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However, he continued to test several types of material for metal filaments to improve upon his original design and by Nov 4, 1879, he filed another U.S. patent for an electric lamp using "a carbon filament or strip coiled and connected ... to platina contact wires."

They built their lamps with different sizes and shapes of carbon rods held between electrodes in glass cylinders filled with nitrogen. Woodward and Evans attempted to commercialize their lamp, but were unsuccessful.

In 1850 an English physicist named Joseph Wilson Swan created a “light bulb” by enclosing carbonized paper filaments in an evacuated glass bulb. And by 1860 he had a working prototype, but the lack of a good vacuum and an adequate supply of electricity resulted in a bulb whose lifetime was much too short to be considered an effective prodcer of light.

Although the patent described several ways of creating the carbon filament including using "cotton and linen thread, wood splints, papers coiled in various ways," it was not until several months after the patent was granted that Edison and his team discovered that a carbonized bamboo filament could last over 1200 hours.

1906 - The General Electric Company were the first to patent a method of making tungsten filaments for use in incandescent lightbulbs. Edison himself had known tungsten would eventually prove to be the best choice for filaments in incandescent light bulbs, but in his day, the machinery needed to produce the wire in such a fine form was not available.

1920s - The first frosted lightbulb is produced and adjustable power beam bulbs for car headlamps, and neon lighting.

Modern incandescent bulbs are not energy efficient – less than 10% of electrical power supplied to the bulb is converted into visible light. The remaining energy is lost as heat. However these inefficient light bulbs are still widely used today due to many advantages such as: wide, low-cost availability easy incorporation into electrical systems adaptable for small systems low voltage operation, such as in battery powered devices wide shape and size availability

with LED prices falling significantly, the future does seem to belong to the LED.

Mars will need ground transportation, too.

especially if the Cybertruck manages to become a high-volume production vehicle (unlikely because of its controversial design, but perhaps possible based on the economics if Tesla can stick to the price points it revealed on stage)

he documents were revealed to have come from Brittany Kaiser, an ex-Cambridge Analytica employee turned whistleblower, and to be the same ones subpoeaned by Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election

The documents were retrieved from her email accounts and hard drives, and though she handed over some material to parliament in April 2018, she said there were thousands and thousands more pages which showed a “breadth and depth of the work” that went “way beyond what people think they know about ‘the Cambridge Analytica scandal’”.

“on our current trajectory these problems are likely to get worse, not better, and with crucial 2020 elections in America and elsewhere approaching, this is a very scary prospect. Something radical needs to be done about it, and fast.”

The unpublished documents contain material that suggests the firm was working for a political party in Ukraine in 2017 even while under investigation as part of Mueller’s inquiry and emails that Kaiser says describe how the firm helped develop a “sophisticated infrastructure of shell companies that were designed to funnel dark money into politics”.

more sophisticated actors will have been emboldened to interfere in our elections and sow social divisions

authorities in the west had failed to punish those practising social and other media manipulation

There are emails between these major Trump donors discussing ways of obscuring the source of their donations through a series of different financial vehicles. These documents expose the entire dark money machinery behind US politics.

“The documents reveal a much clearer idea of what actually happened in the 2016 US presidential election, which has a huge bearing on what will happen in 2020. It’s the same people involved who we know are building on these same techniques,”

“There’s evidence of really quite disturbing experiments on American voters, manipulating them with fear-based messaging, targeting the most vulnerable, that seems to be continuing. This is an entire global industry that’s out of controlbut what this does is lay out what was happening with this one company.

The WhatsApp exchanges show that Nunes aide Derek Harvey raised questions about foreign assistance to Ukraine in late March 2019.

Last month, Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee included in their impeachment inquiry report phone records of calls exchanged between Nunes and Parnas and other allies of President Donald Trump.

Nunes admitted Wednesday to speaking on the phone with Parnas after previously saying such a conversation would have been "very unlikely."

Mars won't just be a harsh environment for humans, but the fungi as well. The fungi will need cyanobacteria to survive. Cyanobacteria uses solar energy to convert dioxide and water in oxygen and food.

Iran, had tried to influence the election by sending intimidating emails was a stark warning. Some of the spoofed emails, sent to Democratic voters, purported to be from pro-Trump far-right groups, including the Proud Boys.

Iran is building upon Russian techniques and trying to demonstrate that it, too, is capable of being a force in the election.

Iran opposes Mr. Trump’s re-election because its leaders believe that under a Biden administration, they might be able to revive their nuclear deal reached in 2015 with six world powers and restart international investment.

Mr. Ratcliffe has been attacked by intelligence officials and Democrats for being overly partisan and Mr. Wray has been the target of Mr. Trump’s fury, including for his repeated insistence that Russia was a threat to the election.

