraught with danger” has nurtured a deep pessimism that democratic politics can offer any route to redressing social and economic inequalities.

According to some reports, he never expected to win in 2016. But even then, in the run-up to the election, Trump’s opponents were already calling him a fascist. I counseled against such usage at the time, because Trump, as a person and as a public figure, is just so obviously ridiculous; fascists, by contrast, are dangerously serious people, and in many circumstances, their leaders have been unnervingly tough and courageous. Trump—whiny, childish, unmanly—hardly fits that bill. (A rare benefit of his disordered character is that his defensiveness and pettiness likely continue to limit the size of his personality cult.)

Unfortunately, the overuse of fascist (among other charges) quickly wore out the part of the public’s eardrums that could process such words.

ere I want to caution my fellow citizens. Trump, whether from intention or stupidity or fear, has identified himself as a fascist under almost any reasonable definition of the word.

He is also constrained by circumstance: The country is not in disarray, or at war, or in an economic collapse

But I do think it’s going to be a while before this virus becomes completely normal. And I’ve never been convinced that this current generation of elderly people will ever get to a place where it is completely normal. If you’re 65 or 75 or even older — it’s really hard to teach an immune system new tricks if you’re that age

And so while we may see excess mortality in the elderly decline somewhat, I don’t think we’ll see it ever disappear for this generation who was already old when the pandemic hit. Many will never develop that robust, long-term immunological memory we would want to see — and which happens naturally to someone who’s been exposed hundreds of times since they were a little baby.

With Covid, when it infects you, it can land in your upper respiratory tract and it just start replicating right there. Immediately, it’s present and replicating in your lungs and in your nose. And that alone elicits enough of an immune response to cause us to feel really crappy and even cause us to feel disease.

Is it really the case that, as babies, we are fighting off those viruses hundreds of times?The short answer is yeah. We start seeing viruses when we’re 2 months old, when we’re a month old. And a lot of these viruses we’ve seen literally tens, if not hundreds of times for some people by the time we’re adults. People tend to think that immunity is binary — you’re either immune or you’re not. That couldn’t be farther from the truth. It’s a gradient, and your protection gets stronger the more times you see a virus.

We used to think we just had this spectacular immune response when we first encountered the virus at, say, age 6, and that the immune response lasted until we were 70. But actually what we were seeing was the effect of an immune system being retrained every time it came into contact with the virus after the initial infection — at 6, and 7, and 8, and so on. Every time your friend got chickenpox, or your neighbor, you got a massive boost. You were re-upping your immune response and diversifying your immunological tools — potentially multiple times a year, a kind of natural booster.

But now, in America, kids get chickenpox vaccines. So you don’t have kids in America getting chickenpox today, and never will. But that means that older Americans, who did get it as kids, are not being exposed again — certainly not multiple times each year. And it turns out that, in the absence of routine re-exposures, that first exposure alone isn’t nearly as good at driving lifelong immunity and warding off shingles until your immune system begins to fall apart in old age — it can last until you’re in your 30s, for example but not until your 70s.

There’s a similar story with measles. There is no routine later-life sequelae, like shingles, for measles. But what we do see is that, in measles outbreaks today, there are some people who were vaccinated who get it anyway. Maybe 5 to 15 percent of cases are not immunologically naïve people, but vaccinated people.

But we could have just set the narrative better at the beginning: Look, you might get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be really low, and if you get a booster, you might still get sick again, but your risk of landing in the hospital is going to be even lower. That’s something I think humans can deal with, and I think the public could have understood it.

But it’s why we don’t see the severe disease as much, with a second exposure or an exposure after vaccination: For most people, it’s not getting into the heart and the liver and stuff nearly as easily.

But it doesn’t have to. It’s still causing symptomatic disease. And maybe mucosal vaccines could stop this, but without them we’re likely to continue seeing infections and even symptomatic infections.

through most of 2020 and into 2021, though. Back then, I think the conventional wisdom was that a single exposure — through infection or vaccination — would be the end of the pandemic for you. If this is basic virology and immunology, how did we get that so wrong?

The short answer is that epidemiologists are not immunologists and immunologists are not virologists and virologists are not epidemiologists. And, in general, physicians don’t know anything about the details.

But this failure had some pretty concrete impacts. When reinfections first began popping up, people were surprised, they were scared, and then, to some degree, they lost trust in vaccines. And the people they were turning to for guidance — not only did they not warn us about that, they were slow to acknowledge it, as well.

It had dramatic impacts and ripple effects that will last for years to limit our ability to get populations properly vaccinated.

For babies born today, though, I really think they’re not going to view Covid as any different than other viruses. By the time they are 20, it will be like any other virus to them. Because their immune systems will have grown up with it.

