History Readings

the ancient Hindu teaching on the stages of life, or ashramas, and the advice I received from a guru in southern India named Nochur Venkataraman. He taught me that many successful people get stuck in a stage called Grihastha—which is where you enjoy professional success and adulation—rather than progressing to Vanaprastha, which is where one should become more of a teacher (“crystallized intelligence”).

But there’s one more stage nearer the end called Sannyasa, which is to be fully enlightened and not working in the worldly domain. That transition is also sticky for many people—politicians, CEOs, sports figures, perhaps even the president—who struggle to stop doing what made them famous and admired. But that is the essence of truly retiring, and retiring well.

Matt: The United States seems to have the persistent problem of a geriatric ruling class. What’s your analysis of why that appears in our political elite?

To my mind, one of the saddest things that has happened to America in my lifetime is how much we’ve lost so many of our mangroves. They are endangered everywhere today — but not just in nature.

Our society itself has lost so many of its social, normative and political mangroves as well — all those things that used to filter toxic behaviors, buffer political extremism and nurture healthy communities and trusted institutions for young people to grow up in and which hold our society together.

You see, shame used to be a mangrove

Around half of all U.S. adults under 30 have used a dating site or app at some point in their lives, and one in 10 adults with partners say they met their significant other by dating online

Online-dating growth has been slowing. Paying users declined 6% in the first quarter of the year at Match Group, whose portfolio includes the League, Tinder and Hinge, compared with a 3% dip in the first quarter of 2023. The Bumble app grew paying users 18% in the first quarter, compared with 31% growth in the period a year earlier. 

Nearly half of all online daters and more than half of female daters say their experiences have been negative, according to Pew, and a growing tide of users are sharing their dissatisfaction

since the 7 October Hamas attacks, violence against Palestinians in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and settlers has reached record levels.“It’s more radicalised, it’s more brutalised, it’s more extreme,” he said. “Since 7 October, more than 500 Palestinians have been killed – more than 100 of them minors – and every day there are invasions of Palestinian cities.”

Jenin has been a particular target for Israeli raids since the 7 October Hamas attacks, with more than 120 Palestinians – civilians and fighters – killed by Israeli soldiers there.

But armed men still patrol Jenin camp where fighters backed by Hamas and Islamic Jihad are based, and residents in the town say there’s no sign of the war subsiding.“What the army doesn’t know is that resistance is an idea planted in the heart,” one resident said. “It won’t stop. If one is killed, five more will replace him.”

Too many on the left wing of American politics have become inured to the effect of their overheated rhetoric and histrionic displays of fealty to in-group norms

Bowman’s supporters sought easy explanations for his defeat, including that redistricting had shifted his district northward out of much of the Bronx and into Westchester. But Bowman in fact had fared well in the predominantly Democratic suburban county in his 2020 and 2022 campaigns.

claims that the massive spending of pro-Israel groups was responsible for Bowman’s defeat warrant skepticism

American computer scientist and techno-optimist Ray Kurzweil is a long-serving authority on artificial intelligence (AI). His bestselling 2005 book, The Singularity Is Near, sparked imaginations with sci-fi like predictions that computers would reach human-level intelligence by 2029 and that we would merge with computers and become superhuman around 2045, which he called “the Singularity”. Now, nearly 20 years on, Kurzweil, 76, has a sequel, The Singularity Is Nearer

no longer seem so wacky.

Your 2029 and 2045 projections haven’t changed…I have stayed consistent. So 2029, both for human-level intelligence and for artificial general intelligence (AGI) – which is a little bit different. Human-level intelligence generally means AI that has reached the ability of the most skilled humans in a particular domain and by 2029 that will be achieved in most respects. (There may be a few years of transition beyond 2029 where AI has not surpassed the top humans in a few key skills like writing Oscar-winning screenplays or generating deep new philosophical insights, though it will.) AGI means AI that can do everything that any human can do, but to a superior level. AGI sounds more difficult, but it’s coming at the same time.

The public conversation about abortion has grown into one about the complexities of pregnancy and reproduction, as the consequences of bans have played out in the news. The question is no longer just whether you can get an abortion, but also, Can you get one if pregnancy complications put you in septic shock? Can you find an obstetrician when so many are leaving states with bans? If you miscarry, will the hospital send you home to bleed? Can you and your partner do in vitro fertilization?

That shift helps explain why a record percentage of Americans are now declaring themselves single-issue voters on abortion rights — especially among Black voters, Democrats, women and those ages 18 to 29. Republican women are increasingly saying their party’s opposition to abortion is too extreme, and Democrats are running on the issue after years of running away from it.