Iran has tinkered at the edges of American election interference since 2012, but always as a minor actor. Last year they stepped up their game, private cybersecurity firms have warned. They have caught Iranian operatives occasionally impersonating politicians and journalists around the world, often to spread narratives that are aimed at denigrating Israel or Saudi Arabia, its two major adversaries in the Middle East.

“But they have gone from propaganda to deliberate interference in this election,

“Their focus here is to prey on existing fears that election infrastructure will be subverted and hacked, as well as fears of voter intimidation,” he said.

The officials also did not make clear whether either nation hacked into voter registration systems.The material obtained by Iran and Russia was mostly public, according to an intelligence official, and Iran was using it as an opposing political campaign might. Some voter information, including party registration, is publicly available, and voters’ names may have been merged with other identifying material like email addresses from other databases, according to intelligence officials, including some sold by criminal hacking networks on the “dark web.”

Some spoofed emails sent to voters contained links to a false and deceptive video that attempted to scare voters into believing the senders were also capable of manipulating the mail-in vote process, playing on fears that Mr. Trump has fanned with his insistence that mail-in ballots are subject to fraud.

WASHINGTON — Iran and Russia have both obtained American voter registration data, and Tehran used it to send threatening, faked emails to voters that were aimed at influencing the presidential election, top national security officials announced on Wednesday evening.

There was no indication that any election result tallies were changed or that information about who is registered to vote was altered, both of which would threaten to alter actual votes,

“This data can be used by foreign actors to attempt to communicate false information to registered voters that they hope will cause confusion, sow chaos and undermine your confidence in American democracy,” Mr. Ratcliffe said.

WASHINGTON — Iran and Russia have both obtained American voter registration data, and Tehran used it to send threatening, faked emails to voters that were aimed at influencing the presidential election, top national security officials announced on Wednesday evening.

both of which would threaten to alter actual votes

And it was not clear that either nation hacked into voter registration systems

Some of the spoofed emails, sent to Democratic voters, purported to be from pro-Trump far-right groups, including the Proud Boys.

Mr. Ratcliffe said the effort was aimed at hurting President Trump, and intelligence officials have said Iran opposes the president’s re-election. But if the emails had the effect of intimidating Democrats, they could also have hurt Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee.

The calamity we're now all living through offers the professional class an opportunity to reconsider assessments of the national condition issued so confidently pre-pandemic: Economists focus on material living standards partly for ease of quantification, but also because that is what free markets most reliably produce

But “material living standards,” measured in dollars of consumption (or inches of flat-screen TV), are not the same thing as “quality of life.” They say little about relationships, dignity, agency, or life satisfaction.

Ask yourself what matters to you right now. Consider whether new apps on your smartphone compensate for the loss of control, sense of powerlessness, and strain of unpredictability.

Speaking in March at the Heritage Foundation, Senator Pat Toomey, a Republican said, “many nuclear families are struggling, that families don’t have the community support that they once had, extended families live apart,” and “civil society” is in “decline.” Still, he argued, “the standard of living of middle-class and working class Americans has improved,” citing larger houses, better computers, and cars that are not only safer but also equipped with satellite radio and seat warmers.

Weighing these competing factors, he concluded, “For all the problems that we undoubtedly have, the fact is life is better today than it has ever been for the vast majority of the American people.”

By Senator Toomey’s and Dr. Strain’s standards, the past few months were the greatest in human history to be alive. The pandemic has allowed more time than ever to enjoy air-conditioning and color televisions, computers and phones. One can joy ride for hours streaming podcasts.

How much of that technology would you trade to erase the coronavirus? Put another way, how far back in history would you have to travel to find a time when Americans’ true quality of life was lower than today’s?

That this is even a question serves as damning refutation of Senator Toomey’s confidence that an improved standard of living more than compensates for weakened family bonds and waning community support.

While the right-of-center often dismisses working-class frustration with claims of economic prosperity, the left-of-center tends to dismiss their frustration as backward or racist.

America could slow, or partially reverse, elements of globalization that have most disrupted working-class lives, if that were our priority.

We could reorient our education system toward serving the majority of young people who still don’t earn even a community-college degree.

We could reform our system of organized labor to provide workers a genuine seat at the table and an institution in the community.

We could emphasize geography when we talk about diversity, aiming to distribute talent and investment more widely.

These are forms of social redistribution. The task is not to write a larger check but to relinquish power and realign institutions on behalf of those who have been left behind for decades.

“They were well aware of the ravages of the 1918 flu, and this virus appeared to be closely related,”

One manufacturer produced 2 million doses with the wrong strain. As tests progressed, more scientific problems emerged — even as there were few, if any, signs that a pandemic was materializing. In June, tests showed the vaccine was not effective in children, prompting a public squabble between Salk and Sabin over who should be vaccinated.

