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In War and Peace and War (2006), his most accessible book, he likens himself to Hari Seldon, the “maverick mathematician” of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, who can foretell the rise and fall of empires. In those 10,000 years’ worth of data, Turchin believes he has found iron laws that dictate the fates of human societies.

The fate of our own society, he says, is not going to be pretty, at least in the near term. “It’s too late,”

The problems are deep and structural—not the type that the tedious process of demo­cratic change can fix in time to forestall mayhem.

Turchin likens America to a huge ship headed directly for an iceberg: “If you have a discussion among the crew about which way to turn, you will not turn in time, and you hit the iceberg directly.” The past 10 years or so have been discussion. That sickening crunch you now hear—steel twisting, rivets popping—­­is the sound of the ship hitting the iceberg.

Of the three factors driving social violence, Turchin stresses most heavily “elite overproduction”—­the tendency of a society’s ruling classes to grow faster than the number of positions for their members to fill.

Don’t we want everyone to be rich and educated? The problems begin when money and Harvard degrees become like royal titles in Saudi Arabia. If lots of people have them, but only some have real power, the ones who don’t have power eventually turn on the ones who do.

“You have a situation now where there are many more elites fighting for the same position, and some portion of them will convert to counter-elites,” Turchin said.

Elite jobs do not multiply as fast as elites do. There are still only 100 Senate seats, but more people than ever have enough money or degrees to think they should be running the country

Turchin noted that a person can be part of an ideological elite rather than an economic one.

Elite overproduction creates counter-elites, and counter-elites look for allies among the commoners. If commoners’ living standards slip—not relative to the elites, but relative to what they had before—they accept the overtures of the counter-elites and start oiling the axles of their tumbrels

Commoners’ lives grow worse, and the few who try to pull themselves onto the elite lifeboat are pushed back into the water by those already aboard.

The final trigger of impending collapse, Turchin says, tends to be state insolvency. At some point rising in­security becomes expensive. The elites have to pacify unhappy citizens with handouts and freebies—and when these run out, they have to police dissent and oppress people.

Eventually the state exhausts all short-term solutions, and what was heretofore a coherent civilization disintegrates.

“I gave up because I solved the problem.” Turchin published one final monograph, Complex Population Dynamics: A Theoretical / Empirical Synthesis (2003), then broke the news to his UConn colleagues that he would be saying a permanent sayonara to the field

“Does population ecology have general laws?” Turchin asked. Most ecologists said no: Populations have their own dynamics, and each situation is different.

All sciences go through this transition to mathematization,” Turchin told me. “When I had my midlife crisis, I was looking for a subject where I could help with this transition to a mathematized science. There was only one left, and that was history.”

After its long adolescence of collecting and cataloging, ecology had enough data to describe these universal laws—and to stop pretending that every species had its own idiosyncrasies. “Ecologists know these laws and should call them laws,” he said.

The laws Turchin applied to ecology—and his insistence on calling them laws—­generated respectful controversy at the time. Now they are cited in textbooks.

Having left ecology, Turchin began similar research that attempted to formulate general laws for a different animal species: human beings.

Turchin suggested that “there are several very general law-like propositions” that could be applied to ecology.

If the historians weren’t going to usher in a mathematical revolution themselves, he would storm their departments and do it for them.

“There is a longstanding debate among scientists and philosophers as to whether history has general laws,” he and a co-author wrote in Secular Cycles (2009). “A basic premise of our study is that historical societies can be studied with the same methods physicists and biologists used to study natural systems.”

he likened historians reluctant to build general principles to his colleagues in biology “who care most for the private life of warblers.” “Let history continue to focus on the particular,” he wrote. Cliodynamics would be a new science

To seed the journal’s research, Turchin masterminded a digital archive of historical and archaeological data.

The coding of its records requires finesse, he told me, because (for example) the method of determining the size of the elite-aspirant class of medieval France might differ from the measure of the same class in the present-day United States. (For medieval France, a proxy is the membership in its noble class, which became glutted with second and third sons who had no castles or manors to rule over. One American proxy, Turchin says, is the number of lawyers.)

Historians of religion have long pondered the relationship between the rise of complex civilization and the belief in gods—especially “moralizing gods,” the kind who scold you for sinning. Last year, Turchin and a dozen co-authors mined the database (“records from 414 societies that span the past 10,000 years from 30 regions around the world, using 51 measures of social complexity and 4 measures of supernatural enforcement of morality”) to answer the question conclusively. They found that complex societies are more likely to have moralizing gods, but the gods tend to start their scolding after the societies get complex, not before

One of Turchin’s most unwelcome conclusions is that complex societies arise through war. The effect of war is to reward communities that organize themselves to fight and survive, and it tends to wipe out ones that are simple and small-scale

the data are clear: Darwinian processes select for complex socie­ties because they kill off simpler ones.

Certain aspects of this cyclical view require relearning portions of American history, with special attention paid to the numbers of elites. The industrialization of the North, starting in the mid-19th century, Turchin says, made huge numbers of people rich. The elite herd was culled during the Civil War, which killed off or impoverished the southern slaveholding class, and during Reconstruction, when America experienced a wave of assassinations of Republican politicians.

“There is a very close correlation between adopting democratic institutions and having to fight a war for survival.”

Also unwelcome: the conclusion that civil unrest might soon be upon us, and might reach the point of shattering the country. In 2012, Turchin published an analysis of political violence in the United States, again starting with a database. He classified 1,590 incidents—riots, lynchings, any political event that killed at least one person—from 1780 to 2010. Some periods were placid and others bloody, with peaks of brutality in 1870, 1920, and 1970, a 50-year cycle.

In 2010, when Nature surveyed scientists about their predictions for the coming decade, most took the survey as an invitation to self-promote and rhapsodize, dreamily, about coming advances in their fields. Turchin retorted with his prophecy of doom and said that nothing short of fundamental change would stop another violent turn.

It wasn’t until the Progressive reforms of the 1920s, and later the New Deal, that elite overproduction actually slowed, at least for a time.

This oscillation between violence and peace, with elite over­production as the first horseman of the recurring American apocalypse, inspired Turchin’s 2020 prediction

The notion that democracy finds its strength in its essential goodness and moral improvement over its rival systems is likewise fanciful. Instead, democratic societies flourish because they have a memory of being nearly obliterated by an external enemy. They avoided extinction only through collective action, and the memory of that collective action makes democratic politics easier to conduct in the present,

Some sound like ideas that might have come from Senator Elizabeth Warren—tax the elites until there are fewer of them

others, such as a call to reduce immigration to keep wages high for American workers, resemble Trumpian protectionism.

He opposes credential-­oriented higher education, for example, which he says is a way of mass-producing elites without also mass-­producing elite jobs for them to occupy. Architects of such policies, he told me, are “creating surplus elites, and some become counter-elites.” A smarter approach would be to keep the elite numbers small, and the real wages of the general population on a constant rise.

We need to stop the runaway process of elite overproduction, but I don’t know what will work to do that, and nobody else does. Do you increase taxation? Raise the minimum wage? Universal basic income?” He conceded that each of these possibilities would have unpredictable effects

practice “adaptive management,” changing and modulating your approach as you go.