And now, there’s a huge number of people questioning, do these vaccines even do anything?

the worst thing we can do during a pandemic is set inappropriately high expectations. These vaccines are incredible, they’ve had an enormously positive impact on mortality, but they were never going to end the pandemic.

Instead, we set society up for failure, since people feel like the government failed everyone, that biology failed us, and that this was a crazy virus that has broken all the rules of our immune system, when it’s just doing what we’ve always known it would do.

The really hard part of answering that question is there’s just not enough data on the frequency of long-term effects, because nothing like this has ever happened at such scale. It’s like everyone in Europe and North America suddenly traveled to a country where malaria was endemic.

To say that this is a textbook virus, it doesn’t mean that it’s not killing people. Objectively, it’s still killing more people than any other infectious disease

What it means is that we could’ve taken action based on what we knew, rather than waiting around to prove everything and publish papers in Nature and Science talking about things we already knew.

We could have prepared for November and December of 2020 and then for November and December of 2021. But everyone kept saying, we don’t know if it’s going to come back. We knew it was going to come back and it makes me want to cry to think about it. We did nothing and hundreds of thousands of people died. We didn’t prepare nursing homes because we all got to the summer of 2020 and we said, cross our fingers.

We knew how tests worked. We knew about serial testing and why it was important for a public health approach. We knew that vaccines could have really good impacts once they were around. And if you were looking through the correct lens, we even knew that they weren’t going to stop transmission.

We didn’t have to live in a world where we were flying blind. We could have lived in a world where we’re knowledgeable. But instead, we chose almost across the board to will ourselves into this state of fear and anxiety.

And that really started in the earliest days. Almost the first experience I had was a lot like that movie with Jennifer Lawrence —Don’t Look Up.

none of this was complicated. You just had to ask a simple question: what would happen if you took away all immunity from an adult? Well, once you control for no immunity, adults are going to get very, very sick.

Of course, by and large, babies didn’t get very sick from this disease.Babies are immunologically naïve, but they are also resilient. A virus can tear up a baby, but a baby can repair its tissue so fast. Adults don’t have that. It’s just like a baby getting a cut. They’ll heal really quick

An adult getting a cut — you go by age, and every decade of age that you are, it’s going to take exponentially longer for that wound to heal. Eventually get to 80 or 90 and the wound can’t even heal. In the immunology world, this is called “tolerance.”

why are all these organ systems getting damaged when other viruses don’t seem to do that? It’s natural to think, it’s Covid — this is a weird disease. But it’s much more a story about immunity and how it develops than about the virus or the disease. None of our organ systems had any immune defenses around to help them out. And I think that the majority of post-acute sequelae and multi-organ complications and long Covid — they are not the result of the virus being a crazy different virus, but are a result of this virus replicating in an environment where there were such absent or exceedingly low defenses.

Is it the same whenever we encounter a virus for the first time?Think about travelers. Travelers get way more sick from a local disease than people who grew up with that virus. If you get malaria as a traveler, you’re much more likely to get really sick. You don’t see everyone in Nicaragua taking chloroquine every day. But you definitely see travelers taking it, because malaria can be deadly for adults.

What about, not severity, but post-acute complications — do we have long malaria? Do we have liver complications from dengue?

How do you wish we had messaged things differently? What would it have meant to communicate early and clearly that Covid was a textbook virus, as you say?I think the biggest thing would have been just to say, we understand the enemy.

Or think about H.I.V. It essentially kills your immune system, and once the immune barriers are down, other viruses that used to infect humans would get into tissues that we didn’t like them to get into. If there wasn’t such a clear signal of a loss of CD-4 T cells to explain it, people might still be scratching their heads and going, man, I wonder why all these patients are getting fungal infections. Well, there’s a virus there that’s depleting their immune system.

Covid is absolutely waking the world up to this — to the fact that there are really weird long-term sequelae to viruses when they infect organ systems that would normally be protected. And I think we’re going to find that more and more cancers are being attributed to viral infections.

It wasn’t that long ago that we first learned that most cases of cervical cancer were caused by H.P.V. — I think the 1980s. And now we have a vaccine for H.P.V. and rates of cervical cancer have fallen by two-thirds.

what about incidence? We’ve talked at a few points about how important it is to think about all of these questions in terms of the scale. What is the right scale for thinking about future long Covid, for instance, or other post-acute sequelae?