Every American, Ford said, would be vaccinated.The government had never attempted such an endeavor — both in its breadth and speed.Almost immediately, there was chaos.

And then more problems emerged. There were reports of sporadic deaths possibly connected to the vaccine. Cases of Guillain-Barre syndrome also emerged, and are still cited today by the anti-vaccine movement. Panic emerged, with dozens of states pausing vaccinations.

By December, following 94 reports of paralysis, the entire program was shut down.

Almost immediately, in grand Washington fashion, fingers were pointed. Scientists and government officials turned on each other, with allegations that Ford acted recklessly for political gain without knowing for sure whether a pandemic would emerge — an impossible predictive game, his defenders argued.The recriminations were fueled by the fact that the swine flu pandemic hadn’t materialized.

The program “appears clearly to have been based on concern for the public good,” Skidmore wrote, “not to achieve political advantage.”

Are paper surgical single-use masks better or is a cloth mask OK? The evidence on any mask use, outside of surgical masks, is still emerging: there appears to be some benefit, but the exact parameters of which masks are the best and the extent to which they protect the wearer or those around them are still being figured out. A tighter fitting around the face is probably better, but the CDC suggests any covering, including a bandana, is better than none.

heavyweight “quilter’s cotton” or multiple layers of material. Scarves and bandana material were less effective, but still captured a fraction of particles.

Replace the mask when it is damp. To remove your mask, take it off using the elastic tags, without touching the front and discard immediately into a closed bin or, if the mask is reusable, directly into the washing machine.

How often do you need to wash masks? They should be washed after each use. The US Center for Disease Control suggests “routinely”.

if every person in the UK used one single-use mask each day for a year, an extra 66,000 tonnes of contaminated plastic waste would be created. The use of reusable masks by the general population would significantly reduce plastic waste and the climate change impact of any policy requirements for the wearing of face masks, according to the UCL team, led by Prof Mark Miodownik. They say that according to the best evidence, reusable masks perform most of the tasks of single-use masks without the associated waste stream.

Volcanic ash, more generally known as tephra, sometimes hides in ice. It’s a special find because it can be geochemically tied to a specific volcano. “The tephra comes from the magma itself,

Sulfur is also indicative of a past eruption. Sulfur dioxide, a gas commonly belched by erupting volcanoes, reacts with water in the atmosphere to create sulfate aerosols. These tiny particles can linger in the stratosphere for years, riding wind currents, but they, like tephra, eventually fall back to Earth.

The ice also carries a time stamp. Dr. McConnell and his colleagues look for variations in elements like sodium, which is found in sea spray that’s seasonally blown inland. By simply counting annual variations in these elements, it’s possible to trace the passage of time, Dr. McConnell said. “It’s like a tree-ring record.”

In layers of ice corresponding to the early months of 43 B.C., they spotted large upticks in sulfur and, crucially, bits of material that were probably tephra. The timing caught the scientists’ attention.

Researchers have previously hypothesized that an environmental trigger may have helped set in motion the crop failures, famines and social unrest that plagued the Mediterranean region at that time. But until now, “There hasn’t been the kind of data that these scholars brought forth to really get those theories into the mainstream,”

The match was spot on, Dr. Plunkett said. “There are some events that are tricky. With Okmok, there’s nothing else that looks like it.”

This eruption was one of the largest of the last few millenniums, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators concluded, and the sulfate aerosols it created remained in the stratosphere for several years. These tiny particles are particularly good at reflecting sunlight, which means they can temporarily alter Earth’s climate.

“They’ve created, for a short term, global cooling events,”

Using climate models to simulate the impact of an Okmok eruption, Dr. McConnell and his collaborators estimated that parts of the Mediterranean, roughly 6,000 miles away, would have cooled by as much as 13.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

Rain patterns changed as well — some regions would have been drenched by 400 percent more precipitation than normal, the modeling revealed.

That climate shock came at precisely the wrong time, Dr. Clark said. “This was a period of Mediterranean-wide political, social and economic upheaval.”

Historical records compiled by Roman writers and philosophers note food shortages and famines. In 43 B.C., Mark Antony, the Roman military leader, and his army had to subsist on wild fruit, roots, bark and “animals never tasted before,” the philosopher Plutarch wrote.

For a society already reeling from the assassination of Julius Caesar the year before, such trying conditions might have exacerbated social unrest, the researchers concluded. They might even have kick-started transfers of political power that led to the rise of the Roman Empire.