Eventually, Turchin hopes, our understanding of historical dynamics will mature to the point that no government will make policy without reflecting on whether it is hurtling toward a mathematically pre­ordained disaster.

He says he could imagine an Asimovian agency that keeps tabs on leading indicators and advises accordingly. It would be like the Federal Reserve, but instead of monitoring inflation and controlling monetary supply, it would be tasked with averting total civilizational collapse.

Since at least the 19th century, the discipline has embraced the idea that history is irreducibly complex, and by now most historians believe that the diversity of human activity will foil any attempt to come up with general laws, especially predictive ones.

The idea that one thing causes another, and that the causal pattern can tell you about sequences of events in another place or century, is foreign territory.

Turchin counters that he has heard claims of irreducible complexity before, and that steady application of the scientific method has succeeded in managing that complexity.

One social scientist who can speak to Turchin in his own mathematical argot is Dingxin Zhao, a sociology professor at the University of Chicago who is—incredibly—­also a former mathematical ecologist.

in a way I am sympathetic to Turchin. If you come to social science from natural sciences, you have a powerful way of looking at the world. But you may also make big mistakes.”

Turchin is nonetheless filling a historiographical niche left empty by academic historians with allergies not just to science but to a wide-angle view of the past.

humans are much wilier social creatures, Zhao said. A woodpecker will eat a termite, but it “will not explain that he is doing so because it is his divine right.” Humans pull ideological power moves like this all the time, Zhao said, and to understand “the decisions of a Donald Trump, or a Xi Jinping,” a natural scientist has to incorporate the myriad complexities of human strategy, emotion, and belief. “I made that change,” Zhao told me, “and Peter Turchin has not.”

Zhao said that human beings are just much more complicated than bugs.

He places himself in a Russian tradition prone to thinking sweeping, Tolstoyan thoughts about the path of history. By comparison, American historians mostly look like micro-historians.

Rather than bending toward progress, the arc in his view bends all the way back on itself, in a never-­ending loop of boom and bust. This puts him at odds with American historians, many of whom harbor an unspoken faith that liberal democracy is the end state of all history.

Writing history in this sweeping, cyclical way is easier if you are trained outside the field. “If you look at who is doing these megahistories, more often than not, it’s not actual historians,”

The genre’s most famous book, Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), beheld 13,000 years of human history in a single volume. Its author, Jared Diamond, spent the first half of his career as one of the world’s foremost experts on the physiology of the gall­bladder.

Steven Pinker, a cognitive psychologist who studies how children acquire parts of speech, has written a megahistory about the decline of violence across thousands of years, and about human flourishing since the Enlightenment

Most historians I asked about these men—and for some reason megahistory is nearly always a male pursuit—used terms like laughingstock and patently tendentious to describe them.

Pinker retorts that historians are resentful of the attention “disciplinary carpet­baggers” like himself have received for applying scientific methods to the humanities and coming up with conclusions that had eluded the old methods.

“Given the noisiness of human behavior and the prevalence of cognitive biases, it’s easy to delude oneself about a historical period or trend by picking whichever event suits one’s narrative,” he says. The only answer is to use large data sets.

“There’s no reason that traditional history and data science can’t merge into a cooperative enterprise,” Pinker wrote. “Knowing stuff is hard; we need to use every available tool.”

Turchin’s conclusions are only as good as his databases, she told me, and any database that tries to code something as complex as who constitutes a society’s elites—then tries to make like-to-like comparisons across millennia and oceans—will meet with skepticism from traditional historians

Turchin’s data are also limited to big-­picture characteristics observed over 10,000 years, or about 200 lifetimes. By scientific standards, a sample size of 200 is small, even if it is all humanity has.

Privately, some historians have told me they consider the tools he uses powerful, if a little crude. Clio­dynamics is now on a long list of methods that arrived on the scene promising to revolutionize history. Many were fads, but some survived that stage to take their rightful place in an expanding historiographical tool kit

Turchin’s methods have already shown their power. Cliodynamics offers scientific hypotheses, and human history will give us more and more opportunities to check its predictions—­revealing whether Peter Turchin is a Hari Seldon or a mere Nostradamus.

The new rules broaden Twitter's existing practices requiring the removal of tweets that it says "advance harmful false or misleading narratives about COVID-19 vaccinations," Twitter wrote in a blog post.

Among the posts that will be flagged are those making false conspiracy claims suggesting immunizations and vaccines are used as tools to control or harm the population at large. Others alleging that the global coronavirus pandemic is made up and those that are dismissive of the gravity of the virus will also be taken down.

Officials said Twitter will use a combination of technology and people who will be consulting with health experts around the world to enforce the changes on such posts.

"The removal of Timnit has had a demoralizing effect on the whole of our team."

Since Gebru's termination earlier this month, more than 2,600 Googlers have signed an open letter expressing dismay over the way Gebru exited the company and asking executives for a full explanation of what prompted her dismissal.

Gebru's firing happened "without warning rather than engaging in dialogue."

Google has maintained that Gebru resigned, though Gebru herself says she never voluntary agreed to leave the company.

They say Jeff Dean, senior vice president of Google Research, and other executives involved in Gebru's firing need to be held accountable.

Gebru helped establish Black in AI, a group that supports Black researchers in the field of artificial intelligence.

At Google, Gebru's former team wrote in the Wednesday letter that studying ways to reduce the harm of AI on marginalized groups is key to their mission.

Last month, Google abruptly asked Gebru to retract a research paper focused on the potential biases baked into an AI system that attempts to mimic human speech. The technology helps power Google's search engine. Google claims that the paper did not meet its bar for publication and that Gebru did not follow the company's internal review protocol.

However, Gebru and her supporters counter that she was being targeted because of how outspoken she was about diversity issues, a theme that was underscored in the letter.

The letter says Google's top brass have committed to advancing diversity, equity and inclusion among its research units, but unless more concrete and immediate action is taken, those promises are "virtue signaling; they are damaging, evasive, defensive and demonstrate leadership's inability to understand how our organization is part of the problem," according to the letter.

She also was the co-author of pioneering research into facial recognition technology that demonstrated how people of color and women are misidentified far more often than white faces. The study helped persuade IBM, Amazon and Microsoft to stop selling the technology to law enforcement.

saying such "gaslighting" has caused harm to Gebru and the Black community at Google.

Google has a history of striking back against employees who agitate internally for change. Organizers of the worldwide walkouts at Google in 2018 over sexual harassment and other issues were fired by the company. And more recently, the National Labor Relation Board accused Google of illegally firing workers who were involved in union organizing.

The University of Oxford-AstraZeneca and Novavax vaccines will add to New Zealand's previously agreed upon purchases of vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Janssen Pharmaceutica. The new agreements secures access to 7.6 million doses from AstraZeneca – enough for 3.8 million people, and 10.72 million doses from Novavax– enough for 5.36 million people, according to the government. Both vaccines require two doses.

they will go a step further and provide free doses to its population as well as neighboring nations Tokelau, Cook Islands, Niue, Samoa, Tonga, and Tuvalu, should they want them.

"no-one misses out, even if it means we've purchased more than we need. It's an investment worth making."

Ardern said New Zealand is also working with Australia to support vaccination across the wider Pacific.