I think the absolute risk, per infection, is going down and down and down. That’s just true.

he U.K.’s Office of National Statistics, which shows a much lower risk of developing long Covid now, from reinfection, than from an initial infection earlier in the pandemic.

the worst is definitely behind us, which is a good thing, especially for people who worry that the problems will keep building and a lot of people — or even everyone — will get long Covid symptoms. I don’t think there’s a world where we’re looking at the babies of today dealing with long Covid at any meaningful scale.

a lot of the fear right now comes from the worst cases, and there’s a lot of worst cases. Even one of the people that I know well, I know in their mind they’re worried that they’ll never recover, but I think objectively they are recovering slowly. It might not be an eight month course. It might be a year and a half. But they will get better. Most of us will.

versky died in 1996. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics for the work the two men did together, which he summarized in his 2011 best seller, Thinking, Fast and Slow. Another best seller, last year’s The Undoing Project, by Michael Lewis, tells the story of the sometimes contentious collaboration between Tversky and Kahneman

Another key figure in the field is the University of Chicago economist Richard Thaler. One of the biases he’s most linked with is the endowment effect, which leads us to place an irrationally high value on our possessions.

In an experiment conducted by Thaler, Kahneman, and Jack L. Knetsch, half the participants were given a mug and then asked how much they would sell it for. The average answer was $5.78. The rest of the group said they would spend, on average, $2.21 for the same mug. This flew in the face of classic economic theory, which says that at a given time and among a certain population, an item has a market value that does not depend on whether one owns it or not. Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in Economics.

“The question that is most often asked about cognitive illusions is whether they can be overcome. The message … is not encouraging.”

Kahneman and others draw an analogy based on an understanding of the Müller-Lyer illusion, two parallel lines with arrows at each end. One line’s arrows point in; the other line’s arrows point out. Because of the direction of the arrows, the latter line appears shorter than the former, but in fact the two lines are the same length.

In this context, his pessimism relates, first, to the impossibility of effecting any changes to System 1—the quick-thinking part of our brain and the one that makes mistaken judgments tantamount to the Müller-Lyer line illusion

that’s not so easy in the real world, when we’re dealing with people and situations rather than lines. “Unfortunately, this sensible procedure is least likely to be applied when it is needed most,” Kahneman writes. “We would all like to have a warning bell that rings loudly whenever we are about to make a serious error, but no such bell is available.”

Because biases appear to be so hardwired and inalterable, most of the attention paid to countering them hasn’t dealt with the problematic thoughts, judgments, or predictions themselves

Is it really impossible, however, to shed or significantly mitigate one’s biases? Some studies have tentatively answered that question in the affirmative.

what if the person undergoing the de-biasing strategies was highly motivated and self-selected? In other words, what if it was me?

I met with Kahneman

Confirmation bias shows up most blatantly in our current political divide, where each side seems unable to allow that the other side is right about anything.

Over an apple pastry and tea with milk, he told me, “Temperament has a lot to do with my position. You won’t find anyone more pessimistic than I am.”

“I see the picture as unequal lines,” he said. “The goal is not to trust what I think I see. To understand that I shouldn’t believe my lying eyes.” That’s doable with the optical illusion, he said, but extremely difficult with real-world cognitive biases.

he most effective check against them, as Kahneman says, is from the outside: Others can perceive our errors more readily than we can.

“slow-thinking organizations,” as he puts it, can institute policies that include the monitoring of individual decisions and predictions. They can also require procedures such as checklists and “premortems,”

A premortem attempts to counter optimism bias by requiring team members to imagine that a project has gone very, very badly and write a sentence or two describing how that happened. Conducting this exercise, it turns out, helps people think ahead.

“My position is that none of these things have any effect on System 1,” Kahneman said. “You can’t improve intuition.

Perhaps, with very long-term training, lots of talk, and exposure to behavioral economics, what you can do is cue reasoning, so you can engage System 2 to follow rules. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t provide cues. And for most people, in the heat of argument the rules go out the window.

Kahneman describes an even earlier Nisbett article that showed subjects’ disinclination to believe statistical and other general evidence, basing their judgments instead on individual examples and vivid anecdotes. (This bias is known as base-rate neglect.)

over the years, Nisbett had come to emphasize in his research and thinking the possibility of training people to overcome or avoid a number of pitfalls, including base-rate neglect, fundamental attribution error, and the sunk-cost fallacy.

we’ve tested Michigan students over four years, and they show a huge increase in ability to solve problems. Graduate students in psychology also show a huge gain.”

about half give the right answer: the law of large numbers, which holds that outlier results are much more frequent when the sample size (at bats, in this case) is small. Over the course of the season, as the number of at bats increases, regression to the mean is inevitabl

When Nisbett asks the same question of students who have completed the statistics course, about 70 percent give the right answer. He believes this result shows, pace Kahneman, that the law of large numbers can be absorbed into System 2—and maybe into System 1 as well, even when there are minimal cues.

Nisbett’s second-favorite example is that economists, who have absorbed the lessons of the sunk-cost fallacy, routinely walk out of bad movies and leave bad restaurant meals uneaten.