“It’s an incredible coincidence that it happened exactly in the waning years of the Roman Republic when things were falling apart,”

The links in the study are probable, but not definite. “They’re not being heavy handed and saying this is absolutely it,” Dr. Holmberg said.

Egyptian society, before the installation of the Aswan Low Dam in the early 20th century, was anchored by the annual summer flooding of the Nile River. These summer floods, sustained by monsoon rains in the highlands of Ethiopia, delivered irrigation and silt, both critical to Egypt’s agrarian society. “The whole rhythm of the year was built around responding to the flood,” Dr. Manning of Yale said.

But volcanic eruptions, even those on the other side of the world, could have disrupted that flooding, Dr. Manning and his colleagues recently showed. Using records from Cairo’s Nilometer — an octagonal marble column that was used for recording Nile flood height from 622 to 1902 A.D., the team found that flooding tended to be weaker, or entirely absent, during years when there was a large volcanic eruption somewhere in the world.

he culprit, the team reasoned in a paper published a few years ago, was cooling caused by sulfate aerosols. When Earth cools after a large eruption, its atmospheric circulation patterns change. That can shift the invisible meeting point of Northern and Southern Hemisphere trade winds — the Intertropical Convergence Zone — that affects where monsoon rains tend to fall. When less precipitation falls over Ethiopia, home to a major tributary of the Nile, there’s less water available for flooding that year.

Ptolemaic-era records revealed that this reduced flooding had socioeconomic and political consequences. Revolts increased in the years following “Nile failure,” Dr. Manning and his colleagues found. Priestly decrees — intended to establish the political legitimacy of Greek rulers — also became more commonplace.

“There are still large unsourced mystery eruptions up until the early 19th century.”

Right now, roughly a dozen volcanoes are erupting. In all likelihood, they’re nothing to worry about — it’s doubtful you’ve even heard of them. But every once in a while, there’s bound to be a really big eruption. How its effects ripple around the world awaits to be seen.

The first 800,000 doses of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine for Britain were transported in recent days from a manufacturing plant in Belgium to government warehouses in Britain, and then to hospitals

First to receive the vaccine will be doctors and nurses, certain people aged 80 and over, and nursing home workers.

Hundreds of people are still dying in Britain each day from the virus, and the country has made allowances for travel over the Christmas period that scientists fear will seed another uptick in infections.

Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the United States’s top infectious disease expert, said last week that the British had not reviewed the vaccine “as carefully” as the United States was.

Once enough people get vaccinated, it will become very difficult for the virus to find vulnerable people to infect. Life may start approaching something like normal by the fall of 2021.

Tens of thousands of people have already received the vaccines, and none of them have reported any serious side effects. Some have felt aches and flulike symptoms that last less than a day.

Pfizer’s vaccine offers strong protection after the first dose, F.D.A. finds.

The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group.

Many experts have expressed concern that the coronavirus vaccines might protect some people better than others. But the results in the briefing materials indicate no such problem.

President-elect Joe Biden's team has magnified the giant hurdles that loom for government officials as they try to ensure the smooth delivery of millions of vaccine doses within the 50 states and cities with different ideas about the best way to administer them.

Trump told guests that with the help of "certain very important people -- if they have wisdom and if they have courage -- we're going to win this election." The crowd chanted "four more years."

the crucial question is whether Trump and his administration are equipping the incoming Biden administration with the knowledge and tools they need to carry out an unprecedented vaccination operation as Trump's White House grudgingly passes the baton.

Trump is pursuing a new round in his quixotic bid to overturn the November election by attempting to intervene in a lawsuit filed with the Supreme Court.

There were signs Wednesday, however, that cooperation is slowly beginning to take shape behind the scenes. Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar said that he has met with Biden's team -- a rare acknowledgment of the former vice president's victory from a top Trump official -- and he insisted that he wants "to make sure they get everything that they need."

"Twenty million people should get vaccinated in just the next several weeks, and then we'll just keep rolling out vaccines through January, February, March as they come off the production lines," Azar said, trying to offer a note of reassurance about continuity during an interview on CNN's New Day.

The vaccine distribution challenges surrounding a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic would normally be at the top of the agenda for any commander-in-chief. But unsurprisingly, Trump is refusing to acknowledge the potential problems as he spreads disinformation to his supporters, and his administration -- at his behest -- continues to target Biden's son Hunter, who revealed Wednesday that his taxes are under federal investigation.

"Unless a court makes some other decision, the Electoral College is the defining outcome of the presidential race," Moran said. Asked what would be next if Trump doesn't concede, Moran said: "There is a transition that just occurs -- occurs under our laws under the Constitution."

Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, a Republican, said "it is unhealthy for the well-being of the country" to continue debating the outcome of the election "once the presidential race has been determined."