Government officials reminded the public that the start of COVID-19 vaccines doesn't mean a quick lifting of the nation's border lockdown.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in the U.S. is also taking steps to ensure all Americans have access to the COVID-19 vaccines at no cost once it becomes widely available.

There are nearly 40,000 troops garrisoned in Western Europe; their presence has secured a generations-old peace in the countries where World War II was fought. We also station nearly 30,000 troops in South Korea in a decades-long effort to ensure stability in the region.

Afghanistan in 2009 is not Afghanistan in 2020.

Part of that healing will be reframing the war in Afghanistan. That means welcoming our veterans home from what, for some, has been a decades-long odyssey, not only of service in our forever wars but as veterans of wars that simply refuse to end.

It’s time to tell veterans that it’s over, that they (and we) no longer need to live in a state of perpetual war; for service members still deploying to Afghanistan, it is time to clarify that they are no longer prosecuting a war but advancing a peace. And who knows, if handled correctly, it might be the first step in ending our perpetual wars at home, too.

“makes significant progress toward ensuring our economy rewards work and not just wealth by cutting taxes for middle-class families, reforming the tax code to prevent the offshoring of American jobs and making sure the wealthiest Americans and big corporations pay their fair share,” said Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman.

The full committee still needs to release and advance text of the legislation, and it is unclear if enough Democrats will embrace the package in the House and the Senate. In order to protect the economic package from a Republican filibuster and pass it with a simple majority, Democrats can spare only three votes in the House and must remain united in the Senate.

In part because of the deep divisions in the Democratic caucus over the scope and structure of the package, Representative Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, had remained remarkably enigmatic about his own preferences for the legislation. Before hearings this week, the committee has been releasing key components of the package, including an extension of monthly payments to families with children through 2025 and tax incentives for cleaner energy.

that’s what I felt back in those days,” he said, “that everything was for sale — it was all about distraction, it didn’t seem serious. It all felt foolish and headed for a crash.”

Younger viewers do not have to fear Chase’s wrath, because they are not so obviously its object. They are also able to watch the show for hours on end, which makes the subtext and themes more apparent. Perhaps all of this has offered clarity that was not possible when the show aired. Perhaps it is easier now to see exactly who — or what — Chase was angry at.

it is easily one of the most written-about TV shows in the medium’s short history. But more than the shows that have emerged in its wake, which are subjected to close readings and recaps in nearly every major publication, “The Sopranos” has a novelistic quality that actually withstands this level of scrutiny. It’s not uncommon to hear from people who have watched the series several times, or who do so on a routine basis — people who say it reveals new charms at different points in life

Perhaps the greatest mystery of all, looking back on “The Sopranos” all these years later, is this: What was Chase seeing in the mid-’90s — a period when the United States’ chief geopolitical foe was Serbia, when the line-item veto and school uniforms were front-page news, when “Macarena” topped the charts — that compelled him to make a show that was so thoroughly pessimistic about this country?

“I don’t think I felt like it was a good time,” he told me. He is 76 now, and speaks deliberately and thoughtfully. “I felt that things were going downhill.” He’d become convinced America was, as Neil Postman’s 1985 polemic put it, “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” not an easy thing for a journeyman TV writer to accept.

“There was nothing but crap out there. Crap in every sense. I was beginning to feel that people’s predictions about the dumbing-down of society had happened and were happening, and I started to see everything getting tawdry and cheap.”

Expanded access to credit had cut into what mobsters call the shylock business; there’s no need to go to a loan shark when the payday lender will offer you similarly competitive rates. Gambling was legalized in many states and flourishes on many reservations; nearly every state in the Union has a lottery, which decimated the numbers racket. Italian American neighborhoods have emptied out — as Jacobs writes, “radically diminishing the pool of tough teenagers with Cosa Nostra potential”; this is dramatized brilliantly in the final episode of the series, when a mobster from a New York family hurries through Little Italy on an important phone call and, when the call ends, looks around to see he’s wandered into an encroaching and vibrant Chinatown. And, Jacobs notes, union membership has been decimated. “In the mid-1950s, about 35 percent of U.S. workers belonged to a union,” he writes. “In recent years, only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers have been union members.”

I was about to change the subject when he hit on something. “Have you noticed — or maybe you haven’t noticed — how nobody does what they say they’re going to do?” he said, suddenly animated. “If your sink gets jammed up, and a guy says he’s going to be out there at 5:30 — no. Very few people do what they say they’re going to do. There is a decline in goods and services that is enormous.”

Chase told me the real joke of the show was not “What if a mobster went to therapy?” The comedic engine, for him, was this: What if things had become so selfish and narcissistic in America that even the mob couldn’t take it? “That was the whole thing,” he said. “America was so off the rails that everything that the Mafia had done was nothing compared to what was going on around them.”

In “The Mafia: A Cultural History,” Roberto M. Dainotto, a professor of literature at Duke, writes that one thing our cinematic Mafiosi have that we admire, against our better judgment, is access to structures of meaning outside of market forces: the church, family, honor. The Mafia movie often pits these traditional values against the corrosive and homogenizing effects of American life.

What “The Sopranos” shows us, Dainotto argues, is what happens when all that ballast is gone, and the Mafia is revealed to be as ignoble as anything else. “Life is what it is,” he writes, “and repeats as such.”

The show puts all this American social and cultural rot in front of characters wholly incapable of articulating it, if they even notice it.

What is, for me, one of the show’s most memorable scenes has no dialogue at all. Tony and his crew have just returned from a business trip to Italy, during which they were delighted with the Old Country but also confronted with the degree of their alienation from their own heritage. They’re off the plane, and in a car traveling through Essex County. As the camera pans by the detritus of their disenchanted world — overpasses, warehouses — Tony, Paulie and Christopher are seeing their home with fresh eyes, and maybe wondering if their ancestors made a bad trade or if, somewhere along the line, something has gone horribly wrong. But we don’t know: For once, these arrogant, stupid and loquacious men are completely silent.

Around the time “The Sopranos” premiered, the N.Y.U. Law professor James B. Jacobs wrote a paper, along with a student, arguing that the Mafia, though weakened by decades of prosecutions, could come roaring back. By 2019, though, he had published a new paper called “The Rise and Fall of Organized Crime in the United States,” declaring the Mafia all but finished. “The world in which the Cosa Nostra became powerful is largely gone,” he wrote. And he cites a litany of factors that aided its collapse, a mix of technological advances, deregulation and financialization — many of the same forces that have created the stratified economy of today.

In his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, Tony tries to explain why he thinks he has panic attacks, why he suffers from stress. “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi tells him that many Americans feel that way. Tony presses on: “I think about my father: He never reached the heights like me, but in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, they had their pride. Today, what do we got?”

You can see this world — one in which no one can be squeezed because everyone is being squeezed — starting to take shape from the very beginning of the show. In the pilot, Tony is fending off competition from a new waste-hauling business undercutting his company’s extortionate fees, and trying to figure out how he can get a piece of the similarly extortionate costs his health insurer paid for his M.R.I. — a procedure he had because the stress in his life had given him a panic attack.