When Nisbett has to give an example of his approach, he usually brings up the baseball-phenom survey. This involved telephoning University of Michigan students on the pretense of conducting a poll about sports, and asking them why there are always several Major League batters with .450 batting averages early in a season, yet no player has ever finished a season with an average that high.

, “I know from my own research on teaching people how to reason statistically that just a few examples in two or three domains are sufficient to improve people’s reasoning for an indefinitely large number of events.”

isbett suggested another factor: “You and Amos specialized in hard problems for which you were drawn to the wrong answer. I began to study easy problems, which you guys would never get wrong but untutored people routinely do … Then you can look at the effects of instruction on such easy problems, which turn out to be huge.”

Nisbett suggested that I take “Mindware: Critical Thinking for the Information Age,” an online Coursera course in which he goes over what he considers the most effective de-biasing skills and concepts. Then, to see how much I had learned, I would take a survey he gives to Michigan undergraduates. So I did.

he course consists of eight lessons by Nisbett—who comes across on-screen as the authoritative but approachable psych professor we all would like to have had—interspersed with some graphics and quizzes. I recommend it. He explains the availability heuristic this way: “People are surprised that suicides outnumber homicides, and drownings outnumber deaths by fire. People always think crime is increasing” even if it’s not.

When I finished the course, Nisbett sent me the survey he and colleagues administer to Michigan undergrads

It contains a few dozen problems meant to measure the subjects’ resistance to cognitive biases

I got it right. Indeed, when I emailed my completed test, Nisbett replied, “My guess is that very few if any UM seniors did as well as you. I’m sure at least some psych students, at least after 2 years in school, did as well. But note that you came fairly close to a perfect score.”

In 2006, seeking to prevent another mistake of that magnitude, the U.S. government created the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (iarpa), an agency designed to use cutting-edge research and technology to improve intelligence-gathering and analysis. In 2011, iarpa initiated a program, Sirius, to fund the development of “serious” video games that could combat or mitigate what were deemed to be the six most damaging biases: confirmation bias, fundamental attribution error, the bias blind spot (the feeling that one is less biased than the average person), the anchoring effect, the representativeness heuristic, and projection bias (the assumption that everybody else’s thinking is the same as one’s own).

For his part, Nisbett insisted that the results were meaningful. “If you’re doing better in a testing context,” he told me, “you’ll jolly well be doing better in the real world.”

The New York–based NeuroLeadership Institute offers organizations and individuals a variety of training sessions, webinars, and conferences that promise, among other things, to use brain science to teach participants to counter bias. This year’s two-day summit will be held in New York next month; for $2,845, you could learn, for example, “why are our brains so bad at thinking about the future, and how do we do it better?”

Philip E. Tetlock, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and his wife and research partner, Barbara Mellers, have for years been studying what they call “superforecasters”: people who manage to sidestep cognitive biases and predict future events with far more accuracy than the pundits

One of the most important ingredients is what Tetlock calls “the outside view.” The inside view is a product of fundamental attribution error, base-rate neglect, and other biases that are constantly cajoling us into resting our judgments and predictions on good or vivid stories instead of on data and statistics

most promising are a handful of video games. Their genesis was in the Iraq War

Nevertheless, I did not feel that reading Mindware and taking the Coursera course had necessarily rid me of my biases

Together with collaborators who included staff from Creative Technologies, a company specializing in games and other simulations, and Leidos, a defense, intelligence, and health research company that does a lot of government work, Morewedge devised Missing. Some subjects played the game, which takes about three hours to complete, while others watched a video about cognitive bias. All were tested on bias-mitigation skills before the training, immediately afterward, and then finally after eight to 12 weeks had passed.

he said he saw the results as supporting the research and insights of Richard Nisbett. “Nisbett’s work was largely written off by the field, the assumption being that training can’t reduce bias,

“The literature on training suggests books and classes are fine entertainment but largely ineffectual. But the game has very large effects. It surprised everyone.”

even the positive results reminded me of something Daniel Kahneman had told me. “Pencil-and-paper doesn’t convince me,” he said. “A test can be given even a couple of years later. But the test cues the test-taker. It reminds him what it’s all about.”

Morewedge told me that some tentative real-world scenarios along the lines of Missing have shown “promising results,” but that it’s too soon to talk about them.

In the future, I will monitor my thoughts and reactions as best I can

The mayor’s proposal, sent to residents in the Highlands community May 25 under Purzycki’s personal letterhead and address, attempts to strike a compromise to ensure the mansion is rehabilitated while reducing the project’s impact on the community.

“When the mayor says this should be taken off the owner’s hands, I applaud him for that,” said Michael Melloy, a Forty Acres resident who grew up in the Highlands. “But the city of Wilmington is in no position to manage a high-end historic mansion and garden.”