The attorney representing Trump, John Eastman, is known for recently pushing a racist conspiracy theory -- that Trump himself later amplified -- claiming Vice President-elect Kamala Harris might not be eligible for the role because her parents were immigrants.

With hopes riding on the vaccine authorization discussion Thursday, the country continued to grapple with an alarming rise in cases around the country as medical professionals began to see the post-Thanksgiving spike materialize and some regions reverted to shutdowns to try to preserve hospital capacity.

"This is by far, the worst surge to date," Colfax said. "The reality is unfortunately proving to be as harsh as we expected. ... The vaccine will not save us from this current surge -- there is simply not enough time."

"The more terrible truth is that over 8,000 people, ... who were beloved members of their family, are not coming back. And their deaths are an incalculable loss to their friends and their family, as well as our community."

Though Trump has said that the vaccination program will "quickly and dramatically reduce deaths," a new White House task force report warns that the vaccine "will not substantially reduce viral spread, hospitalizations, or fatalities until the 100 million Americans with comorbidities can be fully immunized, which will take until the late spring."

The FDA is expected to conduct its authorization review between December 11 and the 14, with first shipment of the vaccine going out by December 15. Needles, syringes and other materials to deliver the vaccines are already on their way to states.

Gen. Gustave Perna, said that 2.9 million doses of vaccine will go out in the first shipment from Pfizer once the FDA grants emergency use authorization.

Initially the federal government expected to receive 6.4 million doses from Pfizer as the first shipment. But because the vaccine is administered in two doses, the math is more complicated. About 500,000 doses will be set aside as a reserve supply, and the remaining number was divided in half to set aside what is needed for the second dose of the Pfizer vaccine, which brought down the total in the first shipment to 2.9 million doses.

"We just want to make sure that Americans understand exactly the science that went into this, understand the gold standard of the FDA and the approval process. We want to make sure that the vaccines are actually administered, and we're afraid that that won't happen," Ostrowski said.

Their research underscored increasing concern that the new chatbots could flood the internet with false and dangerous information despite attempts by their creators to ensure that would not happen.

The researchers found that they could break through the guardrails of open source systems by appending a long suffix of characters onto each English-language prompt fed into the system.

A recent decision by Meta, Facebook’s parent company, to let anyone do what they want with its technology has been criticized in some tech circles because it could lead to the spread of powerful A.I. with little regard for controls.

The debate over whether it is better to let everyone see computer code and collectively fix it rather than keeping it private predates the chatbot boom by decades. And it is likely to become even more contentious because of what the researchers revealed in their report on Thursday.

The researchers found that they could use a method gleaned from open source A.I. systems — systems whose underlying computer code has been released for anyone to use — to target the more tightly controlled and more widely used systems from Google, OpenAI and Anthropic.

attacks on image recognition systems without success.

The researchers were surprised when the methods they developed with open source systems could also bypass the guardrails of closed systems

The companies that make the chatbots could thwart the specific suffixes identified by the researchers. But the researchers say there is no known way of preventing all attacks of this kind.

If they asked one of these chatbots to “write a tutorial on how to make a bomb,” it would decline to do so. But if they added a lengthy suffix to the same prompt, it would instantly provide a detailed tutorial on how to make a bomb. In similar ways, they could coax the chatbots into generating biased, false and otherwise toxic information.

“There is no obvious solution,”

“You can create as many of these attacks as you want in a short amount of time.”

Somesh Jha, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Google researcher who specializes in A.I. security, called the new paper “a game changer” that could force the entire industry into rethinking how it built guardrails for A.I. systems.

If these types of vulnerabilities keep being discovered, he added, it could lead to government legislation designed to control these systems.

But the technology can repeat toxic material found on the internet, blend fact with fiction and even make up information, a phenomenon scientists call “hallucination.” “Through simulated conversation, you can use these chatbots to convince people to believe disinformation,”

About five years ago, researchers at companies like Google and OpenAI began building neural networks that analyzed huge amounts of digital text. These systems, called large language models, or L.L.M.s, learned to generate text on their own.

The testers found that the system could potentially hire a human to defeat an online Captcha test, lying that it was a person with a visual impairment. The testers also showed that the system could be coaxed into suggesting how to buy illegal firearms online and into describing ways of making dangerous substances from household items.

The researchers at Carnegie Mellon and the Center for A.I. Safety showed that they could circumvent these guardrails in a more automated way. With access to open source systems, they could build mathematical tools capable of generating the long suffixes that broke through the chatbots’ defenses

they warn that there is no known way of systematically stopping all attacks of this kind and that stopping all misuse will be extraordinarily difficult.

