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it is also the continuation of a remarkably consistent German attitude toward Europe and the world since 1945. Think about how different the world would look if we did not have, at the center of Europe, its most powerful nation — the country that is the largest net contributor to the E.U. — totally committed to democratic and liberal values and willing to make sacrifices for them. Germany today is the rock on which a new Europe is being built.

the sacrifices are real and deep. Natural gas prices are up tenfold in Europe compared to last year. The price of electricity for 2023 is more than 15 times higher than it has been in recent years, by one estimate. Vladimir Putin is ramping up the pressure by slowing and even stopping gas exports to Germany

But Germany has not given in. Confronted with these massive challenges, it has patiently sought to diversify away from a dependence on Russia, investing even more in green technology, buying liquefied natural gas, reopening coal-fired plants and even debating whether to keep its last three nuclear power plants running longer than planned.

The European Union has suggested a 15 percent reduction in the consumption of natural gas this winter. Germany is trying to achieve a 20 percent cut just to be safe. German industry is being resourceful about energy efficiency, and companies are even thinking about sharing resources with competitors, all to get through the crisis.

Merkel herself was seen in similar ways when she came to power. Over time she developed the skills and stature to gain respect from all quarters. She might have erred in trying to develop too conciliatory a relationship with Moscow

but when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2014, she was at the forefront in condemning it and persuading Europe to impose an ambitious program of sanctions. She also led the world in responding to the Syrian refugee crisis, reassuring her country by declaring, “We can do this.” As of mid-2021, Germany hosts more than 1.2 million refugees, half of whom are from Syria. In fact, Germany has managed this stunning act of integration with minimal problems.

We always underestimate modern-day Germany and its leadership. The federal republic has had a remarkable run of leaders in the post-World War II era, from its first chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, to Willy Brandt to Helmut Schmidt to Merkel — and now, let’s hope, to Scholz. Can any other country compare over the past seven decades?

In 1945, no one would have predicted that Germany would develop as it has. It came out of the war utterly destroyed, its cities flattened, its population starving. Around 12 million ethnic Germans who had been expelled from other countries poured into Germany. Above all, postwar Germany was scarred by the gruesome legacy of Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust. But the country found a way to overcome its past, to become, in Henry Kissinger’s words, “a normal country … with an abnormal memory.” And that much larger Zeitenwende is one of the great good news stories of our times.

“It is genius for the current consumer culture,” Christine Whelan, a clinical professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “It encourages and then meets the need for the thing, so we then continue on the hedonic treadmill: Buy the latest thing we want and then have it delivered immediately and then buy the next latest thing.”

With traditional retail, “there’s the friction of having to go to the store, there’s the friction of will the store have it, there’s the friction of carrying it,” Whelan said. “There’s the friction of having to admit to another human being that you’re buying it. And when you remove the friction, you also remove a lot of individual self-control. The more you are in the ecosystem and the easier it is to make a purchase, the easier it is to say yes to your desire rather than no.”

“It used to be that being a consumer was all about choice,”

But now, “two-thirds of people start their product searches on Amazon.

Prime discourages comparison shopping—looking around is pointless when everything you need is right here—even as Amazon’s sheer breadth of products makes shoppers feel as if they have agency.

“Consumerism has become a key way that people have misidentified freedom,”

what Amazon represents is a corporate infrastructure that is increasingly directed at getting as many consumers as possible locked into a consumerist process—an Amazon consumer for life.”

Amazon offers steep discounts to college students and new parents, two groups that are highly likely to change their buying behavior. It keeps adding more discounts and goodies to the Prime bundle, making subscribing ever more appealing. And, in an especially sinister move, it makes quitting Prime maddeningly difficult.

the United States now has more Prime memberships than households. In 2020,

In 2019, Amazon shaved a full day off its delivery time, making one-day shipping the default, and also making Prime an even more tantalizing proposition: Why hop in the car for anything at all when you could get it delivered tomorrow, for free?

As subscription numbers grew through the 2010s, the revenue from them helped Amazon pump more money into building fulfillment centers (to get products to people even faster), acquiring new businesses (to control even more of the global economy), and adding more perks to the bundle (to encourage more people to sign up)

“Every decision we make is based upon the fact that Amazon can get these books cheaper and faster. The prevailing expectation is you can get anything online shipped for”— he scrunched his fingers into air quotes—“‘free,’ in one or two days. And there’s really only one company that can do that. They do that because they’re willing to push and exploit their workers.”

Thanks in large part to the revenue from Prime subscriptions and from the things subscribers buy, Amazon’s value has multiplied roughly 97 times, to $1.76 trillion, since the service was introduced. Amazon is the second-largest private employer in the United States, after Walmart, and it is responsible for roughly 40 percent of all e-commerce in the United States.

It controls hundreds of millions of square feet across the country and is opening more fulfillment centers all the time. It has acquired dozens of other companies, most recently the film studio MGM for $8.5 billion. Its cloud-computing operation, Amazon Web Services, is the largest of its kind and provides the plumbing for a vast swath of the internet, to a profit of $13.5 billion last year.

Amazon has entered some 40 million American homes in the form of the Alexa smart speaker, and some 150 million American pockets in the form of the Amazon app

“Amazon is a beast we’ve never seen before,” Alimahomed-Wilson told me. “Amazon powers our Zoom calls. It contracts with ICE. It’s in our neighborhoods. This is a very different thing than just being a large retailer, like Walmart or the Ford Motor Company.”

I find it useful to compare Big Tech to climate change, another force that is altering the destiny of everyone on Earth, forever. Both present themselves to us all the time in small ways—a creepy ad here, an uncommonly warm November there—but are so big, so abstract, so everywhere that they’re impossible for any one person to really understand

Both are the result of a decades-long, very human addiction to consumption and convenience that has been made grotesque and extreme by the incentives and mechanisms of the internet, market consolidation, and economic stratification

Both have primarily been advanced by a small handful of very big companies that are invested in making their machinations unseeable to the naked eye.

Speed and convenience aren’t actually free; they never are. Free shipping isn’t free either. It just obscures the real price.

Next-day shipping comes with tremendous costs: for labor and logistics and transportation and storage; for the people who pack your stuff into those smiling boxes and for the people who deliver them; for the planes and trucks and vans that carry them; for the warehouses that store them; for the software ensuring that everything really does get to your door on time, for air-conditioning and gas and cardboard and steel. Amazon—Prime in particular—has done a superlative job of making all those costs, all those moving parts, all those externalities invisible to the consumer.

The pandemic drove up demand for Amazon, and for labor: Last year, company profits shot up 70 percent, Bezos’s personal wealth grew by $70 billion, and 1,400 people a day joined the company’s workforce.