The bien-pensant line on Tony remains that he’s a sociopath, and only used therapy to become a better criminal. This is an idea spoon-fed to the viewer in the final episodes by a contrite Dr. Melfi, in a show that spoon-feeds almost nothing to the viewer. Melfi herself might call this a coping mechanism to avoid the messier reality, which is that Tony lives in an immoral world nestled within another immoral world, both of which have only grown more chaotic because of forces outside his control.

Because of this, you can see how he reasons himself into more and more heinous crimes, justifying each and every one of them to himself. Perhaps to you too — at least, up to a point. That sympathy for Tony led contemporaneous critics to ask if people were watching the show in the wrong way, or if our enjoyment pointed to a deficiency of the heart.

t is this quality of Tony’s — this combination of privilege and self-loathing — that I suspect resonates with a younger generation, whether we want to admit it or not. He’s not so different from us, after all. He has an anxiety disorder. He goes to therapy and takes S.S.R.I.s, but never really improves — not for long, anyway. He has a mild case of impostor syndrome, having skipped some key steps to becoming boss, and he knows that people who hold it against him are sort of right. He’s still proud of his accomplishments in high school. He does psychedelics in the desert, and they change his perspective on things. He often repeats stuff he half-remembers someone smarter than him saying. He’s arguably in an open marriage with Carmela, if a rather lopsided one. He liked listening to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in 2007. He’s impulsive and selfish and does not go to church, though he does seem open to vaguer notions of spirituality. He wishes his career provided him with meaning, but once he had the career, he discovered that someone had pulled the rug out at some point, and an institution that had been a lodestar to him for his whole life was revealed to be a means of making money and nothing more. Does this sound at all familiar to you?

Like many young people, Tony is a world-historically spoiled man who is nevertheless cursed, thanks to timing, to live out the end of an enterprise he knows on some level to be immoral.

It gives him panic attacks, but he’s powerless to find a way out. Thus trapped — and depressed — it’s not so hard for him to allow himself a few passes, to refuse to become better because the world is so rotten anyway.

Tony’s predicament was once his to suffer alone, but history has unfolded in such a way as to render his condition nearly universal.

That the people in power truly had insulated themselves in a fantasy environment — not just in the realm of foreign policy, but also, more concretely, in the endless faux-bucolic subdivisions that would crater the economy. We were living in a sort of irreality, one whose totality would humiliate and delegitimize nearly every important institution in American life when it ended, leaving — of all people — the Meadows and A.J.s of the world to make sense of things.

if people still see a monster in Tony, then the monster is themselves: a twisted reflection of a generation whose awakening to the structures that control them came in tandem with a growing aversion to personal accountability in the face of these systems.

Whether that’s true or not, it offers us all permission to become little Tonys, lamenting the sad state of affairs while doing almost exactly nothing to improve ourselves, or anything at all.

This tendency is perhaps most pronounced online, where we are all in therapy all day, and where you can find median generational opinions perfectly priced by the marketplace of ideas — where we bemoan the wrongs of the world and tell ourselves that we can continue being who we are, and enjoy the comforts we’ve grown accustomed to.

In the show’s finale, as the extended Soprano family gathers to mourn the death of Bobby Baccalieri, we find Paulie Walnuts stuck at the kids’ table, where A.J., newly politically awakened, charges into a rant. You people are screwed, he says. “You’re living in a dream.” Bush let Al Qaeda escape, he tells them, and then made us invade some other country? Someone at the table tells him that if he really cares, he should join up. A.J. responds: “It’s more noble than watching these jackoff fantasies on TV of how we’re kicking their ass. It’s like: America.” Again, he’s interrupted: What in the world does he mean? He explains: “This is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling? And come-ons for [expletive] they don’t need and can’t afford?”

However inartfully, A.J. was gesturing at something that would have been hard for someone his age to see at the time, which is that the ’00s were a sort of fever dream, a tragic farce built on cheap money and propaganda.

The notion that individual action might help us avoid any coming or ongoing crises is now seen as hopelessly naïve, the stuff of Obama-era liberalism.

. The “leftist ‘Sopranos’ fan” is now such a well-known type that it is rounding the corner to being an object of scorn and mockery online.

One oddity that can’t be ignored in this “Sopranos” resurgence is that, somewhat atypically for a TV fandom, there is an openly left-wing subcurrent within it

“Journalists may think we can dash off an opinion the way they dash off articles,” Alito snarked. “You can’t expect the E.M.T.s and the emergency rooms to do the same thing that a team of physicians and nurses will do when . . . time is not of the essence.”

That begs the question of why the Court is now deciding more frequently that their EMT services are needed.

In any event, Alito’s “blame the messenger” ignores what behavior psychologists have known for decades: When a message receives a favorable response, the messenger returns for more.

Alito rejected critics’ claims that emergency orders suffer from opaqueness that full court opinions help avoid: “[F]air-minded readers can easily understand the grounds for our rulings.”

What he didn’t address was the fact that the three orders he discussed all favored conservative litigants, a consistency that could lead “fair minded observers” to question whether the Court was impartially “calling balls and strikes.” In July, a Reuters analysis concluded that the Court’s emergency orders consistently favored religious groups and Trump’s administration.

Findings like that may have contributed to Justice Amy Coney Barrett publicly declaring in September that “we’re not a bunch of partisan hacks.” (Reminiscent of Richard Nixon’s Watergate-era speech in which he said, “I am not a crook.”)

That bromide does not mean, however, that judges should seek the limelight to offer their perspectives on Court business or doctrine. That practice carries enormous risk of destroying the public’s trust in their impartiality and nonpartisanship.

All or nothing, nothing or all.

it was not hard to discern what was happening: Reports of Trump supporters refusing to wear masks in big-box stores or indoor campaign events seemed to make liberals more inclined to wear masks even when outdoors with few people around; seeing mask wearing turned into a political statement, more partisan talisman than necessary tool, in turn made many conservatives less likely to mask up indoors when the circumstances justified it.

No, it seems to me that the likelier explanation for the less polarized approach to virus mitigation behavior is that Germany is, well, much less polarized. Politics are so consensus-driven here that for the past eight years Germany has had a governing coalition consisting of the two largest parties.

It might be tempting to chalk up the uniformity of Germans’ behavior to their penchant for rule-following

The difference between the share of Germans on the ideological right and left who thought there should have been fewer restrictions on public activity was 20 percentage points, a Pew survey found early this summer. In the United States, the difference between right and left on that question was a whopping 45 points, by far the largest gap of any country surveyed

The overall effect is of an environment set at a lower temperature, far closer to normalcy, where the public space is not forever on the verge of flaring into a divisive battleground of signaling, judgments and resistance.

Mr. Scholz invoked the unity and sense of purpose that Germany had demonstrated during the pandemic as his model for bringing the country together to confront other challenges, such as climate change. “We saw in this corona crisis that we can hold together, that solidarity is possible in this country,” he said.

For the industry to meet customer demand, restaurants would probably have to draw workers from other industries, but there are indications that the opposite is true. An analysis of job seekers’ search history data by the company review site Glassdoor found that people who used to search for “restaurant server” are now more likely to type in “office assistant,” “data entry” or “Amazon,” for example.