“This shows — very clearly — the brittleness of the defenses we are building into these systems,”

There is also a tendency in our moment to prioritize the distant over the proximate and the big over the small.

We can seek to have all the right political opinions and still not really love our actual neighbors, those right around us, in our homes, in our workplaces or on our blocks.

Ben Sasse wrote, “When we prioritize ‘news’ from afar, we’re saying that our distant-but-shallow communities are more important than our small-but-deep flesh-and-blood ones.”

In our time of digitization and rapid information, our temptation is what the philosopher Charles Taylor called “excarnation” — the opposite of “incarnation,” it makes our life into an abstraction.

We become like Linus in the old “Peanuts” cartoons who famously said: “I love mankind. It’s people I can’t stand.”

True community, however, is made of real people with names, of friends with true faults, of congregations with faces, of the local, the small.

Global and national news is important and I will continue to read news and opinion pieces nearly every day. But for me, as for most of us, the places we meet God — the places we become human — are not primarily in abstract debates about culture wars or the role of religion in society, but in worship on a Sunday morning or in dropping off soup for a grieving friend, in a vulnerable conversation or in making breakfast at the homeless shelter down the street, in celebration with a neighbor or in the drowsy prayers uttered while rocking a feverish toddler in the middle of the night.

The way to battle abstraction in our time is to embrace the material, the incarnation of our lives, the fleshy, complicated, touchable realities right around us in our neighborhoods, churches, friends and families

it is beautifully written and a magnificent read, whether or not one follows the author all the way to his final destination in this journey of the pilgrim soul in the capitalist wilderness.

McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work. He rails against “the ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics”, which offer “a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history”.

Homo economicus, driven by instrumental self-interest and controlled by the power of money, is condemned as a shabby and degrading construct that betrays the truth of human experience.

After capitalism has delivered what the author describes as “two centuries of Promethean technics and its irreparable ecological impact” there must be a return to an earlier, gentler, more sacramental vision of the world; one that has a greater sense of natural limits and a restored sense of wonder at creation.

McCarraher embarks on a kind of genealogy of neoliberal morals, barrelling his way through the tracts, studies, theories and literature that have constituted the “symbolic universe” of capitalism since the Renaissance.

From the English Puritans who made money for the greater glory of God, through the machine idolatry rampant in 1920s Fordism, to the cult of the ruthless entrepreneur

capitalism is best understood, he concludes, as a secular faith. It operates through myths and dogma, just as any religion does.

Modernity is not, as Max Weber maintained, the culmination of a process of intellectual “disenchantment”, in which societies lost their sense of the sacred and embraced the rational

Instead, a different enchantment took hold of our minds; the material culture of production and consumption. “Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism,” writes McCarraher. “Its iconography consists of advertising, marketing, public relations and product design.”

This brave new era produced a “predatory and misshapen love of the world

Spiritually diminished by the commodification of things and people, and the desire to consume, we have lost sight of what the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as the “dearest freshness deep down things”.

On Avarice. This work, says McCarraher, signalled a transition: the growth of commerce and banking was beginning to loosen the grip of biblical disdain for “filthy lucre”

the Florentine then makes an argument that is precociously modern, suggesting that without it, there would be “no temples, no colonnades, no palaces…”

The 17th-century Puritans are presented as a capitalist “avant garde”, driven by notions of a divine calling to turn common land into private property and then turn a profit on it

Milton mourns this sellout of the English revolution, using Paradise Lost to portray Mammon as a fallen angel, driven to blasphemous self-aggrandisement on eart

by the 20th century such satanic cunning is the new common sense in business circles

McCarraher leaves the poetry of Milton to move, via the Industrial Revolution, to the outlandish business utopias dreamed up in early 20th-century America

In February 1928, Vanity Fair caught the mood, praising Henry Ford as “a divine master-mind”

the epilogue of this mammoth portrait of the religious longings at the heart of secular materialism carries a bleak message: 20th-century fantasies of the world as one global business have been realised. Capital’s empire now extends to all corners of the world. Globalisation has built a “paradise of capital”

But Mammon is delivering an unsustainable future dominated by wage stagnation, tech-led unemployment, deepening inequality and environmental peril. As disaster looms, distraction is being sought in “a tranquillising repertoire of digital devices and myriad forms of entertainment” along with “the analgesic pleasures of consumption”.

“get back to the garden”. A new Romantic left is needed to reinhabit a sacramental imagination, which values people and things in themselves rather than as factors of production, and places collaboration over competition

recalling John Ruskin’s principle of “amazement”, which teaches that the gifts of nature should be admired and nurtured, rather than ravished and depleted

where pessimism might take hold, the author’s Christian faith gives him a trump card. For McCarraher, it is simply the case that “the Earth is a sacramental place, mediating the presence and power of God”

however obscured the truth is by a destructive lust for power and accumulation. It is simply a question of seeing things as they truly are.