Amazon is so big that every sector of our economy has bent to respond to the new way of consuming that it invented. Prime isn’t just bad for Amazon’s workers—it’s bad for Target’s, and Walmart’s. It’s bad for the people behind the counter at your neighborhood hardware store and bookstore, if your neighborhood still has a hardware store and a bookstore. Amazon has accustomed shoppers to a pace and manner of buying that depends on a miracle of precision logistics even when it’s managed by one of the biggest companies on Earth. For the smaller guys, it’s downright impossible.

Amazon’s revenue from subscriptions alone—mostly Prime—was $25.2 billion, which is a 31 percent increase from the previous year

Just as abstaining from flying for moral reasons won’t stop sea-level rise, one person canceling Prime won’t do much of anything to a multinational corporation’s bottom line. “It’s statistically insignificant to Amazon. They’ll never feel it,” Caine told me. But, he said, “the small businesses in your neighborhood will absolutely feel the addition of a new customer. Individual choices do make a big difference to them.”

Whelan teaches a class at UW called Consuming Happiness, and she is fond of giving her students the adage that you can buy happiness—“if you spend your money in keeping with your values: spending prosocially, on experiences. Tons of research shows us this.”

Also on Friday, N.A.R.’s chief legal officer, Katie Johnson, sent an internal message to staff that clarified the group’s own interpretation of the rules for agent commissions. In that message, which was obtained by The New York Times, she said that while N.A.R.’s policy does require listing agents to offer compensation to a buyer’s broker, that offer can be $0.

Agents who are members of N.A.R. must follow the organization’s policies when buying, selling and listing homes, including the one that led to what home sellers in the lawsuits described as a violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act by inflating seller costs.

N.A.R. has said it has no intention of joining Anywhere and Re/Max in a settlement, and instead will head to federal court on Oct. 16 in Kansas City

The departures from N.A.R. come just a few days after Redfin, the Seattle-based online real estate broker, announced it would require many of its own agents to sever their ties with the organization.

“The trial and the sexual harassment are inextricably linked because they expose flaws within N.A.R. Anyone in real estate knows, a house is only as strong as its foundation. The house of N.A.R., after years of neglect, had too many cracks and now those cracks have been exposed,” he said in an interview. “The only way to save it is to rebuild it from the ground up.”

“N.A.R. is bloated, and its staff is arrogant. And at the same time, its membership is trying to figure out if they can function without N.A.R., and we’re defending whether or not our business model works for the average consumer.”

the decreasing importance of the printed word, over the past decades, in favour of visual and hyper-concise forms of media, from TV to TikTok. Televised debates require fast reaction times, whereas scientists are used to studying issues at length and only talking about them after thinking.

a successful visual performance is not just about being correct but evoking sympathy in the viewer – about performing. This doesn’t always come easy to scientists.

Whereas once it was thought that the future would necessarily be better than the present, faith in progress – in the magnificent and progressive fortunes of humans – has been eroded

These episodes made me experience first-hand a phenomenon that I was becoming increasingly familiar with: the vanishing of confidence in science. It seems almost a paradox: as our societies become more and more dependent on advanced technology based on scientific discoveries, people are becoming more and more suspicious of scientists.

In a nutshell, scientists are thought to be part of the elite and, therefore, not trustworthy. And the increasing interest by a fraction of scientists in patenting knowledge and making individual financial gains from discoveries reinforces this identification with the elite

a fundamental reality: science makes fair predictions that become reliable after the gradual formation of a scientific consensus. The construction of consensus is the process that makes the real difference – it involves the whole scientific community and that cannot be manipulated.

this lack of trust can have disastrous effects: if citizens do not trust science, we will not be able to fight global warming, infectious diseases, poverty and hunger, and the depletion of the planet’s natural resources.

A great coordinated effort is needed, and this will only be possible if there is a full understanding of the dramatic nature of the problem

A part of the human and financial resources devoted to the advancement of science must be used to discuss with citizens, through education and media and outreach programmes, what science really is: the most reliable and honest tool for understanding the world and predicting the future.

It is also important that we scientists talk about not just our successes, but our mistakes, doubts and hesitations. Often there is no trace, in the public scientific discourse, of the toil of the scientific process and the doubts that accompany it.

In the late 1990s, the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas interviewed 162 low-income single mothers in Camden, N.J., and Philadelphia to understand why they had children without being married. “Money is seldom the primary reason” why mothers say they are no longer with their children’s fathers. Instead, mothers point to “far more serious” offenses: “It is the drug and alcohol abuse, the criminal behavior and consequent incarceration, the repeated infidelity, and the patterns of intimate violence that are the villains looming largest in poor mothers’ accounts of relational failure.”

But it doesn’t take behavior this harmful to discourage marriage; often, simple compatibility or constancy can be elusive.

Ms. Camino, for her part, has dabbled in dating since her partner left, but hasn’t yet met anyone who shares her values, someone who’s funny and — she hesitates to use the word “feminist” — but a man who won’t just roll his eyes and say something about being on her period whenever she voices an opinion.

“There are women that are just out here trying, and the men aren’t ready,” she told me. “They don’t care, most of them.” Who, exactly, is Ms. Camino supposed to marry?

For as long as people have been promoting marriage, they have also been observing that a good man is hard to find

what was once dismissed as the complaint of “picky” women is now supported by a raft of data

The same pundits plugging marriage also bemoan the crisis among men and boys, what has come to be known as “male drift” — men turning away from college, dropping out of the work force, or failing to look after their health.

even this nod ignores the qualitative aspect of the dating experience — the part that’s hard to cover in surveys, or address with policy.

a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who recently surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating and relationships, found that nearly half of college-educated women said they were single because they had trouble finding someone who meets their expectations, versus one-third of men.

For a variety of reasons — mixed messages from the broader culture about toughness and vulnerability, the activity-oriented nature of male friendships — it seems that by the time men begin dating, they are relatively “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available,” he said.

Navigating interpersonal relationships in a time of evolving gender norms and expectations “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack, or they don’t have the experience,

He had recently read about a high school creative writing assignment in which boys and girls were asked to imagine a day from the perspective of the opposite sex. While girls wrote detailed essays showing they had already spent significant time thinking about the subject, many boys simply refused to do the exercise, or did so resentfully

Mr. Cox likened that to heterosexual relationships today: “The girls do extra and the boys do little or nothing.”

educated women freeze their eggs because they’re unable to find a suitable male partner: Ms. Inhorn points to a large gap in the number of college-educated women versus college-educated men during their reproductive years — on the order of several million.