Fast-food wages historically trail those in other service industry jobs, with the typical U.S. worker collecting about $11.80 per hour or $24,540 a year as of May 2020,

Some current and former fast-food workers say labor shortages merely reflect the limited appeal of low-wage work that can be physically demanding and stressful, conditions that existed long before the pandemic.

some economists question the accuracy of the term “labor shortage” in this context, saying businesses are simply offering too low a wage for an hour’s work.

When I go shopping for an Audi and I can’t afford it, I don’t get to declare an Audi shortage,” said Erica Groshen, a labor economist with Cornell University. “At the wage being offered, businesses still aren’t getting as many applicants for work.”

“I think the problem is workers are being paid too little working full time. That’s the real scandal,” he said.

Of the nearly 10 million job openings in the United States, roughly 1 in 6 are in the leisure and hospitality sector that includes food service workers,

Nonsupervisory workers in the accommodations and food service sector made an average of $15.91 per hour as of August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In February 2020, they made an average of $14.46 per hour.

“The fact that nominal wages have been increasing so rapidly over the last several months is itself pretty strong evidence that businesses really are doing a lot to attract and retain workers. … The labor market is just really competitive,”

McDonald’s announced that it had raised its hourly rate to a range of $11 to $17 for entry-level workers, and $15 to $20 for managers.

one of the company’s locations in Hendersonville, N.C., recently increased its starting hourly wage to $19, for example.

For many fast-food establishments, the pandemic has accelerated a trend toward online and app-based ordering, and drive-through technology.

quarter — momentum that CEO David Gibbs said was underpinned by the Louisville-based company’s digital investments and “ability to serve customers through multiple on- and off-premise channels.”

McDonald’s also reported strong-second quarter gains, boosted by growth in its delivery and digital platforms and higher menu prices. U.S. sales were 25.9 percent higher than the same period in 2020 and 14.9 percent above where they were in a pre-pandemic 2019, the company said.

The average cost to close a restaurant to improve or add an advanced drive-through ranges from $125,000 to $250,000

drive-throughs account for about half of annual sales for all fast-food and fast-casual restaurants, or roughly $169 billion.

“One of other things they have done is turn all of us into the cashiers,” he said, pointing to restaurant apps, and touch-screen kiosks that have taken the place of some food service workers. “We did a study on automation and robotics and found that at least half could be replaced with robots or automation.”

But opponents of the law — including some Republicans who have supported abortion rights — argue that it would go far beyond the landmark court precedent, stripping states of much of their ability to regulate abortion and impose measures intended to make the procedure safe. They say it would lead to many more abortions in the late stages of pregnancy.

“This legislation is really about a mandate by the federal government that would demand abortion on demand, without any consideration for anyone, including the conscience of the provider,” said Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington and a chief foe of the bill.

Again and again, the Facebook Papers show staffers sounding alarms about the dangers posed by the platform—how Facebook amplifies extremism and misinformation, how it incites violence, how it encourages radicalization and political polarization. Again and again, staffers reckon with the ways in which Facebook’s decisions stoke these harms, and they plead with leadership to do more.

And again and again, staffers say, Facebook’s leaders ignore them.

Facebook has dismissed the concerns of its employees in manifold ways.

One of its cleverer tactics is to argue that staffers who have raised the alarm about the damage done by their employer are simply enjoying Facebook’s “very open culture,” in which people are encouraged to share their opinions, a spokesperson told me. This stance allows Facebook to claim transparency while ignoring the substance of the complaints, and the implication of the complaints: that many of Facebook’s employees believe their company operates without a moral compass.

When you stitch together the stories that spanned the period between Joe Biden’s election and his inauguration, it’s easy to see Facebook as instrumental to the attack on January 6. (A spokesperson told me that the notion that Facebook played an instrumental role in the insurrection is “absurd.”)

what emerges from a close reading of Facebook documents, and observation of the manner in which the company connects large groups of people quickly, is that Facebook isn’t a passive tool but a catalyst. Had the organizers tried to plan the rally using other technologies of earlier eras, such as telephones, they would have had to identify and reach out individually to each prospective participant, then persuade them to travel to Washington. Facebook made people’s efforts at coordination highly visible on a global scale.

The platform not only helped them recruit participants but offered people a sense of strength in numbers. Facebook proved to be the perfect hype machine for the coup-inclined.

In November 2019, Facebook staffers noticed they had a serious problem. Facebook offers a collection of one-tap emoji reactions. Today, they include “like,” “love,” “care,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad,” and “angry.” Company researchers had found that the posts dominated by “angry” reactions were substantially more likely to go against community standards, including prohibitions on various types of misinformation, according to internal documents.

In July 2020, researchers presented the findings of a series of experiments. At the time, Facebook was already weighting the reactions other than “like” more heavily in its algorithm—meaning posts that got an “angry” reaction were more likely to show up in users’ News Feeds than posts that simply got a “like.” Anger-inducing content didn’t spread just because people were more likely to share things that made them angry; the algorithm gave anger-inducing content an edge. Facebook’s Integrity workers—employees tasked with tackling problems such as misinformation and espionage on the platform—concluded that they had good reason to believe targeting posts that induced anger would help stop the spread of harmful content.

By dialing anger’s weight back to zero in the algorithm, the researchers found, they could keep posts to which people reacted angrily from being viewed by as many users. That, in turn, translated to a significant (up to 5 percent) reduction in the hate speech, civic misinformation, bullying, and violent posts—all of which are correlated with offline violence—to which users were exposed.

Facebook rolled out the change in early September 2020, documents show; a Facebook spokesperson confirmed that the change has remained in effect. It was a real victory for employees of the Integrity team.

But it doesn’t normally work out that way. In April 2020, according to Frances Haugen’s filings with the SEC, Facebook employees had recommended tweaking the algorithm so that the News Feed would deprioritize the surfacing of content for people based on their Facebook friends’ behavior. The idea was that a person’s News Feed should be shaped more by people and groups that a person had chosen to follow. Up until that point, if your Facebook friend saw a conspiracy theory and reacted to it, Facebook’s algorithm might show it to you, too. The algorithm treated any engagement in your network as a signal that something was worth sharing. But now Facebook workers wanted to build circuit breakers to slow this form of sharing.

Experiments showed that this change would impede the distribution of hateful, polarizing, and violence-inciting content in people’s News Feeds. But Zuckerberg “rejected this intervention that could have reduced the risk of violence in the 2020 election,” Haugen’s SEC filing says. An internal message characterizing Zuckerberg’s reasoning says he wanted to avoid new features that would get in the way of “meaningful social interactions.” But according to Facebook’s definition, its employees say, engagement is considered “meaningful” even when it entails bullying, hate speech, and reshares of harmful content.

This episode, like Facebook’s response to the incitement that proliferated between the election and January 6, reflects a fundamental problem with the platform

Facebook’s megascale allows the company to influence the speech and thought patterns of billions of people. What the world is seeing now, through the window provided by reams of internal documents, is that Facebook catalogs and studies the harm it inflicts on people. And then it keeps harming people anyway.

“I am worried that Mark’s continuing pattern of answering a different question than the question that was asked is a symptom of some larger problem,” wrote one Facebook employee in an internal post in June 2020, referring to Zuckerberg. “I sincerely hope that I am wrong, and I’m still hopeful for progress. But I also fully understand my colleagues who have given up on this company, and I can’t blame them for leaving. Facebook is not neutral, and working here isn’t either.”