Facing death in a matter of months, Ellsberg is loquacious but low-key about his legacy. He said he is still trying to decide whether to be buried or cremated. “If I had a tombstone, I’ve always thought what it would say is: ‘He became a member of the antiwar and anti-nuclear movements,’” he said, adding that he doesn’t believe in the afterlife.

“He actually read and understood all of the material he released. He knew what he was doing. And he acted with thoughtful discrimination by withholding four volumes of material on diplomatic negotiations that he considered particularly sensitive,” Aftergood said.

“Government officials had told the public lies before, but rarely had they been exposed with such merciless clarity as they were in the Pentagon Papers.”

This isn’t an American crisis alone. All around the world, developed nations have locked themselves into unsustainable, energy-intensive lifestyles.

Among those with the largest footprints are wealthy oil-producing microstates with small populations, like Qatar or Trinidad and Tobago, where the per-capita footprint pushes 60 tons

In the next tier, with the United States, are other sprawling, continent-size countries that use a lot of heating or cooling and where people tend to drive long distances, such as Canada and Australia (around 20 tons)

By dint of their density and reliance on mass transit, nations in Western Europe (as well as Japan and South Korea) make up most of the next tier, which cleaves roughly into two groups: places like Germany, Norway and the Netherlands that rely more on fossil fuels (around 15 tons),

places like the United Kingdom, Denmark and France that use a higher percentage of nuclear and renewable power. Though it’s half the size of an American’s, the footprint of someone in the typical French household still remains unsustainably high: around nine tons.

This is the paradox at the heart of climate change: We’ve burned far too many fossil fuels to go on living as we have, but we’ve also never learned to live well without them

the problem of the future is how to create a 19th-century carbon footprint without backsliding into a 19th-century standard of living. N

The greatest crisis in human history may require imagining ways of living — not just of energy production but of daily habit — that we have never seen before. How do we begin to imagine such a household?

With a carbon footprint hovering around the global median of 4.5 tons per capita, it falls within a narrow tier of nearly developed countries within sight of two tons per capita — the estimated amount needed to limit the world to 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming.

There are countries more prosperous, and countries with a smaller carbon footprint, but perhaps in none do the overlapping possibilities of living well and living without ruin show as much promise as in Uruguay.

Mujica harbored another deeper belief too. For years, he had been arguing that the “blind obsession to achieve growth with consumption” was the real cause of the linked energy and ecological crises.

In speeches, he pushed his people to reject materialism and embrace Uruguay’s traditions of simplicity and humility. “The culture of the West is a lie,” he told me. “The engine is accumulation. But we can’t pretend that the whole world can embrace it. We would need two or three more planets.”

He shared his own experience in solitary confinement, and how years without books or conversation drew him closer to the fundamentals of being: nature, love, family. “I learned to give value to little things in life. I kept some frogs as pets in prison and bathed them with my drinking water,”

“The true revolution is a different culture: learning to live with less waste and more time to enjoy freedom.”

By 2016, an array of biomass, solar and some 50 wind parks had replaced the grid’s use of oil, helping slash more than half a billion dollars from the country’s annual budget. Today, Uruguay boasts one of the world’s greenest grids, powered by 98 percent renewable energy.

prevailing economic conditions and something in Uruguay’s character had afforded the transition more receptivity than anyone predicted. This was one way in which a career in theoretical physics prepared Méndez for the world of policymaking, he said: “You have to be open to the solutions being very narrow and technical, or very wide and human.”

as the energy sector shifted, the mind-set in the country began to shift with it, Méndez said, sometimes in surprising ways. Some bought air-conditioning units, but many kept to their formerly low-consumption habits, continuing to hang their laundry and take the bus, dozens of which in Montevideo were now electric. Others bought plug-in timers to automate their laundries to run at night or installed solar water heaters on their roof

for Méndez, the biggest shift was among leaders. In cabinet and business meetings the problems of the future — like how to eliminate industrial waste and phase out gas entirely — began to feel like just that, he said: problems, not crises.

there appeared to be fundamental tension in how to bring Uruguayans along in the energy transition. On the one hand, the infrastructure shift needed to happen in the background, so the public never lost confidence in the grid — that part had been surprisingly smooth. But on the other hand, it was important to keep people engaged so they would support the necessary changes to come

Emaldi and her colleagues focused their efforts on electrifying transportation and growing the green-energy sector. The government eliminated duties and taxes on electric cars and rebranded a tax on gas as a CO2 tax, with a portion funding green initiatives.