Ms. Inhorn’s book goes beyond these quantitative mismatches to document the qualitative experience of women who are actively searching for partners — the frustration, hurt and disappointment.

“Almost without exception,” she writes, “women in this study were ‘trying hard’ to find a loving partner,” mostly through dating sites and apps. Women in their late 30s reported “online ageism,” others described removing their Ph.D from their profiles so as not to intimidate potential dates; still others found that men were often commitment-averse.

Ms. Inhorn compiled a sort of taxonomy of cads, such as the “Alpha males” who “want to be challenged by work, not by their partners” or the “Polyamorous men” who claim “that their multiple attachments to women are all ‘committed.’” Her breakdown — table 1.1 in the book — reads like a rigorous academic version of all the complaints you’ve ever heard from your single female friends.

to truly address the decline in heterosexual marriage, we must attend to the details — to acknowledge the qualitative aspects of relationship formation

in particular, we should listen to the experiences of women who are attempting to find partners. We should care about the interior lives, not just the educational attainment or the employment status, of the men who could be those partners.

It requires taking the stories of single women seriously, and not treating them as punchlines — something for which there is little historical precedent, but which a handful of scholars are slowly beginning to do.

I saw these gym protests as a similar idea: my body is my temple. What I’m doing here is my protection; I’m keeping myself strong. I’m building up my immune system, my body is my force field against whatever is coming.

The parts of listening to Bannon that were most destabilizing were when I heard him saying things that sounded like the left, and when I heard him saying things that I agreed with in part – not in whole, but where I saw that kernel of truth and I realized how effective it was going to be in the mix and match with what I see as a fascist project that he’s engaged in.

I expect Steve Bannon to be monstrous on immigration, on gender. I expect that from him. It’s when he’s talking about corporate control of the media and saying things that are true about big tech that I start to get queasy and ask, wait a minute, why is he saying more about this than a lot of people on the liberal side of the spectrum? Have we ceded this territory?

This point seems central. The mirror world isn’t devoid of truth. Instead, it’s destabilizing because elements of truth are there, but warped.

Absolutely. And the destabilizing piece is not simply that they’re saying something true. It’s when you realize people [on the left] have stopped saying that true thing. That’s when you realize that it has power.

If we were building multiracial, intergenerational social movements that were really rooted in confronting corporate power, then they could say whatever they want and it wouldn’t really bother me. But we’re talking about it less, and the more [conspiracists] talk about it, the more reticent we become. So it’s a dialectic that makes me queasy.

Ehrenreich has a completely different theory, which I think is much more plausible, which is this is the 1980s: people are in the wreckage of the failures of these huge social movements in the ‘60s and ‘70s. There had been this glimpse of collective power that a lot of people really thought was going to change the world, and suddenly they’re living through Thatcherism and Reaganism. And there is this turn towards the self, towards the body as the site of control.

Kneeling before the temple of the body also has fascist roots. Historically, certain ideals of human fitness were a way to communicate the value of citizens.Whenever you are working within a system of a hierarchy of humans and bodies, then you’re in fascism territory. I think that it made perfect sense that Nazis were body obsessives who fetishized the natural and the hyperfit form and genes.

There is a connection between certain kinds of new age ideas and health fads and the fascist project

After the second world war, a lot of people in the world of wellness ran in the opposite direction. But there are some ways in which they are natural affinities and they’re finding each other again

there is a way the quest for wellness and hyper fitness becomes obsessive.

But the spread of misinformation across wellness culture was likely attributable to more complex factors, including the limits of conventional medicine and the areas of health that are understudied or dismissed.

Ehrenreich is trying to understand why this exploded in the 1980s. The whole aerobics craze, the whole jogging craze. You know, how does somebody like Jerry Rubin, a member of the Yippies, turn into a health evangelist in the 1980s?

in lots of ways this is what Naomi Wolf was trying to understand in the Beauty Myth. Why was there so much more of a focus in the 1980s on personal appearance? She makes the case that beauty became a third shift for women: there was the work shift, there was the home shift, and on top of that, women were now also expected to look like professional beauties.

Barbara Ehrenreich wrote about this really beautifully in her book about wellness culture, where she talks about the silence of the gyms. This is a collective space, right? Why aren’t people chitchatting? But often gyms are very silent and she speculates that maybe it’s because people are talking to someone, it’s just not the other people in the gym, it’s somebody in their head. They’re trying to tame their body into being another kind of body, a perfected body.

Then you have all of these entrepreneurial wellness figures who come in and say, individuals must take charge of their own bodies as their primary sites of influence, control and competitive edge.

the flip side of the idea that your competitive edge is your body is that the people who don’t have bodies as fit or strong as yours somehow did something wrong or are less deserving of access, less deserving even of life.

And that is unfortunately all too compatible with far-right notions of natural hierarchies, genetic superiority and disposable people.

We should be compassionate with ourselves in terms of why we look away. There are lots of ways of distracting oneself from unbearable realities. Conspiracy theories are a kind of distraction. So is hyper fitness, this turn towards the self.

The compassion comes in where we acknowledge that there’s a reason why it is so hard to look at the reality of what has been unveiled by these overlapping crises – you could call it a polycrisis: of the pandemic, climate change, massive racial and economic inequality, realizing that your country was founded on a lie, that the national narratives that you grew up on left out huge parts in the story.

All of this is hard to bear.

Because we live in a hyper-individualist culture, we try to bear it on our own and we should not be surprised that we’re cracking under the weight of that, because we can’t bear it alone.

the weight of our historical moment. We really are alive on the knife’s edge of whether or not this earth is going to be habitable for our species. That is not something that we can handle just on our own.

So we need to reach towards each other. That’s really tricky work. It’s a lot easier to come together and agree on things that are not working and things that are bad than it is to come together and develop a horizon of how things could be better.

Things could be beautiful, things could be livable. There could be a world where everyone belongs. But I don’t think we can bear the reality of our moment unless we can imagine something else.

Part of the answer, to be fair, is luck. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine caused a major energy shock in Europe, which had come to rely on imports of Russian natural gas. America, which exports gas, was much less affected.

What about inflation? When you use comparable measures, America also has the lowest inflation rate among major economies.

It’s true that one recent poll found that a majority of Americans and 60 percent of Republicans say that unemployment is near a 50-year high. But it’s actually near its lowest level since the 1960s.

A second, probably more important factor was that the United States pursued aggressively expansionary fiscal policy

Many economists were extremely critical, warning that this spending would fuel inflation, which it probably did for a while. But inflation has subsided, while “Big Fiscal” helped the economy get to full employment — arguably the first time we’ve had truly full employment in decades.