Melloy and others continue to press for the state to enforce the conservation easement – which requires the current owners to stabilize and secure the mansion at their expense – and consider taking ownership of the property as it has done with other historical sites in Delaware.

Purzycki told Delaware Online/The News Journal during a recent phone interview that the bond bill funding request would go toward rehabilitating the mansion, not the owners, per his latest proposal.Melloy argues in a draft letter that while the state funds wouldn't go directly to the owners, "the effect is the same: the owners’ financial responsibility is absolved and transferred to all Delaware taxpayers."The developer did not return calls requesting comment.

That pursuit would mean lawsuits and potentially years of red tape that would stall any progress in rehabbing Gibraltar, the mayor said.Melloy contends city departments have neither the historic preservation nor the horticultural experience to own and maintain Gibraltar and the accompanying gardens. The Wilmington resident points to a lack of code enforcement at the property over the years, and the recent condemnation of several buildings on North Adams Street as examples of the city’s failure to maintain properties in general.HISTORIC NEGLECT:Wilmington landlord of condemned apartments has long history of property neglect

As for the state or a nonprofit taking ownership of the historic estate, Purzycki said the state isn’t interested and noted that Preservation Delaware – a nonprofit – previously owned Gibraltar “and that didn’t work out, did it?”Got a tip? Contact Amanda Fries at afries@delawareonline.com, or by calling 302-598-5507. Follow her on Twitter at @mandy_fries.

Latinos have maintained this type of edge despite generally having lower incomes, less access to health care and a greater prevalence of some chronic health issues, such as diabetes and obesity. Some researchers believe the life expectancy advantage is tied to the fact that many Latino immigrants to the U.S. are younger and healthier than many older Latinos, and have lower rates of smoking.

The researchers used projections of COVID-19 mortality to reach their conclusions, and a follow-up study arrived at similar findings. A CDC analysis showing provisional life expectancy estimates also pointed to a three-year drop in life expectancy for Latinos, and a shrinking gap between Latinos and whites.

Latino subgroups have an array of political and cultural differences. But one cultural norm that cuts across all groups is the primacy of family. Whatever country they’re descended from, it’s not uncommon for Latinos in the U.S. to live in multigenerational households that often include young children, their adult parents and a grandparent or grandparents.When young children and adults – many of whom are essential workers – live with elderly grandparents, “that increases the risk for the older people in the household,” says Dr. Luis Ostrosky, chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at the McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston. “If the younger people in the household contract COVID-19, they may be OK, because younger people have stronger immune systems and tend to be healthier. Older people – who tend to be not as healthy and have chronic diseases – may become severely ill, with increased risk of hospitalization and mortality.”

“Once you put all those together, what you find is you have the disappearing of the Latino paradox,” Saenz says.While older Latinos have continued to have a higher rate of COVID-19 mortality than their white counterparts during each year of the pandemic, the difference in death rates has diminished over time. During the first year of the crisis, Latinos age 65 and older died of COVID-19 at 2.1 times the rate of older whites, Saenz and Garcia’s research shows. In 2021, older Latinos died at 1.6 times the rate of older whites, and into late April of this year, older Hispanics had died at 1.2 times the rate of older whites. Saenz attributes the narrowing difference to COVID-19 death rates among older whites in red states where vaccination rates are lower.

Transportation, language and employment. A study in 2020 from the UCLA Latino Policy & Politics Initiative found Latinos (and Blacks) in Los Angeles County and New York City were roughly twice as likely to die of COVID-19 as non-Hispanic whites as of July 20 of that year, and noted that carpooling or taking public transportation to work may raise the risk of coronavirus exposure. The study also found that 34% and 37% of the populations in Los Angeles County and New York City were foreign-born, respectively, with Latinos making up the largest share of that population in each area. Approximately 13% of the foreign-born do not speak English, according to the report, which poses a challenge to their obtaining important health information.

“A three-year reduction in life expectancy is huge in historical terms. We usually have not seen reductions this large except during times of war or major pandemics,” says Theresa Andrasfay, a postdoctoral scholar at the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology at USC and one of the PNAS study’s researchers. “Of course, it’s really sad to think about the individuals who died of COVID, but it also has broader implications for the family members of those who died.”COVID-19 has not only claimed the lives of many older Latinos, but many younger, working-age Latinos as well, leaving behind children, siblings, parents and grandparents who depended on them, Andrasfay says. She says she and other researchers are working on an update, tracking the effect of COVID-19 on life expectancy in 2021: “We’re finding a similar pattern (to 2020), with Latinos having the largest reduction in life expectancy.”