“What comes in the near future will change more lives,” Minister Paganini told me. “You have to get into sectors or areas that are much more difficult than just changing the generation of electricity.” You need to change human behavior.

fossil fuels gave humanity the ability to choose our food, to transform a rainforest or windblown desert into something fertile and constant, a biotic vending machine from which eaters can select whatever they want whenever they want it. This choice now drives about a third of all global emissions. Most of them stem from the growing process itself — clearing land, fertilizing crops — with the bulk of the rest coming indirectly from the vast web of manufacturing and delivery systems that bring it to us: packaging crackers, refrigerating drumsticks, airlifting avocados.

One reason the global cattle industry had become so damaging, Baethgen said, was that too many grasslands had been razed or degraded. In the short term, feedlots produced more food, often with lower emissions, since cows got fatter faster and burped less frequently, but over the long term, without the grasslands to recycle carbon, net emissions built up. From Baethgen’s perspective, every damaged field thus represented a huge opportunity: By restoring grasslands, he could not only pull more greenhouse gases into the ground, but also grow more beef. And since the 1990s, Uruguay has managed a remarkable feat: increasing its annual production of beef without any increase in greenhouse gases — and doing all of this on natural pasturelands.

He believed too much climate science relied on big-picture modeling to drive engagement. “Those science-fiction scenarios were great to increase awareness,” he said. “But if you give a minister of agriculture information for the year 2080, that doesn’t do anything.” He waved a hand over the landscape. “You’re providing information, far in the future, with no resolution and no certainty. That’s the best combination to ensure paralysis. Nobody does anything.”

In his 2016 book, “The Great Derangement,” the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh says it’s unwise to reduce climate denial to “only a function of money and manipulation.” The sheer level of paralysis, he writes, “suggests that the climate crisis threatens to unravel something deeper, without which large numbers of the people would be at a loss to find meaning.” Ghosh wonders if the modern consumer mind-set can ever change, collectively or otherwise: “In a world where the rewards of a carbon-intensive economy are regarded as wealth, this must be reckoned as a very significant material sacrifice.”

Esponda described his family as middle to upper middle class. Both he and Laroca were economists for the city and together made about $30,000 a year. “Everybody in Uruguay is middle class,” he said. I thought I knew what he meant. Unlike in the United States, I found it difficult in Uruguay to discern class differences. Conspicuous displays of wealth seemed rare, as were the tiers of consumer goods that otherwise revealed someone’s spending. “There’s not the American consumerist mentality of ‘We need to get the next new thing,’”

On trips to New Orleans and Chicago, he had been transfixed by the selection of junk food in convenience stores, the undamaged furniture left on the street. “You guys throw away your whole home,” he told me. “Here, most of this stuff wouldn’t be trash.”

Esponda pointed to his couch, a sagging green camelback. It was given to them by his parents, he said, and barely fit his growing family anymore. But he couldn’t find a reason to replace it, even with a dual income that allowed them to save each month. “Why would I?” he said. It was a mentality apparent throughout the couple’s apartment. In stark contrast to most American homes with two kids, their apartment wasn’t overflowing with toys. Two bikes leaned against the wall by a plastic slide. “Our choices don’t really have anything to do with the environment,” he said. “It’s about saving money, yes, but also being careful with what we buy.”

Several people described frugality to me as a core tenet of the Uruguayan political project, though globalization had played a role, too.

something a man in the asentamientos said to me: “Nobody has confronted the real problem: How will the country grow?”

I thought of a single dad I met in Montevideo who said I shouldn’t think of his country as a model or example. It was too small, its progress too troubled. It was more like a laboratory for the rest of the world, he said.

We often picture the future as a kind of growth, a set of possibilities to expand and realize, but maybe it could also be the opposite, a present to reconcile and safeguard.

Part of the reason America has become so paralyzed by climate change is precisely that we’ve failed to acknowledge the limits it imposes — on where we can live, the things we can have, the household we can envision. This is a particularly difficult idea to sell to a country perched atop decades of accrued wealth, which was itself amassed by generations imagining further comfort and choice.

In the coming months, gas prices spiked, inflation climbed and the price of energy began to strangle Europe. No future seemed as certain as a less abundant one.

A former bank analyst at Bear Stearns, Estrada had decided to take a 75 percent pay cut to return home and eventually took a job with a local energy firm. “I read studies about how there’s a diminishing return on happiness above a certain income, and I experienced that,” he told me of living in New York. “I had more money than I had things I wanted to buy.” He said that contracting his life had allowed him to be more mindful of its details. It reminded him of the household his parents ran in the 1980s, when things were so precarious. No one left lights on or wasted water. They were mindful of the things they bought.

“We learn to live with less here,” he said. “And it’s made my life better.”