History Readings

new documentary, Climate: The Movie, by the maverick filmmaker Martin Durkin, is becoming a phenomenon, though it’s received almost no publicity in the mainstream media. It rejects the idea that we’re in the midst of a ‘climate emergency’,

Climate: The Movie confronts this argument head on, not by disputing the 97 per cent figure, but by interviewing William Happer, a spry 84-year-old former physics professor at Princeton

One of the reasons it’s so hard to challenge the narrative about climate change is because it supposedly reflects the ‘settled’ scientific consensus. We’re told that 97 per cent of climate scientists agree that global warming – or ‘global boiling’, as it’s now called – is caused by humans burning fossil fuels and releasing CO2 into the atmosphere

In audio and video clips that have reached millions of viewers over the past month on TikTok, X, Instagram and YouTube, the führer’s AI-cloned voice quavers and crescendos as he delivers English-language versions of some of his most notorious addresses, including his 1939 Reichstag speech predicting the end of Jewish people in Europe. Some seeking to spread the practice of making Hitler videos have hosted online trainings.

Extremists are using artificial intelligence to reanimate Adolf Hitler online for a new generation, recasting the Nazi German leader who orchestrated the Holocaust as a “misunderstood” figure whose antisemitic and anti-immigrant messages are freshly resonant in politics today.

The posts, which make use of cheap and popular AI voice-cloning tools, have drawn praise in comments on X and TikTok, such as “I miss you uncle A,” “He was a hero,” and “Maybe he is NOT the villain.” On Telegram and the “dark web,” extremists brag that the AI-manipulated speeches offer an engaging and effortless way to repackage Hitler’s ideas to radicalize young people.

China’s leaders have been drip-feeding support into their ailing economy for three years. This week, they jacked up the dose.

A major injection of stimulus from the central bank—and promises of more government support from the Communist Party’s top decision-making body—mark the beginning of a more muscular approach from Beijing to righting the economy after months of hesitancy,

It electrified the markets, sparking a seventh straight day of gains on Shanghai’s stock market that has pushed the benchmark index up 11%—its biggest such run in four years—and into positive territory for the year.

Americans’ reliance on government support is soaring, driven by programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.

That support is especially critical in economically stressed communities throughout the U.S., many of which lean Republican and are concentrated in swing states crucial in deciding the presidential election. Neither party has much incentive to dial back the spending.

As America’s population aged, more counties came to count on this government backing for a significant share of their total income. That is defined by EIG, the think tank, as those in which government safety-net and social programs account for 25% or more of personal income in the county.By 2000, roughly one in 10 counties drew a significant share of their income from federal and state safety-net and social programs.

Mark Noll is a historian at Notre Dame. He wrote a book in 1994 called “The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind.” In it he tracked how the political evolution of the United States directly related to how people viewed religion from an increasingly nationalistic and individualistic perspective, an increasing rejection of authority. Noll’s book, even though it was written so long ago, shows how the land had already been cleared, tilled and sowed for when the Moral Majority came along in the 1980s. They took advantage of those fertile fields to deliberately politicize religion in America. They couldn’t have succeeded if it wasn’t for this trend over the last hundred years to conflate individualism and American culture with theology.

churches are not catechizing.33 Jacobs, in Wehner’s article, “The Evangelical Church Is Breaking Apart,” which was published in late October: “People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume. . . . The churches have barely better than a snowball’s chance in hell of shaping most people’s lives.” People might show up for one hour on a Sunday morning, and half of that is singing, and there’s some entertaining talking because they want to keep people coming in the door because that’s how you fill the coffers. Churches are not teaching and people are spending hours and hours on cultural and political content and that is what is informing our beliefs.

the biggest problem is not the people who aren’t on board; the biggest problem is the people who don’t know what to do.44 According to research conducted by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 26 percent of people believe climate change is an urgent problem but are unsure what they can do to solve it. And if we don’t know what to do, we do nothing. Just start by doing something, anything, and then talk about it!

DairyX’s approach is a third route – precision fermentation. It is now scaling up its operation and aims to seek the regulatory approval needed for consumers to buy the product in 2027. If successful, the caseins could be used by cheese and yoghurt companies as a drop-in replacement for dairy milk, without changes to equipment or ingredients.

Other companies developing fermented caseins include New Culture in the US, which is focusing on mozzarella, and Australia’s Eden Brew, targeting cow-free milk, as well as All G Foods, Fooditive and Standing Ovation.

“People have been trying to take the cow out of making dairy since the late 1970s,” said Dr Arik Ryvkin, DairyX founder and chief executive. Early efforts used plant protein but about a decade ago biotechnology developments opened a new path, pioneered by the company Perfect Day, he said. “We now bring the last step in that line of evolution … helping dairy companies make the exact products consumers desire while helping cows live happier lives.”