Tresa Undem, who has been polling people on abortion for 25 years, estimated that before the Supreme Court’s ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case that overturned Roe, less than 15 percent of the public considered abortion personally relevant — women who could get pregnant and would choose an abortion.

According to the Public Religion Research Institute’s 2023 American Values Atlas, 55 percent of Trump supporters are Christian nationalists, as measured by their agreement with statements like “Being Christian is an important part of being truly American” and “God has called Christians to exercise dominion over all areas of American society.”

The Christian right increasingly sees American politics as zero-sum, meaning it is either going to triumph or face subjugation. As Justice Samuel Alito of the Supreme Court was recorded saying, “One side or the other is going to win.”

In “Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide,” Mr. Chopra builds his case on the pillars of four traditions of thought that in their various ways see anxiety as an inevitable part of the human condition

he first and oldest is Buddhism, which teaches that a feeling of dissatisfaction with life, dukkha, is the root of all mental suffering.

n the 19th and 20th centuries, Mr. Chopra notes, European existentialists saw anxiety as the necessary consequence of human freedom: Realizing that we have to choose our moral values and fashion our own futures induces a kind of vertigo as we feel the burden of responsibility for our fates.

the Mediterranean rush is turning Europe’s recent economic history on its head. In the 2010s, Germany and other manufacturing-heavy economies helped drag the continent out of its debt crisis thanks to strong exports of cars and capital goods, especially to China.

Today, Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal contribute between a quarter and half of the bloc’s annual growth. 

While Germany’s economy is flatlining, Spain is Europe’s fastest-growing big economy. Nearly three-quarters of the country’s recent growth and one in four new jobs are linked to tourism

A rift between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the country’s military leadership is spilling increasingly into the open after the armed forces’ top spokesman said Netanyahu’s aim of destroying Hamas in Gaza is unachievable.“The idea that we can destroy Hamas or make Hamas disappear is misleading to the public,” military spokesman Daniel Hagari told Israeli television on Wednesday.

The exchange was an illustration of months of tensions between Netanyahu and the country’s military leadership, who argue that Hamas could only be defeated if Israel replaces it with another governing authority in Gaza. During more than eight months of war, the Israeli military has invaded swaths of the Gaza Strip, only to see Hamas reconstitute itself in areas when Israeli forces withdraw.“What we can do is grow something different, something to replace it,” Hagari said Wednesday. “The politicians will decide” who should replace Hamas, he said.

The friction between Netanyahu and the military establishment had burst into public view earlier in the war. In May, Defense Minister Yoav Gallant delivered a speech calling on the government to decide who should replace Hamas in Gaza. The lack of a decision, he said, left Israel with only two choices: Hamas rule or a complete Israeli military takeover of the strip.

It is a dark night on a vast plain. There are wild sounds—the hiss of prehistoric cicadas, the scream of a hyena. A tribe of cavemen sit grunting around a fire. An antelope turns on a spit. Suddenly another caveman runs in, breathlessly, from the bush. “Something happened,” he says. They all turn. “The tribe two hills over was killed by a pack of dire wolves. Everyone torn to pieces.”

Clamor, questions. How do you know? Did you see it? (He did, from a tree.) Are you sure they were wolves? “Yes, with huge heads and muscled torsos.” What did it look like? “Bloody.”

As he reports he is given water and a favored slice of meat. Because he has run far and is hungry, but mostly because he has told them the news, and they are grateful.

team of economists recently analyzed 20 years of peer-reviewed research on the social cost of carbon, an estimate of the damage from climate change. They concluded that the average cost, adjusted for improved methods, is substantially higher than even the U.S. government’s most up-to-date figure.

That means greenhouse gas emissions, over time, will take a larger toll than regulators are accounting for. As tools for measuring the links between weather patterns and economic output evolve — and the interactions between weather and the economy magnify the costs in unpredictable ways — the damage estimates have only risen.

It’s the kind of data that one might expect to set off alarm bells across the financial industry, which closely tracks economic developments that might affect portfolios of stocks and loans. But it was hard to detect even a ripple.

Applying the same pre-pandemic model to consumer sentiment during and after the pandemic, however, simply does not work. The indicators that correlated with people's feelings about the economy before 2020 no longer seem to matter in the same way

As with so many areas of American life, the pandemic has changed virtually everything about how people think about the economy and the issues that concern them

Prior to the pandemic, our model shows consumers felt better about the economy when the personal savings rate, a measure of how much money households are able to save rather than spend each month, was higher. This makes sense: People feel better when they have money in the bank and are able to save for important purchases like cars and houses.