Though he wasn’t in the best of health, Salvador Macias, 83, enjoyed going to a neighborhood community center for senior activities in Long Beach, a beachside city about 25 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. He lived in a modest, tidy house with his wife, Manuela, and their adult daughter, Julie.Salvador suffered from three chronic health conditions: diabetes, high cholesterol and high blood pressure, says his son, Joe Macias.In August 2020 – four months before health care workers received the first COVID-19 vaccine – the elder Macias became ill with the disease, suffering from fatigue and severe shortness of breath. After several days, Salvador died at home. Manuela, who doesn’t have the chronic health conditions her husband had, also contracted COVID-19. She was hospitalized for a week, but survived.

“Part of what I hope to accomplish,” Mr. Kertzer said, “is to show how important a role Pius XII played.”

Mr. Kertzer makes the case that Pius XII’s overriding dread of Communism, his belief that the Axis powers would win the war, and his desire to protect the church’s interests all motivated him to avoid offending Hitler and Mussolini, whose ambassadors had worked to put him on the throne. The pope was also worried, the book shows, that opposing the Führer would alienate millions of German Catholics.

The book further reveals that a German prince and fervent Nazi acted as a secret back channel between Pius XII and Hitler, and that the pope’s top Vatican adviser on Jewish issues urged him in a letter not to protest a Fascist order to arrest and send to concentration camps most of Italy’s Jews.

“A more open protest would not have saved a single Jew but killed even more,” Michael Hesemann, who considers Pius XII a champion of Jews, wrote in response to the evidence revealed by Mr. Kertzer, whom he called “heavily biased.”

Mr. Kertzer argues that the unearthed documents paint a more nuanced picture of Pius XII, showing him as neither the antisemitic monster often called “Hitler’s Pope” nor a hero.

On Oct. 16, 1943, Nazis rounded up more than a thousand of them throughout the city, including hundreds in the Jewish ghetto, now a tourist attraction where crowds feast on Jewish-style artichokes near a church where Jews were once forced to attend conversion sermons.

“They didn’t want to offend the pope,” Mr. Kertzer said. His book shows that Pius XII’s top aides only interceded with the German ambassador to free “non-Aryan Catholics.” About 250 were released. More than a thousand were murdered in Auschwitz.

One U.S. soldier, a Jew from Rome who had emigrated to America when Mussolini introduced Italy’s racial laws, asked Rabbi Kertzer if he could make an announcement to see if his mother had survived the war. The rabbi positioned the soldier at his side, and when the services started, a cry broke out and the G.I.’s mother rushed up to embrace her son.

At Brown University, his organizing against the Vietnam War nearly got him kicked out, and landed him in a jail cell with Norman Mailer. He stayed in school and became enamored with anthropology and with Susan Dana, a religion major from Maine.

In the early 1990s, an Italian history professor told him about Edgardo Mortara, a 6-year-old child of Jewish parents in Bologna. In 1858, the church Inquisitor ordered the boy seized because a Christian servant girl had possibly, and secretly, had him baptized, and so he could not remain in a Jewish family.

Since then, Vatican archivists recognize and, sometimes, encourage him.

“Perhaps even they’re happy that some outsider is able to bring this to light because it’s awkward, perhaps, for some of them to do so,” he said.

The company adds information labels to some posts about climate change, and it reduces distribution of posts that its fact-checking partners rate as false. But it generally does not remove those posts, as it does with certain false claims about vaccines and the coronavirus. Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, called the company’s approach “disturbing.”

“Unmitigated climate change is projected to lead to far greater numbers of human fatalities than covid-19,” said Mann, author of “The New Climate War.” “The fact that they’re treating greater threat with so much less urgency and care is problematic.”

Attorneys for Trump and the attorney general have been engaged in a back and forth over whether Trump has scoured file cabinets, storage rooms and electronic filings to produce records called for by the subpoena.

“I don’t see anything wrong with it; I don’t blame other people for doing it,” Carter says over dinner. “It just never had been my ambition to be rich.”

Carter decided that his income would come from writing, and he has written 33 books, about his life and career, his faith, Middle East peace, women’s rights, aging, fishing, woodworking, even a children’s book written with his daughter, Amy Carter, called “The Little Baby Snoogle-Fleejer.”

Carter costs U.S. taxpayers less than any other ex-president, according to the General Services Administration, with a total bill for him in the current fiscal year of $456,000, covering pensions, an office, staff and other expenses.

Carter is the only president in the modern era to return full-time to the house he lived in before he entered politics — a two-bedroom rancher assessed at $167,000, less than the value of the armored Secret Service vehicles parked outside.

Ex-presidents often fly on private jets, sometimes lent by wealthy friends, but the Carters fly commercial. Stuckey says that on a recent flight from Atlanta to Los Angeles, Carter walked up and down the aisle greeting other passengers and taking selfies.

“He doesn’t like big shots, and he doesn’t think he’s a big shot,” said Gerald Rafshoon, who was Carter’s White House communications director.