A strong job market may in turn have had major long-term benefits, by drawing previously marginalized Americans into the work force.

the percentage of U.S. adults in their prime working years participating in the labor force is now at its highest level in 20 years. One number I find especially striking is labor force participation by Americans with a disability, which has soared.

One last thing: When Covid struck, all advanced countries took strong measures to limit economic hardship, but they took different approaches. European governments generally paid employers to keep workers on their payrolls, even if they were temporarily idle. America, for the most part, let layoffs happen but protected workers with expanded unemployment benefits.

There was a case for each approach. Europe’s approach helped keep workers connected to their old jobs; the U.S. approach created more flexibility, making it easier for workers to move to different jobs if the post-Covid economy turned out to look quite different from the economy before the pandemic.

is clear: We have been remarkably successful, even if nobody will believe it.

Thrall was asked about his depictions of Israelis, and whether he had qualms about “humanizing the occupation.”

I don’t like the fact that the statement Nguyen signed gestured only vaguely at Hamas’s slaughter of Israeli civilians. In calling off his Friday evening appearance, 92NY, a Jewish organization, was playing by rules much of the left established, privileging sensitivity to traumatized communities ahead of the robust exchange of ideas.

Thrall is not alone; in recent weeks several literary and cultural events by pro-Palestinian speakers or groups have been either scrapped or relocated.

if someone as evenhanded as Thrall now finds his talks being dropped, we’re in an especially repressive period. And in a time of war, particularly a war shrouded in fiercely competing narratives, free speech is more important than ever.

“I was very glad to be asked that question,” Thrall told me. “Because that was absolutely the ambition of the book, to depict real people” rather than villains and saints.

And supporters of Israel are hardly alone in creating a censorious atmosphere; particularly on college campuses, it is Zionists who feel silenced and intimidated

Nevertheless, a commitment to free speech, like a commitment to human rights, shouldn’t depend on others reciprocating; such commitments are worth trying to maintain even in the face of unfairness

The way that people tend to argue today, particularly online, makes things worse.

hilosophers and social scientists have long pondered the question of why people hold different beliefs and values

odds are that neither camp is having any effect on the other; on the contrary, the attacks make opponents dig in deeper.

If you want a chance at changing minds, you need a new strategy: Stop using your values as a weapon, and start offering them as a gift.

You wouldn’t blame anyone involved for feeling as if they’re under fire, and no one is likely to change their mind when they’re being attacked.

even when two groups agree on a moral foundation, they can radically disagree on how it should be expressed

Extensive survey-based research has revealed that almost everyone shares at least two common values: Harming others without cause is bad, and fairness is good. Other moral values are less widely shared

political conservatives tend to value loyalty to a group, respect for authority, and purity—typically in a bodily sense, in terms of sexuality—more than liberals do.

Sometimes conflict arises because one group holds a moral foundation that the other simply doesn’t feel strongly about

One of the most compelling explanations comes from Moral Foundations Theory, which has been popularized by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at NYU. This theory proposes that humans share a common set of “intuitive ethics,” on top of which we build different narratives and institutions—and therefore beliefs—that vary by culture, community, and even person.

When people fail to live up to your moral values (or your expression of them), it is easy to conclude that they are immoral people.

Further, if you are deeply attached to your values, this difference can feel like a threat to your identity, leading you to lash out, which won’t convince anyone who disagrees with you.

research shows that if you insult someone in a disagreement, the odds are that they will harden their position against yours, a phenomenon called the boomerang effect.

3. Listen more.

effective missionaries present their beliefs as a gift. And sharing a gift is a joyful act, even if not everyone wants it.

so it is with our values. If we want any chance at persuasion, we must offer them happily. A weapon is an ugly thing, designed to frighten and coerce

A gift is something we believe to be good for the recipient, who, we hope, may accept it voluntarily, and do so with gratitude. That requires that we present it with love, not insults and hatred.

1. Don’t “other” others.

Go out of your way to welcome those who disagree with you as valued voices, worthy of respect and attention. There is no “them,” only “us.”

2. Don’t take rejection personally.

just as you are not your car or your house, you are not your beliefs. Unless someone says, “I hate you because of your views,” a repudiation is personal only if you make it so

he solution to this problem requires a change in the way we see and present our own values

when it comes to changing someone’s mind, listening is more powerful than talking. They conducted experiments that compared polarizing arguments with a nonjudgmental exchange of views accompanied by deep listening. The former had no effect on viewpoints, whereas the latter reliably lowered exclusionary opinions.

when possible, listening and asking sensitive questions almost always has a more beneficial effect than talking.

howing others that you can be generous with them regardless of their values can help weaken their belief attachment, and thus make them more likely to consider your point of view

for your values to truly be a gift, you must weaken your own belief attachment first

we should all promise to ourselves, “I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.”

if I truly have the good of the world at heart, then I must not fall prey to the conceit of perfect knowledge, and must be willing to entertain new and better ways to serve my ultimate goal: creating a happier world

generosity and openness have a bigger chance of making the world better in the long run.

The largest declines in news attention over this period were found among working-age and pre-retirement Americans—for example, more than six in ten Americans ages 50-64 paid close attention to the news in 2016 compared to less than half in 2022.

around two-thirds of those ages 65 or older say they follow the news “all or most of the time” (down from a high of 81 percent in 2018) compared to less than one-fifth of those ages 18 to 29.

One-third of U.S. adults in 2022 said they follow the news at least “some of the time” while just under three in ten said they pay attention to the news “only now and then” or “hardly at all”.

it occurs in conjunction with shifts in media consumption towards digital devices, overall declining trust in the media and other institutions, and “high levels of news fatigue” across demographic groups.

It’s easier for people to do something else with their time and find more enjoyable distractions that don’t involve keeping up with the latest implosion in the House of Representatives, fights between dumb politicians, or what new conflict is flaring up in another part of the world.

Even as fewer people than ever are paying close attention to what is actually going on in America and the world, more and more Americans (and politicians) are piping off routinely—online, in the workplace, and in family gatherings—with hard-and-fast opinions about what it all means.

the net result is a more divisive and less informed citizenry coupled with a clear inability of major institutions and political parties in America to do anything cooperative on common economic, security, and social problems.

In a pluralistic society like ours—with important rights to freedom of speech and individual beliefs—it is not the job of government or others to coerce people into paying more or closer attention to what is going on.

But media companies, government bodies, and philanthropists could certainly put more money and effort into creating trustworthy news platforms for reporting important facts, presenting neutral analyses, exploring successes and failures in public policy, and hosting civil discussions about the important issues shaping the country.