It is quite a thing to see, the sheer number of Facebook employees—people who presumably understand their company as well as or better than outside observers—who believe their employer to be morally bankrupt.

I spoke with several former Facebook employees who described the company’s metrics-driven culture as extreme, even by Silicon Valley standards

Facebook workers are under tremendous pressure to quantitatively demonstrate their individual contributions to the company’s growth goals, they told me. New products and features aren’t approved unless the staffers pitching them demonstrate how they will drive engagement.

e worries have been exacerbated lately by fears about a decline in new posts on Facebook, two former employees who left the company in recent years told me. People are posting new material less frequently to Facebook, and its users are on average older than those of other social platforms.

One of Facebook’s Integrity staffers wrote at length about this dynamic in a goodbye note to colleagues in August 2020, describing how risks to Facebook users “fester” because of the “asymmetrical” burden placed on employees to “demonstrate legitimacy and user value” before launching any harm-mitigation tactics—a burden not shared by those developing new features or algorithm changes with growth and engagement in mind

The note said:We were willing to act only after things had spiraled into a dire state … Personally, during the time that we hesitated, I’ve seen folks from my hometown go further and further down the rabbithole of QAnon and Covid anti-mask/anti-vax conspiracy on FB. It has been painful to observe.

Current and former Facebook employees describe the same fundamentally broken culture—one in which effective tactics for making Facebook safer are rolled back by leadership or never approved in the first place.

That broken culture has produced a broken platform: an algorithmic ecosystem in which users are pushed toward ever more extreme content, and where Facebook knowingly exposes its users to conspiracy theories, disinformation, and incitement to violence.

One example is a program that amounts to a whitelist for VIPs on Facebook, allowing some of the users most likely to spread misinformation to break Facebook’s rules without facing consequences. Under the program, internal documents show, millions of high-profile users—including politicians—are left alone by Facebook even when they incite violence

whitelisting influential users with massive followings on Facebook isn’t just a secret and uneven application of Facebook’s rules; it amounts to “protecting content that is especially likely to deceive, and hence to harm, people on our platforms.”

Facebook workers tried and failed to end the program. Only when its existence was reported in September by The Wall Street Journal did Facebook’s Oversight Board ask leadership for more information about the practice. Last week, the board publicly rebuked Facebook for not being “fully forthcoming” about the program.

As a result, Facebook has stoked an algorithm arms race within its ranks, pitting core product-and-engineering teams, such as the News Feed team, against their colleagues on Integrity teams, who are tasked with mitigating harm on the platform. These teams establish goals that are often in direct conflict with each other.

“We can’t pretend we don’t see information consumption patterns, and how deeply problematic they are for the longevity of democratic discourse,” a user-experience researcher wrote in an internal comment thread in 2019, in response to a now-infamous memo from Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, a longtime Facebook executive. “There is no neutral position at this stage, it would be powerfully immoral to commit to amorality.”

Zuckerberg has defined Facebook’s mission as making “social infrastructure to give people the power to build a global community that works for all of us,” but in internal research documents his employees point out that communities aren’t always good for society:

When part of a community, individuals typically act in a prosocial manner. They conform, they forge alliances, they cooperate, they organize, they display loyalty, they expect obedience, they share information, they influence others, and so on. Being in a group changes their behavior, their abilities, and, importantly, their capability to harm themselves or others

Thus, when people come together and form communities around harmful topics or identities, the potential for harm can be greater.

The infrastructure choices that Facebook is making to keep its platform relevant are driving down the quality of the site, and exposing its users to more dangers

hose dangers are also unevenly distributed, because of the manner in which certain subpopulations are algorithmically ushered toward like-minded groups

And the subpopulations of Facebook users who are most exposed to dangerous content are also most likely to be in groups where it won’t get reported.

And it knows that 3 percent of Facebook users in the United States are super-consumers of conspiracy theories, accounting for 37 percent of known consumption of misinformation on the platform.

Zuckerberg’s positioning of Facebook’s role in the insurrection is odd. He lumps his company in with traditional media organizations—something he’s ordinarily loath to do, lest the platform be expected to take more responsibility for the quality of the content that appears on it—and suggests that Facebook did more, and did better, than journalism outlets in its response to January 6. What he fails to say is that journalism outlets would never be in the position to help investigators this way, because insurrectionists don’t typically use newspapers and magazines to recruit people for coups.

Facebook wants people to believe that the public must choose between Facebook as it is, on the one hand, and free speech, on the other. This is a false choice. Facebook has a sophisticated understanding of measures it could take to make its platform safer without resorting to broad or ideologically driven censorship tactics.

Facebook knows that no two people see the same version of the platform, and that certain subpopulations experience far more dangerous versions than others do

Facebook knows that people who are isolated—recently widowed or divorced, say, or geographically distant from loved ones—are disproportionately at risk of being exposed to harmful content on the platform.

It knows that repeat offenders are disproportionately responsible for spreading misinformation.

All of this makes the platform rely more heavily on ways it can manipulate what its users see in order to reach its goals. This explains why Facebook is so dependent on the infrastructure of groups, as well as making reshares highly visible, to keep people hooked.

It could consistently enforce its policies regardless of a user’s political power.

Facebook could ban reshares.

It could choose to optimize its platform for safety and quality rather than for growth.

It could tweak its algorithm to prevent widespread distribution of harmful content.

Facebook could create a transparent dashboard so that all of its users can see what’s going viral in real time.

It could make public its rules for how frequently groups can post and how quickly they can grow.

It could also automatically throttle groups when they’re growing too fast, and cap the rate of virality for content that’s spreading too quickly.

Facebook could shift the burden of proof toward people and communities to demonstrate that they’re good actors—and treat reach as a privilege, not a right

You must be vigilant about the informational streams you swim in, deliberate about how you spend your precious attention, unforgiving of those who weaponize your emotions and cognition for their own profit, and deeply untrusting of any scenario in which you’re surrounded by a mob of people who agree with everything you’re saying.

It could do all of these things. But it doesn’t.

Lately, people have been debating just how nefarious Facebook really is. One argument goes something like this: Facebook’s algorithms aren’t magic, its ad targeting isn’t even that good, and most people aren’t that stupid.

All of this may be true, but that shouldn’t be reassuring. An algorithm may just be a big dumb means to an end, a clunky way of maneuvering a massive, dynamic network toward a desired outcome. But Facebook’s enormous size gives it tremendous, unstable power.

Facebook takes whole populations of people, pushes them toward radicalism, and then steers the radicalized toward one another.

When the most powerful company in the world possesses an instrument for manipulating billions of people—an instrument that only it can control, and that its own employees say is badly broken and dangerous—we should take notice.

The lesson for individuals is this:

Facebook could say that its platform is not for everyone. It could sound an alarm for those who wander into the most dangerous corners of Facebook, and those who encounter disproportionately high levels of harmful content

Without seeing how Facebook works at a finer resolution, in real time, we won’t be able to understand how to make the social web compatible with democracy.

One might argue that a realer, not to mention healthier, manifestation of Black affirmation would come from more concrete markers of progress than the dutiful hand-wringing of well-meaning white people about their forebears’ sins.