With book income and the $210,700 annual pension all former presidents receive, the Carters live comfortably. But his books have never fetched the massive sums commanded by more recent presidents.

The federal government pays for an office for each ex-president. Carter’s, in the Carter Center in Atlanta, is the least expensive, at $115,000 this year. The Carters could have built a more elaborate office with living quarters, but for years they slept on a pullout couch for a week each month. Recently, they had a Murphy bed installed.

Carter doesn’t even have federal retirement health benefits because he worked for the government for four years — less than the five years needed to qualify, according to the GSA. He says he receives health benefits through Emory University, where he has taught for 36 years.

Carter’s office costs a fraction of Obama’s, which is $536,000 a year. Clinton’s costs $518,000, George W. Bush’s is $497,000 and George H.W. Bush’s is $286,000, according to the GSA.

“He didn’t feel suited to the grandeur,” Eizenstat said. “Plains is really part of his DNA. He carried it into the White House, and he carried it out of the White House.”

“I am a great admirer of Harry Truman. He’s my favorite president, and I really try to emulate him,” says Carter, who writes his books in a converted garage in his house. “He set an example I thought was admirable.”

The Jimmy Carter National Historic Site is essentially the entire town, drawing nearly 70,000 visitors a year and $4 million into the county’s economy.

Carter has used his post-presidency to support human rights, global health programs and fair elections worldwide through his Carter Center, based in Atlanta. He has helped renovate 4,300 homes in 14 countries for Habitat for Humanity, and with his own hammer and tool belt, he will be working on homes for low-income people in Indiana later this month.

Carter’s gait is a little unsteady these days, three years after a diagnosis of melanoma on his liver and brain. At a 2015 news conference to announce his illness, he seemed to be bidding a stoic farewell, saying he was “perfectly at ease with whatever comes.”

In October, he will become the second president ever to reach 94; George H.W. Bush turned 94 in June. These days, Carter is sharp, funny and reflective.

The Carters walk every day — often down Church Street, the main drag through Plains, where they have been walking since the 1920s.

“I grew up in church with him,” says Maya Wynn. “He’s a nice guy, just like a regular person.”

“He’s a good ol’ Southern gentleman,” says David Lane.

Carter says this place formed him, seeding his beliefs about racial equality. His farmhouse youth during the Great Depression made him unpretentious and frugal. His friends, maybe only half-joking, describe Carter as “tight as a tick.”

That no-frills sensibility, endearing since he left Washington, didn’t work as well in the White House. Many people thought Carter scrubbed some of the luster off the presidency by carrying his own suitcases onto Air Force One and refusing to have “Hail to the Chief” played.

Stuart E. Eizenstat, a Carter aide and biographer, said Carter’s edict eliminating drivers for top staff members backfired. It meant that top officials were driving instead of reading and working for an hour or two every day.

That’s less than half the $952,000 budgeted for George H.W. Bush; the three other living ex-presidents — Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama — cost taxpayers more than $1 million each per year.

When Carter looks back at his presidency, he says he is most proud of “keeping the peace and supporting human rights,” the Camp David accords that brokered peace between Israel and Egypt, and his work to normalize relations with China. In 2002, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts.

“I always told the truth,” he says.

Carter says he thinks the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision has “changed our political system from a democracy to an oligarchy. Money is now preeminent. I mean, it’s just gone to hell now.”

He says he believes that the nation’s “ethical and moral values” are still intact and that Americans eventually will “return to what’s right and what’s wrong, and what’s decent and what’s indecent, and what’s truthful and what’s lies.”

They are asked if there is anything they want but don’t have. “I can’t think of anything,” Carter says, turning to Rosalynn. “And you?” “No, I’m happy,” she says.

They watch Atlanta Braves games or “Law and Order.” Carter just finished reading “The Innovators” by Walter Isaacson. They have no chef and they cook for themselves, often together. They make their own yogurt.

if we are agreed that Beijing looks set to stop the largest property boom in history without unleashing a systemic financial crisis, it is doing something truly remarkable. It is setting a new standard in economic policy.

Is this perhaps what policy looks like if it actually takes financial stability seriously? And if we look in the mirror, why aren’t we applauding more loudly?

Add to real estate the other domestic factor roiling the Chinese financial markets: Beijing’s remarkable humbling of China’s platform businesses, the second-largest cluster of big tech in the world. That too is without equivalent anywhere else.

Beijing’s aim is to ensure that gambling on big tech no longer produces monopolistic rents. Again, as a long-term policy aim, can one really disagree with that?

we have two dramatic and deliberate policy-induced shocks of the type for which there is no precedent in the West. Both inflict short-term pain with a view to longer-term social, economic and financial stability.

Ultimately political economy determines the conditions for long-run growth. So if you had to bet on a regime, which might actually have what it takes to break a political economy impasse, to humble vested interests and make a “big play” on structural change, which would it be? The United States, the EU or Xi’s China?