He argues that the tools of social media are just too sharp for young minds. On digital platforms teens parade themselves, often to an audience of strangers, and this is leading to addiction, paranoia and despair

For girls, the effect is especially acute. ‘What we’re seeing is a very sharp, sudden change in girls’ mental health all around the Anglosphere and the Nordic countries,’ he says. A big change was evident from 2013, when physical friendship groups started to be supplanted by smartphones and online chat. ‘But you cannot grow up in networks. You have to grow up in communities.’

The first is that they are fragile and can be harmed by speech and words.

But if you’re a secular liberal girl, you’re probably more than twice as likely to have a mental health problem.’

a University of Michigan survey into ‘self-derogation’ – i.e., how likely teenagers are to say they are ‘no good’ or ‘can’t do anything right’. Figures had been stable for years but started rising sharply ten years ago – except for among boys who identified as conservative and said that religion was important to them.

irls simply use social media more. But Professor Haidt also thinks they are more likely to buy into what he calls the ‘three great untruths’ of social media

boys who have religion in their lives seem to be less susceptible. ‘If you’re a kid who’s a religious conservative, on average, your mental health is not really much worse than it was ten years ago

Next, that their emotions, and especially their anxieties, are reliable guides to reality.

And finally, that society is one big battle between victims and oppressors. All this, he says, is the subtext to social media discourse.

‘It’s what I’ve been calling the phone-based child,’

So we had playdates in childhood, up until around 2010.’ In Britain, he says, the number of children who went on real-life playdates then fell sharply.

Social media is a bit of a misnomer, he says. It’s no longer about connecting people, but ‘performing on a platform’. Perhaps this is fine for grown-ups, but not for children, ‘where they can say things in public, including to strangers, and then be publicly shamed by potentially millions of people

Children should not be on social networks. They should be playing in person. Social media platforms should never be accessed by children until they’re 18. It’s just insane that we let kids do these things.’

I ask if he thinks all platforms are equally dangerous

if you get your news from social media (which many people do – in the UK, Instagram has overtaken all newspapers as a news source), this can change your view of the world, especially as the algorithms tend to promote the most provocative views.

‘TikTok is probably the worst for their intellectual development. I think it literally reduces their ability to focus on anything while stuffing them with little bits of stuff that was selected by an algorithm for emotional arousal. Not for truth.’

If asked to choose whether they side more with Israel or Hamas, ‘the great majority of Americans side with Israel, except for Gen Z, which is split 50-50’,

‘There was a Twitter thread recently showing how if you look at what people are saying on TikTok, you can understand why

TikTok and Twitter are incredibly dangerous for our democracy. I’d say they’re incompatible with the kind of liberal democracy that we’ve developed over the last few hundred years.’

Might it just be the case, I ask, that there’s less of a stigma around mental health now, so teenagers are far more likely to admit that they have problems?

why is it, then, that right around 2013 all these girls suddenly start checking into psychiatric inpatient units? Or suicide – they’re making many more suicide attempts. The level of self-harm goes up by 200 or 300 per cent, especially for the younger girls aged ten to 14

we see very much the same curves, at the same time, for behaviour. Suicide, certainly, is not a self-report variable. This is real. This is the biggest mental health crisis in all of known history for kids.’

he increased number of suicides since 2010 is so large that I suspect this is among the largest public health threats to children since the major diseases were wiped out

His third rule: no phones in schools.

What should parents do? They know that if they try to remove their teenager’s smartphone, their child will accuse them of destroying his or her social life. ‘That’s a perfect statement of what we call a collective action problem,’

‘Any one person doing the right thing is in big trouble. But why do we ever let our kids on social media? It’s only down to the dynamic you just said.’ New norms are needed, he says. And his book will suggest four.

Rule one, he says: no smartphones before the age of 14.

‘Give them a flip phone. Millennials had flip phones. They texted each other

Rule two: no social media before 16

In Britain, suicide rates started rising in 2014, up about 20 per cent for boys (to 420 a year) and 60 per cent for girls (to 160 a year).

finally: more unsupervised play. ‘Both of our countries freaked out in the 1990s, locked up our kids because we lost trust in each other. We thought everyone was a child molester or a rapist.’ Children and teens could do with six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents, he argues. Keeping them inside risks more harm than the outside world would pose.

The transformation of social media into mass media is largely because the rise of TikTok has demonstrated to every social-media company on the planet that people still really like things that can re-create the experience of TV

Advertisers also like things that function like TV, of course—after all, people are never more suggestible than when lulled into a sort of anesthetized mindlessness.

In this future, people who are good at making content with high production values will thrive, as audiences and tech company algorithms gravitate toward more professional content.

On these formerly-social platforms, whether content is coming from creators with better equipment and more skills, or Hollywood studios testing the waters, hardly matters. In the end, it will all look remarkably similar to the consumer.

It will look

like flipping through cable channels does, only our thumb on the remote has been replaced by our thumb on the screen of our phone, swiping from one TikTok, YouTube Short, or Instagram Reel to the next.

A telling indicator is the rise of a new kind of entertainment professional—the “creator.”

A creator is anyone who records or makes something that can go viral on the internet

TikTok is now more popular than Netflix among consumers younger than 35,

While YouTube and TikTok have always been about video, just about every other social-media platform that wants to keep people engaged is emphasizing it more than ever, so that’s what creators have to make,

His agency gets involved with creators and musicians at the earliest stages of their careers, helping them plan content, update their style, understand what the algorithms of different platforms demand, and connecting them with potentially lucrative brand deals

. Even more telling: In first place is YouTube, the original online TV analog.

Where attention flows, money—and content—must also. In 2023 brands will spend an estimated $6 billion on marketing through influencers—a subspecies of creators

Globally, the total addressable market for this kind of marketing is currently $250 billion

Then there is a new generation of shows that are going straight to TikTok, bypassing even streaming services

In the wake of the success of YouTube and TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and even LinkedIn are all pushing more and more content made by professionals into our feeds,

In order to quantify how TikTok has mastered the art of discerning our interests and feeding us the most compelling possible content, Faltesek, of Oregon State University, conducted a two-year project to study exactly what kind of content TikTok pushes

With a team of students, he created dozens of fresh TikTok user accounts that didn’t like or interact with content in any way—they just let the algorithm play one video after another.

At the end of this exhaustive process of gathering data on TikTok’s algorithm, the conclusion became obvious, says Faltesek. “TikTok is television. It flips channels like TV, it provides a flow like TV.”