Right-wing health obsession comes in many forms. Some men—and it is overwhelmingly men—will evangelize their online followers about the purported benefits of eating only red meat, while other men thump the tub about opposing vaccines. Others proclaim the hazards of seed oils—that is, oils derived from pressed seeds like safflower and rapeseed. 

Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance has copped to being a seed oils avoider who relies instead on ghee

The broadly conspiracist view that Big Government and Big Agriculture are colluding to poison American citizens is increasingly common among Trump’s highest-profile allies.

Solar panels have, over the last months, suddenly gotten so cheap that they’re now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world. Without waiting for what are often moribund utilities to do the job, business and home owners are getting on with electrifying their lives, and doing it cleanly.

Pakistan, where power prices in the wake of Putin’s Ukraine invasion have soared so dramatically that sales of electricity have gone down ten percent in the last two years. That should cripple a country—”yet somehow it’s economy grew by two percent anyway.”

what was happening? Basically, Pakistanis were buying huge quantities of very cheap Chinese solar panels and putting them up themselves. Pakistan, they reported, “has become the third-largest importer of Chinese solar modules, acquiring a staggering 13GW in the first half of this year alone.” This is particularly astonishing because the country’s entire official electricity generating capacity is only 46 GW.

In choosing Vance and discarding Pence, Trump traded actual decency for a man who can simulate decency, and that’s exactly what Vance did on Tuesday night.

With those words and in that moment, Vance told MAGA: Don’t be fooled by my civility; when real power is on the line, I’m with Trump. He’s said so before. Just last month, he told the All-In podcast that he “would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we had.”

There was nothing peaceful about the transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. Even the relative calm of Inauguration Day (which Trump skipped) was guaranteed only by a troop deployment that made any substantial disruption impossible.

Game Change, pre-Trump, pre-pandemic, pre–January 6, unknowing as it obviously was of all the weirdness that was coming down the pike, saw quite clearly the cleavage in the American psyche out of which the future—our present!—would emerge.

before the pick is announced, brutal Steve Schmidt is struck by Palin’s equanimity. (She is gazing blissfully out the window.) “You seem totally unfazed by this,” he says. She turns to him: “It’s God’s plan.” And despite the slight glaze of fanaticism on Moore’s face as she says this, and the flash of panic on Harrelson’s, you’re kind of with her. Schmidt, about to ascend to 30,000 feet, doesn’t know that he’s in the hands of God. But Palin does!

McCain-Palin was a tragedy: A great statesman, desperate for the win, succumbed to vanity and made a pact with darkness. That’s one way to look at it.

The mass migration of people seeking refuge from war and poverty in prosperous democracies has become a major challenge of the 21st century. While it has posed differing and often real problems in different parts of North America and Europe, a common repercussion has been the rise of far-right movements, which feed popular — and often misguided — fears of invading alien tribes stealing jobs and benefits, spreading terrorism and crime and diluting national cultures and identities.

Germany, Europe’s economic powerhouse and a state with generous social services, has been a prime destination for refugees. Their number reached a record 3.48 million refugees and others fleeing conflict, including Ukrainians, as of the end of June, by far the most of any European state.

The public has reacted accordingly. A recent poll in Germany found that 44 percent of respondents said migration and refugees are the country’s most pressing problem, and about 77 percent said Germany needed a change in its policies.

We are of two minds about mushrooms. As part of the fungi kingdom, they may be the death of us (see HBO’s “The Last of Us”). Or, just maybe, a big handful of the 5 million or more species will be our salvation — cure us of depression and anxiety, reduce our inflammation or curb our addiction to more carbon-intensive foods.

Fungo-philes seem to be winning the debate, however, in part due to awe-inspiring documentaries like “Fantastic Fungi” that showcase the mycelial network, a vast underground connective tissue of fungal strands that link plants and trees in a mutually beneficial ecosystem, and because the number of ways to use mushrooms — the fruiting body above the ground and the mycelium below — has exploded.

e the increasing demand for biomaterials as the beginning of a fourth Industrial Revolution: the intersection of biology and technology. At the annual Biofabricate summit, which draws together consumer brands, start-ups and investors eager to contribute to the growing world of biomaterials, mycelium takes center stage in products from cosmetics to textiles. Industry experts project a global mycelium market at $5.8 billion by the end of this decade.

in 2010, the British historian Tony Judt wrote Ill Fares the Land, a love letter to postwar social democracy

he social-democratic tradition can be regarded as a conservative project. “The Left has something to conserve,” he wrote. “The democratic Left has often been motivated by a sense of loss: sometimes of idealized pasts, sometimes of moral interests ruthlessly overridden by private advantage. It is doctrinaire market liberals who for the past two centuries have embraced the relentlessly optimistic view that all economic change is for the better.”

This is also the view taken by Sohrab Ahmari in his provocative new book, Tyranny, Inc