Beijing’s challenge right now is to manage the fall out from the two most dramatic development policies the world has ever seen, the one-child policy and China’s urbanisation, plus the historic challenge of big tech — less a problem specific to China than the local manifestation of what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism”.

no, Xi’s regime has not yet presented a fully convincing substitute plan. But, as Michael Pettis has forcefully argued, China has options. There is an entire range of policies that Beijing could put in place to substitute for the debt-fuelled infrastructure and housing boom.

First and foremost China needs a welfare state befitting of its economic development.

China needs to spend heavily on renewable energy and power distribution to break its dependence on coal. If it needs more housing, it should be affordable. All of this would generate more balanced growth. 5 per cent? Perhaps not, but certainly healthier and more sustainable.

If it has not so far pursued an alternative growth model in a more determined fashion, some of the blame no doubt falls on the prejudices of the Beijing policy elite. But even more significant are surely the entrenched interests of the infrastructure-construction-local government-credit machine, in other words the kind of political economy factors that generally inhibit the implementation of good policy.

The problem is only too familiar in the West. In Europe and the US too, such interest group combinations hobble the search for new growth models. In the United States they put in doubt the possibility of the energy transition, the possibility of providing a healthcare system that is fit for purpose and any initiative on trade policy that involves widening market access.

demography is normally treated as a natural parameter for economic activity. But in China’s case the astonishing fact is that the sudden ageing of its workforce is also a policy-induced challenge. It is a legacy of the one-child policy — the most gigantic and coercive intervention in human reproduction ever undertaken.

On balance, if you want to be part of history-making economic transformation, China is still the place to be. But it is undeniably shifting gear. And thanks to developments both inside and outside the country, investors will have to reckon with a much more complex picture of opportunity and risk. You are going to need to pick smart and follow the politics and geopolitics closely.

If on the other hand you want to invest in the green energy transition — the one big vision of economic development that the world has come up with right now — you simply have to have exposure to China, whether directly or indirectly by way of suppliers to China’s green energy sector. China is where the grand battle over the future of the climate is going to be fought. It will be a huge driver of innovation, capital accumulation and profit, the influence of which will be felt around the world.

it is one key area that both the Biden administration and the EU would like to “silo off” from other areas of conflict with China.

I worry that we may be too focused on the medium-term. Given the news out of Hong Kong and mainland China, Covid may yet come back to bite us.

Here too China is boxed in by its own success. It has successfully pursued a no-Covid policy, but due to the failing of the rest of the world, it has been left to do so in “one country”.

Until China finds some way to contain the risks, this is a story to watch. A dramatic Omicron surge across China would upend the entire narrative of the last two years, which is framed by Beijing success in containing the first wave.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency wants people in storm-affected areas to remember that generators can cause carbon monoxide poisoning or fires.Generators should never be operated inside or adjacent to a building, enclosed area or open windows.According to the Consumer Product Safety Commission: "One generator produces as much CO as hundreds of cars. It can incapacitate and kill consumers within minutes."Six people in Louisiana died of carbon monoxide poisoning from generators in the days following Hurricane Ida in August, according to the state health department.

Girl in Wheelchair Rescued From 'Wizard of Oz' HouseOne of the seven people reported injured in Arabi, a community adjacent to New Orleans, was a girl in a wheelchair who was rescued from a house that the tornado lifted off its foundation and dropped in the middle of the road, nola.com reported.

How to Help Victims in LouisianaThe United Way of Southeast Louisiana is taking public donations for its Tornado Relief Fund, with all proceeds earmarked for immediate relief efforts and long-term rebuilding.“Nearly two thirds of households in the affected areas of St. Bernard and Orleans parishes don’t earn enough to save for disasters and many are still recovering from Hurricane Ida’s impacts,” Michael Williamson, UWSELA President and CEO, said in a news release. Cash donations as well as supplies including diapers, baby formula and toiletries are needed. Details on how to contribute can be found here.

Damage Reported in 12 Mississippi CountiesHomes were damaged in a dozen Mississippi counties as the storms moved through Tuesday, according to the state's emergency management agency. At least two people were injured – one in Holmes County, to the north of Jackson, and one to the south in Copiah County.The update said severe weather, tornadoes, hail, damaging winds and flash flooding all impacted parts of the state, with multiple reports of fallen trees across roads and power lines.

Power Outages Linger in Several AreasSome 14,000 homes and businesses are without power in Louisiana and Mississippi as of about 10:15 a.m. CDT, according to PowerOutage.us.Most of the Louisiana outages are in Orleans and St. Bernard parishes. In Mississippi, most of them are in the central part of the state. More than 19,000 outages are being reported in Texas.