By this logic, Instagram’s move to copy TikTok, which is in turn encroaching on the turf of YouTube by allowing longer videos, and the increasing dominance of professional content on all three, means they’re all turning into TV. Even Threads, the new offering from Facebook parent company Meta, is fast becoming a broadcast medium for news, as Twitter was before it.

In every case, the structure of social networks has become one in which a handful of accounts create most of the content that others see, and the role of everyone else on the network is, primarily, to amplify and consume that content,

Some, like Magana, believe we’ll eventually see an ever more complete blending of what were once “social” platforms with the traditional television networks and even film studios.  

aren’t convinced they’ll eat the rest of the entertainment industry. “It’s hard to say this kind of short-form video will be the only kind of TV,” she reflects. “A long time ago, the internet became the new thing, but we still have the other forms on television, and scripted streaming shows. It’s almost like this is just another avenue for that—of watching shows and movies on your phone.”

Digital art: The latest fad in crypto is a bitcoin “ordinal,” digital art—or anything else—virtually inscribed on a fraction of a bitcoin in the digital ledger known as the blockchain.

The sudden demand supports bitcoin’s value, in the same way that shopping in bitcoin would. I don’t understand why anyone would pay a cent, let alone real money, to inscribe art in the bitcoin blockchain, but hey, whatever floats your boat. 

The rise in small bitcoin transactions also shows just how useless it is as a currency, and why it’s nonsensical to think bitcoin could ever be used as real money. The median fee leapt to more than $5 over the past week, even as transaction sizes plunged, an insane cost to pay for something invented as a payment method.

Crime: I was tempted a few years ago by the idea that the value of crypto could be underpinned by genuine transactions that need to avoid the financial system: buying illegal drugs; money laundering; avoiding sanctions; anonymous (but legal) pornography purchases; terrorist finance; and ransomware. 

Digital gold: When it became clear that bitcoin was useless as a currency, its backers switched to claiming that it is a store of value, with its maximum issuance offering protection against the money-printing tendencies of the Federal Reserve. The argument was tested to destruction over the past two years. Inflation was last below the Fed’s 2% target in February 2021, when one bitcoin cost close to $50,000. By the time inflation peaked in June last year the price had collapsed to $20,000, the opposite of what it should have done.

There was a time when savers in countries with dodgy currencies and bad governments would buy bitcoin or other crypto to escape devaluation and avoid capital controls. But the rise of stablecoins allows these savers to buy digital dollars without the pain of trying to open offshore bank accounts, so they have no need for other cryptocurrencies

Gambling: Crypto offers a store of volatility more than a store of value. Its volatility makes it an excellent way to bet, and the pretense that it is an investment asset gives speculators cover; it sounds much better to say you are a crypto trader than that you just bet $100,000 at the track.

Basing the value of an asset on speculation is risky, because the value depends on everyone else betting that it has value. But so long as the merry-go-round continues, it looks like it has value, and decentralized finance, or DeFi, provides the infrastructure for speculation in the language of Wall Street.

Bitcoin’s moves over the past three years have been much closer to the S&P 500 than to gold or inflation. But stocks are an investment in real assets that pay dividends, while bitcoin produces nothing.

Lots of that was going on, and Binance has paid the price for helping. Bitcoin isn’t a particularly good way to hide from the cops, anyway, as repeated police busts have demonstrated. Crypto has to clean up its act, so basing its value on illegal transactions no longer makes sense.

Bitcoin has failed to live up to its original promise of being cheap online cash, but crypto keeps on reinventing itself. It’s so technically satisfying that it must be the solution to something, but quite what remains a mystery.

“Write a five-paragraph essay on Virginia Woolf’s ‘To the Lighthouse.’” Too generic? Well, how about “Write a five-paragraph essay on the theme of loss in ‘To the Lighthouse’”? Too high-schoolish? “Add some bigger words, please.” The product might not be ready to turn in the moment it is born, fully formed, from ChatGPT’s head. But with enough tweaking — either by the student or by the machine at the student’s demand — chances are the output can muster at least a passing grade.

Which of these uses are okay? Which aren’t? The harnessing of an AI tool to create an annotated bibliography likely doesn’t rankle even librarians the way relying on that same tool to draft a reflection on Virginia Woolf offends the professor of the modern novel. Why? Because that kind of contemplation goes closer to the heart of what education is really about.

the core of the question colleges now face. They can’t really stop students from using AI in class. They might not be able to notice students have done so at all, and when they do think they’ve noticed they’ll be acting only on suspicion. But maybe teachers can control the ways in which students use AI in class.

Figuring out exactly what ways those ought to be requires educators to determine what they care about in essays — what they are desperate to hear. The purpose of these papers is for students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, from hard facts to compositional know-how, and for teachers to assess how their pupils are progressing. The answer to what teachers want to get from students in their written work depends on what they want to give to students.

What’s most important to Ole Miss faculty members is that students use these tools with integrity. If the university doesn’t have a campuswide AI honor code, and so far it doesn’t, individual classes should. And no matter whether professors permit all applications of AI, as some teachers have tried, or only the narrowest, students should have to disclose just how much help they had from robots.

The next concern is that students should use AI in a manner that improves not only their writing but also their thinking — in short, in a manner that enhances learning rather than bypasses the need to learn at all.

This simple principle makes for complicated practice. Certainly, no one is going to learn anything by letting AI write an essay in its entirety. What about letting AI brainstorm an idea, on the other hand, or write an outline, or gin up a counter-argument? Lyndsey Cook, a senior at Ole Miss planning a career in nursing, finds the brainstorming especially helpful: She’ll ask ChatGPT or another tool to identify the themes in a piece of literature, and then she’ll go back and look for them herself.

These shortcuts, on the one hand, might interfere with students’ learning to brainstorm, outline or see the other side of things on their own

But — here comes a human-generated counterargument — they may also aid students in surmounting obstacles in their composition that otherwise would have stopped them short. That’s particularly true of kids whose high schools didn’t send them to college already equipped with these capabilities.

Allow AI to boost you over these early hurdles, and suddenly the opportunity for deeper learning — the opportunity to really write — will open up. That’s how Caleb Jackson, the part-time student for whom Perplexity has been such a boon, sees it: His professor, he says , wanted them to “get away from the high-school paper and go further, to write something larger like a thesis.”

maybe, as one young Ole Miss faculty member put it to me, this risks “losing the value of the struggle.” That, she says, is what she is scared will go away.

All this invites the most important question there is: What is learning for?

Learning, in college, can be instrumental. According to this view, the aim of teaching is to prepare students to live in the real world, so all that really matters is whether they have the chops to field jobs that feed themselves and their families. Perhaps knowing how to use AI to do any given task for you, then, is one of the most valuable skills out there — the same way it pays to be quick with a calculator.