A compelling reason for fostering white guilt would be that if doing so led white Americans to go out and foster change in society.

but is white guilt necessary to or the best way to effect societal change?

For the civil rights victories of the 1960s, it wasn’t

The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were undeniably huge advances, even if they did not (and they did not) end racism or completely level the societal playing field. In any case, all of this did not happen because white people became guilty nationwide.

But even phrased as complicity, the charge requires not just the occasional acolyte but the white populace as a whole to feel guilty about things people did not individually do, that were often done in the deep past rather than by their parents and that were done within a vast societal system, the operations of which even experts disagree on.

Technology was the accelerant, in that television illustrated the civil rights movement in a way that radio and newspapers could not.

The mid-20th-century American (white) Everyman tended to lack the visceral sense of revulsion at racism that we now take for granted as at least a courtesy norm.

In his classic “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,” Gunnar Myrdal observed that “even the white man who defends discrimination frequently describes his motive as ‘prejudice’ and says that it is ‘irrational.’” In other words, the Everyman acknowledged racism but felt no need to disavow it.

it seems that somehow, no matter what we say or do, white people are never guilty enough and white guilt is supposed to go on in perpetuity

Might it be that the effort to make white people any guiltier than they are is a Sisyphean effort?

We seek for enlightened white people to acknowledge that they are complicit — to use a term especially popular in recent years — in a system constructed for the benefit of whites

America’s white majority, and with them America’s political leaders, got behind tangible change because segregation as policy, and the violence required to maintain it, was pragmatically inconvenient on the world stage during the Cold War standoff.

What’s more, I don’t completely trust white guilt. It lends itself too easily to virtue signaling, which overlaps only partially, and sometimes not at all, with helping people.

people can actively foster change without harboring (or performing?) a sense of personal guilt for America’s history.

Black America likely will not overcome without some white assistance. But I’m not convinced that the way this happens is with white people’s cheeks burning in shame over their complicity. Maybe they can just help.

as the production of food and material goods centralized and rapidly expanded, commerce reached a scale that the country’s existing stores were ill-equipped to handle, according to the historian Susan Strasser, the author of Satisfaction Guaranteed: The Making of the American Mass Market. Manufacturers needed ways to distribute their newly enormous outputs and educate the public on the wonder of all their novel options. Americans, in short, had to be taught how to shop.

In 2019, one in five American workers was employed in retail, food service, or hospitality; even more are now engaged in service work of some kind.

This dynamic is exacerbated by the fact that the United States has more service workers than ever before, doing more types of labor, spread thin across the economy

Customers might not have been able to afford a household staff to do their bidding like the era’s truly wealthy, but corporate stores offered them a little taste of what that would be like. The middle class began to see itself as the small-time beneficiaries of industrialization’s barons.

With these goals in mind, Leach writes, customer service was born. For retailers’ tactics to be successful, consumers—or guests, as department stores of the era took to calling them—needed to feel appreciated and rewarded

From 1870 to 1910, the number of service workers in the United States quintupled. It’s from this morass that “The customer is always right” emerged as the essential precept of American consumerism—service workers weren’t there just to ring up orders

they were there to fuss and fawn, to bolster egos, to reassure wavering buyers, to make dreams come true.

they were also quite intentionally building something far grander: class consciousness. Leach writes that the introduction of shopping was fundamental to forming middle-class identity at a particularly crucial moment, as the technological advances of the Gilded Age helped create the American office worker as we now know it.

Retailers won over this growing middle class by convincing its members that they were separate from—and opposed to—industrial workers and their distrust of corporate power,

For many of these workers, the difficulty of finding non-service employment enables companies to pay low wages and keep their prices artificially low, which consumers generally like as long as they don’t have to think about what makes it possible. In theory, these conditions are supposed to encourage better performance on the part of the worker; in practice, they also encourage cruelty on the part of the consumer.

Previously confined to a few lavish European-owned hotels in America, tipping “aristocratized consumption,

Department-store magnates alleviated these concerns by linking department stores to the public good. Retailers started inserting themselves into these communities as much as possible, Leach writes, turning their enormous stores into domains of urban civic life. They hosted free concerts and theatrical performances, offered free child care, displayed fine art, and housed restaurants, tearooms, Turkish baths, medical and dental services, banks, and post offices. They made splashy contributions to local charities and put on holiday parades and fireworks shows. This created the impression that patronizing their stores wouldn’t just be a practical transaction or an individual pleasure, but an act of benevolence toward the orderly society those stores supported.

In the 150 years that American consumerism has existed, it has metastasized into almost every way that Americans construct their identities. Today’s brands insert themselves into current events, align themselves with causes, associate patronage of their businesses with virtue and discernment and success.

Most Americans now expect corporations to take a stand on contentious social and political issues; in return, corporations have even co-opted some of the language of actual politics, encouraging consumers to “vote with their dollars” for the companies that market themselves on the values closest to their own.

For Americans in a socially isolating culture, living under an all but broken political system, the consumer realm is the place where many people can most consistently feel as though they are asserting their agency.

Being corrected by a salesperson, forgotten by a bartender, or brushed off by a flight attendant isn’t just an annoyance—for many people, it is an existential threat to their self-understanding.

“The notion that at the restaurant, you’re better than the waiters, it becomes part of the restaurant experience,” and also part of how some patrons understand their place in the world. Compounding this sense of superiority is the fact that so many service workers are from historically marginalized groups—the workforce is disproportionately nonwhite and female.

Because consumer identities are constructed by external forces, Strasser said, they are uniquely vulnerable, and the people who hold them are uniquely insecure

If your self-perception is predicated on how you spend your money, then you have to keep spending it, especially if your overall class status has become precarious, as it has for millions of middle-class people in the past few decades

Although underpaid, poorly treated service workers certainly exist around the world, American expectations on their behavior are particularly extreme and widespread, according to Nancy Wong, a consumer psychologist and the chair of the consumer-science department at the University of Wisconsin. “Business is at fault here,” Wong told me. “This whole industry has profited from exploitation of a class of workers that clearly should not be sustainable.”

Tipping ratcheted up the level of control that members of the middle class could exercise over the service workers beneath them: Consumers could deny payment—effectively, deny workers their wages—for anything less than complete submission.

Modern businesses have invented novel ways to exacerbate conflicts between their customers and their workers.

A big problem at airlines and hotels in particular, Wong said, is what’s called the “customer relationship management” model. CRM programs, the first and most famous of which are frequent-flyer miles, are fabulously profitable; awarding points or miles or bucks encourages people not only to increase the size and frequency of their purchases, but also to confine their spending to one airline or hotel chain or big-box store.

Higher-spending customers access varying levels of luxury and prestige, often in full view of everyone else. Exposure to these consumer inequalities has been found to spark antisocial behavior in those who don’t get to enjoy their perks, the classic example of which is air rage

Workers must do what the sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild, in her 1983 book, The Managed Heart, identified as “emotional labor.”

Workers must stifle their natural emotional reactions to, in the case of those in the service industry, placate members of the consumer class. These workers are alienated from their own emotional well-being, which can have far-reaching psychological consequences—over the years, research has associated this kind of work with elevated levels of stress hormones, burnout, depression, and increased alcohol consumption.