If you accept this line of argument, however, there are still drawbacks to robotic crutches. Some level of critical thinking is necessary to function as an adult, and if AI stymies its development even the instrumental aim of education is thwarted. The same goes for that “value of the struggle.” The real world is full of adversity, much of which the largest language model can’t tell you how to overcome.

more compelling is the idea, probably shared by most college professors, that learning isn’t only instrumental after all — that it has intrinsic value and that it is the end rather than merely a means to one.

Every step along the way that is skipped, the shorter the journey becomes, the less we will take in as we travel.

This glummest of outlooks suggests that AI will stunt personal growth even if it doesn’t harm professional prospects.

While that doesn’t mean it’s wise to prohibit every little application of the technology in class, it probably does mean discouraging those most closely related to critical thinking.

One approach is to alter standards for grading, so that the things the machines are worst at are also the things that earn the best marks: originality, say, or depth of feeling, or so-called metacognition — the process of thinking about one’s own thinking or one’s own learning.

Hopefully, these things are also the most valuable because they are what make us human.

Caleb Jackson only wants AI to help him write his papers — not to write them for him. “If ChatGPT will get you an A, and you yourself might get a C, it’s like, ‘Well, I earned that C.’” He pauses. “That might sound crazy.”

Dominic Tovar agrees. Let AI take charge of everything, and, “They’re not so much tools at that point. They’re just replacing you.”

Lyndsey Cook, too, believes that even if these systems could reliably find the answers to the most vexing research problems, “it would take away from research itself” — because scientific inquiry is valuable for its own sake. “To have AI say, ‘Hey, this is the answer …’” she trails off, sounding dispirited.

Claire Mischker, lecturer of composition and director of the Ole Miss graduate writing center, asked her students at the end of last semester to turn in short reflections on their experience in her class. She received submissions that she was near certain were produced by ChatGPT — “that,” she says as sarcastically as she does mournfully, “felt really good.

The central theme of the course was empathy.

The videos promoted narratives that Chinese technology was superior to America’s, that the United States was doomed to economic collapse, and that China and Russia were responsible geopolitical players. Some of the clips fawned over Chinese companies like Huawei and denigrated American companies like Apple.

Content from at least 30 channels in the network drew nearly 120 million views and 730,000 subscribers since last year, along with occasional ads from Western companies

Disinformation — such as the false claim that some Southeast Asian nations had adopted the Chinese yuan as their own currency — was common. The videos were often able to quickly react to current events

he coordinated campaign might be “one of the most successful influence operations related to China ever witnessed on social media.”

Historically, its influence operations have focused on defending the Communist Party government and its policies on issues like the persecution of Uyghurs or the fate of Taiwan

Efforts to push pro-China messaging have proliferated in recent years, but have featured largely low-quality content that attracted limited engagement or failed to sustain meaningful audiences

“This campaign actually leverages artificial intelligence, which gives it the ability to create persuasive threat content at scale at a very limited cost compared to previous campaigns we’ve seen,”

YouTube said in a statement that its teams work around the clock to protect its community, adding that “we have invested heavily in robust systems to proactively detect coordinated influence operations.” The company said it welcomed research efforts and that it had shut down several of the channels mentioned in the report for violating the platform’s policies.

China began targeting the United States more directly amid the mass pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and continuing with the Covid-19 pandemic, echoing longstanding Russian efforts to discredit American leadership and influence at home and aboard.

Over the summer, researchers at Microsoft and other companies unearthed evidence of inauthentic accounts that China employed to falsely accuse the United States of using energy weapons to ignite the deadly wildfires in Hawaii in August.

Meta announced last month that it removed 4,789 Facebook accounts from China that were impersonating Americans to debate political issues, warning that the campaign appeared to be laying the groundwork for interference in the 2024 presidential elections.

It was the fifth network with ties to China that Meta had detected this year, the most of any other country.

The advent of artificial technology seems to have drawn special interest from Beijing. Ms. Keast of the Australian institute said that disinformation peddlers were increasingly using easily accessible video editing and A.I. programs to create large volumes of convincing content.

She said that the network of pro-China YouTube channels most likely fed English-language scripts into readily available online text-to-video software or other programs that require no technical expertise and can produce clips within minutes. Such programs often allow users to select A.I.-generated voice narration and customize the gender, accent and tone of voice.

In 39 of the videos, Ms. Keast found at least 10 artificially generated avatars advertised by a British A.I. company

she also discovered what may be the first example in an influence operation of a digital avatar created by a Chinese company — a woman in a red dress named Yanni.

The scale of the pro-China network is probably even larger, according to the report. Similar channels appeared to target Indonesian and French people. Three separate channels posted videos about chip production that used similar thumbnail images and the same title translated into English, French and Spanish.

Before the rise of Google, internet companies stuffed their data centers with increasingly powerful and expensive computer servers, as they struggled to reach more and more people. Each server delivered the website to a relatively small group of people. And if the server died, those people were out of luck.

Dr. Barroso realized that the best way to distribute a wildly popular website like Google was to break it into tiny pieces and spread them evenly across an array of servers. Rather than each server delivering the site to a small group of people, the entire data center delivered the site to its entire audience.

“In other words, we must treat the data center itself as one massive warehouse-scale computer.”

Widespread outages became a rarity, especially as Dr. Barroso and his team expanded these ideas across multiple data centers. Eventually, Google’s entire global network of data centers behaved as a single machine.

By the mid-1990s, he was working as a researcher in a San Francisco Bay Area lab operated by the Digital Equipment Corporation, one of the computer giants of the day.

There, he helped create multi-core computer chips — microprocessors made of many chips working in tandem. A more efficient way of running computer software, such chips are now a vital part of almost any new computer.

At first, Dr. Barroso worked on software. But as Dr. Hölzle realized that Google would also need to build its own hardware, he tapped Dr. Barroso to lead the effort. Over the next decade, as it pursued his warehouse-size computer, Google built its own servers, data storage equipment and networking hardware.

For years, this work was among Google’s most closely guarded secrets. The company saw it as a competitive advantage. But by the 2010s, companies like Amazon and Facebook were following the example set by Dr. Barroso and his team. Soon, the world’s leading computer makers were building and selling the same kind of low-cost hardware, allowing any internet company to build an online empire the way Google had.

Think about the lives lost.Think about the teachers.Think about the children.They were family, friends, and loved ones.And a gun killed them all.It was only last week that we posted a similar prompt in response to the racist massacre in Buffalo. Like all of our student forums, this one will be moderated.

Students might find their own ways to respond, perhaps through writing or art. It may also be helpful to look at how victims of other tragedies have been memorialized, in ways big and small. For example: The 26 playgrounds built to remember the children of Sandy Hook; the memorial for the Oklahoma City bombing, with its “field of chairs,” including 19 smaller ones for the children who lost their lives; and the New York Times Portraits of Grief series, which profiled those lost in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Here are more examples, from the El Paso Times. In what ways can your students or school respond, individually or collectively?

What is it like to be a student in the shadow of this violence? How have repeated mass shootings shaped young people? We invite your students to reflect on these questions in this writing prompt, and post their answers to our forum if they would like to join a public conversation on the topic.To help students think about the issue from different angles, we invite them to read the article “A ‘Mass Shooting Generation’ Cries Out for Change,” which was published in 2018 following the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla. Then we ask questions such as:

The authors of the 2018 Times article described how the Parkland shooting moved students around the country to become more involved in activism. Do you think something similar will happen in the wake of the shooting in Uvalde, Texas? Why or why not? How do you think school shootings are shaping the generation of students who are in school right now?Invite your students to weigh in here.

Democrats moved quickly to clear the way for votes on legislation to strengthen background checks for gun purchasers. Republicans, even as they expressed horror about the shooting, did not signal that they would drop their longstanding opposition to gun safety measures. Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas pointed the blame at Uvalde’s lack of mental health care, even though the suspect had no record of problems.

Which efforts might be the most effective? Students might also take a look at the forum on guns we posted during the 2016 election as part of our Civil Conversation Challenge in which we invited teenagers to have productive, respectful conversations on several issues dividing Americans. We received more than 700 responses to the questions we posed about gun rights, the Second Amendment and more.

This article takes on three of the most prominent rumors that have spread via online platforms such as Twitter, Gab, 4chan and Reddit and explains why they are false. What rumors are your students seeing in their feeds, and what steps can they take to find out the truth? From double-checking via sites like Snopes to learning habits like lateral reading, this article (and related lesson plan) has suggestions.

While the town of Uvalde grapples with the aftermath of the shooting, community members, local leaders and organizations have mobilized. Two local funeral homes said in social media posts that they would not charge families of victims for their funeral services. Volunteers have lined up to give blood for the shooting victims.

Melissa Carrion, a professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies the rhetoric of health and medicine, spoke to 50 mothers who had refused one or more vaccines for their children for a study published in 2017.“Across the board, every single one of them gave some variation of the advice that a mother ‘should do her own research,’” she said in a phone interview. “It was this kind of worldview that was less about the result of the research than the individual process of doing it themselves.”

One of the enticing aspects of cryptocurrencies, which pose an alternative to traditional financial institutions, is that expertise is available to anyone who wants to claim it. There are people who’ve gotten rich, people who know a lot about blockchains and people who believe in the liberating power of digital currencies. There is some recent institutional interest. But nobody’s been around very long, which makes the idea of “researching” your way to prosperity feel more credible.

Cryptocurrency trading, in contrast to medicine, might represent DYOR in pure no-expert form. Virtually everyone is operating in a beginners’ bubble, whether they’re worried about it or not, betting with and against one another, in hopes of making money.

ere, so-called research materials are often limited to a white paper, marketing materials and testimonials, the “due diligence” posts of others, the reputations of a currency’s creators and the general sentiment of other possible buyers. Will they buy-in, too? Will we take this coin to the moon?In that way — the momentum of a group — crypto investing isn’t altogether distinct from how people have invested in the stock market for decades. Though here it is tinged with a rebellious, anti-authoritarian streak: We’re outsiders, in this together; we’re doing something sort of ridiculous, but also sort of cool. Though DYOR may be used to foster a sense of community, what it actually describes is participation in a market.

A year ago, Luna boosters (and a few skeptics) in online forums offered the same advice to gathered audiences of potential buyers reading their posts, looking for tips: just DYOR. Thousands invested in both Luna and TerraUSD. The price of Luna climbed from around $5 to over $100. After the crash, at least one Reddit user suggested that the situation highlighted the “limit” of DYOR; the coin’s price had fallen to nearly zero.

Covid deaths, though always concentrated in older people, have in 2022 skewed toward older people more than they did at any point since vaccines became widely available.

That swing in the pandemic has intensified pressure on the Biden administration to protect older Americans, with health officials in recent weeks encouraging everyone 50 and older to get a second booster and introducing new models of distributing antiviral pills.

But the mortality gap between older and younger people has grown: Middle-aged Americans, who suffered a large share of pandemic deaths last summer and fall, are now benefiting from new stores of immune protection in the population as Covid deaths once again cluster around older people.

among people 65 and older, 13 percent are unvaccinated, 3 percent have a single Moderna or Pfizer shot and another 14 percent are vaccinated but not boosted.

“The government wasn’t sure about the booster shot,” he said. “If they weren’t sure about it, and they’re the ones who put it out, why would I take it?” Mr. Thomas said Covid recently killed a former boss of his and hospitalized an older family friend.

“In 2021, you see the mortality impact of the pandemic shift younger,” said Ridhi Kashyap, a lead author of that study and a demographer at the University of Oxford.

That changed last summer and fall, during the Delta surge. Older people were getting vaccinated more quickly than other groups: By November, the vaccination rate in Americans 65 and older was roughly 20 percentage points higher than that of those in their 40s. And critically, those older Americans had received vaccines relatively recently, leaving them with strong levels of residual protection.

As a result, older people suffered from Covid at lower rates than they had been before vaccines became available. Among people 85 and older, the death rate last fall was roughly 75 percent lower than it had been in the winter of 2020, Dr. Stokes’s recent study found.

The rebalancing of Covid deaths was so pronounced that, among Americans 80 and older, overall deaths returned to prepandemic levels in 2021, according to a study posted online in February.

But scientists warned that many older Americans remained susceptible. To protect them, geriatricians called on nursing homes to organize in-home vaccinations or mandate additional shots.

For some people, even three vaccine doses appear to become less protective over time against Omicron-related hospital admissions.

During the Omicron wave, Covid death rates were once again dramatically higher for older Americans than younger ones, Dr. Stokes said. Older people also made up an overwhelming share of the excess deaths — the difference between the number of people who actually died and the number who would have been expected to die if the pandemic had never happened.

Long-ago Covid cases do not prevent future infections, but reinfected people are less likely to become seriously ill.

Eventually, her family had to arrange a trip to a pharmacy on their own for a second booster.“It just seems that now the onus is put completely on the individual,” she said. “It’s not like it’s made easy for you.”

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

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

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

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

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

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