If a less democratic world is needed to deal with the climate, who are the people who’d like to bring a less democratic world into being?

The aim is not to reach net zero faster – neither party has laid out workable plans to do so – but to endear climate-conscious voters to an ethno-nationalist cause.

It’s not just the right, however, that has considered a turn away from democracy for the planet’s sake.

As much as US and UK liberals have talked up the promise of spreading democracy throughout the world this century, though, many centrists – as the Progressive International’s David Adler wrote in 2018 – are pretty down on democracy itself. Analysing the World Values and the European Values surveys, Adler found that centrists in wealthy countries were less supportive of democracy than their counterparts on either the left or the far right. Less than half of centrists in the US thought elections were essential; only 25% saw civil rights as a critical feature of democracy.

Actually existing centrist politicians, meanwhile, such as Emmanuel Macron in France, haven’t shown any willingness to address the climate crisis at the speed or scale it demands.

Openly authoritarian governments hardly fare better. China has rolled out an impressive array of green technologies over the last decade with massive industrial policy. Yet still it continues to prioritise fossil-fuelled growth, with its 14th five-year plan pledging to reduce “emissions intensity” by just 18% through 2025, and the planned opening of 43 new coal-fuelled power stations

But India, like China, has missed the deadline to update its emissions reduction plan in advance of UN climate talks in Glasgow this November.

There is simply no class of enlightened technocrats in powerful governments waiting in the wings to save the day.

A proposal for curbing emissions from the developed world so that the billion individuals who live without electricity can enjoy its benefits would probably pass in a landslide in a world referendum,” the writer and filmmaker Astra Taylor has argued, “but it would likely fail if the vote were limited to people in the wealthiest countries.”

In the less upbeat SSP3, “resurgent nationalism” and “concerns about competitiveness and security” start to emerge as countries go their own way in trying to adapt to and (more rarely) mitigate rising temperatures.

A best-case scenario detailed in their report by IPCC scientists, Shared Socioeconomic Economic Pathway 1, involves “more inclusive development” and unprecedented collaboration among the world’s governments to manage the global commons

The best hope in the short term is for a popular front to browbeat the middling centrists who claim to “believe science” into actually acting on it, and beating back the illiberal right accordingly.

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

But at what cost?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reading or rereading a collection of such books today is like watching an old movie that feels more anguishing and frustrating than you remember. The anguish comes from knowing how the tale will unfold; the frustration from realizing that this was hardly the only possible outcome.

This conclusion is laid bare in the sprawling literature to emerge from 9/11 over the past two decades

Whatever individual stories the 9/11 books tell, too many describe the repudiation of U.S. values, not by extremist outsiders but by our own hand.

In these works, indifference to the growing terrorist threat gives way to bloodlust and vengeance after the attacks. Official dissembling justifies wars, then prolongs them. In the name of counterterrorism, security is politicized, savagery legalized and patriotism weaponized.

that state of exception became our new American exceptionalism.

The latest works on the legacy of 9/11 show how war-on-terror tactics were turned on religious groups, immigrants and protesters in the United States. The war on terror came home, and it walked in like it owned the place.

It happened fast. By 2004, when the 9/11 Commission urged America to “engage the struggle of ideas,” it was already too late; the Justice Department’s initial torture memos were already signed, the Abu Ghraib images had already eviscerated U.S. claims to moral authority.

“It is for now far easier for a researcher to explain how and why September 11 happened than it is to explain the aftermath,” Steve Coll writes in “Ghost Wars,” his 2004 account of the CIA’s pre-9/11 involvement in Afghanistan. Throughout that aftermath, Washington fantasized about remaking the world in its image, only to reveal an ugly image of itself to the world.

“We anticipate a black future for America,” bin Laden told ABC News more than three years before the 9/11 attacks. “Instead of remaining United States, it shall end up separated states and shall have to carry the bodies of its sons back to America.”

bin Laden also came to grasp, perhaps self-servingly, the benefits of luring Washington into imperial overreach, of “bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy,” as he put it in 2004, through endless military expansionism, thus beating back its global sway and undermining its internal unity.

To an unnerving degree, the United States moved toward the enemy’s fantasies of what it might become — a nation divided in its sense of itself, exposed in its moral and political compromises, conflicted over wars it did not want but would not end.

“The most frightening aspect of this new threat . . . was the fact that almost no one took it seriously. It was too bizarre, too primitive and exotic.” That is how Lawrence Wright depicts the early impressions of bin Laden and his terrorist network among U.S. officials

The books traveling that road to 9/11 have an inexorable, almost suffocating feel to them, as though every turn invariably leads to the first crush of steel and glass.

With the system “blinking red,” as CIA Director George Tenet later told the 9/11 Commission, why were all these warnings not enough? Wright lingers on bureaucratic failings

Clarke’s conclusion is simple, and it highlights America’s we-know-better swagger, a national trait that often masquerades as courage or wisdom. “America, alas, seems only to respond well to disasters, to be undistracted by warnings,” he writes. “Our country seems unable to do all that must be done until there has been some awful calamity.”

The problem with responding only to calamity is that underestimation is usually replaced by overreaction. And we tell ourselves it is the right thing, maybe the only thing, to do.

A last-minute flight change. A new job at the Pentagon. A retirement from the fire station. The final tilt of a plane’s wings before impact. If the books about the lead-up to 9/11 are packed with unbearable inevitability, the volumes on the day itself highlight how randomness separated survival from death.

Had the World Trade Center, built in the late 1960s and early 1970s, been erected according to the city building code in effect since 1938, Dwyer and Flynn explain, “it is likely that a very different world trade center would have been built.

Instead, it was constructed according to a new code that the real estate industry had avidly promoted, a code that made it cheaper and more lucrative to build and own skyscrapers. “It increased the floor space available for rent . . . by cutting back on the areas that had been devoted, under the earlier law, to evacuation and exit,” the authors write. The result: Getting everybody out on 9/11 was virtually impossible.

The towers embodied the power of American capitalism, but their design embodied the folly of American greed. On that day, both conditions proved fatal.

Garrett Graff quotes Defense Department officials marveling at how American Airlines Flight 77 struck a part of the Pentagon that, because of new anti-terrorism standards, had recently been reinforced and renovated

“In any other wedge of the Pentagon, there would have been 5,000 people, and the plane would have flown right through the middle of the building.” Instead, fewer than 200 people were killed in the attack on the Pentagon, including the passengers on the hijacked jet. Chance and preparedness came together.

The bravery of police and firefighters is the subject of countless 9/11 retrospectives, but these books also emphasize the selflessness of civilians who morphed into first responders

The passengers had made phone calls when the hijacking began and had learned the fate of other aircraft that day. “According to one call, they voted on whether to rush the terrorists in an attempt to retake the plane,” the commission report states. “They decided, and acted.”

The civilians aboard United Airlines Flight 93, whose resistance forced the plane to crash into a Pennsylvania field rather than the U.S. Capitol, were later lionized as emblems of swashbuckling Americana

Such episodes, led by ordinary civilians, embodied values that the 9/11 Commission called on the nation to display. Except those values would soon be dismantled, in the name of security, by those entrusted to uphold them.