History Readings

the more simulated human conversation I heard, the more it left me craving the real thing: in-person connections with the people I care about, with all the quirks of a meandering human discussion

the upside may be that it forces us to appreciate the subtleties of personal interactions that many of us have come to devalue.

I witnessed A.I. voice agents strike up conversations with one another, which raised a Zen-like question: If one A.I. voice agent tries to scam another, is anyone’s time being wasted?

As I provided my A.I. voice agent with more information about me and my life, it evolved into a more credible impersonator of me. Armed with my biography, it attended work meetings on my behalf (off-camera, of course), conducted interviews in my place and even attempted to negotiate business deals. My clone was better at arranging meetings than closing deals, though it handled an important legal conversation with aplomb.

Along the way, I discovered its singular talent: a knack for endless untruthful riffing that no human can match.

I’m talking about a bottomless capacity for mundane small talk, combined with the imperative to make things up just to keep the conversation going.

Even when my voice agent did a good job masquerading as me, I found that for the people on the other end of the line, having out-loud conversations with A.I. clones upended their sense of reality.

Companies are poised to unleash these A.I. voice agents into our world. We humans need to decide how we will adjust to a world flooded with near-human voices

we could try and reject this technology, carving out no-clone spaces and refusing to patronize the companies that offer a pseudo-human experience instead of a real one.

If there’s one thing we don’t need, it’s more loneliness, which seems to be the one thing these A.I. voices reliably supply. Their arrival offers a chance to rethink how we use our own voices and to seek out more of the human interactions that they can never replace.

“The Apprentice” tells Mr. Trump’s story through the lens of the two men who most influenced him: his father, Fred, and Roy Cohn, his longtime lawyer and one of the most notorious and disgraced fixers of the 20th century. What they had in common, and passed on to Donald in spades, was their shamelessness when it came to winning and dominating others, whatever that took. The end always justified the means.

“The Apprentice” is less about how Mr. Trump rose to power than it is about the generational impact of his family’s trauma and dysfunction, and how it shaped the person Mr. Trump became and the impact he’s had on an entire country.

What Mr. Trump never let me know was that amid all those glittering external signs of success, he was in increasingly desperate financial trouble, drowning in debts that would lead him into a series of bankruptcies. I did not yet realize that he routinely lied as easily as he breathed, including to me for his own memoir, and without a hint of a guilty conscience.

What “The Apprentice” captures most evocatively is Mr. Trump’s transition from pleasing his father to enlisting Mr. Cohn as a mentor and role model. Mr. Cohn’s role was to help Mr. Trump outdo his father, even as Fred used his vast wealth and political connections to clear Donald’s path

he remained the product — and even the prisoner — of his childhood experiences. As he told a reporter in 2015, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”

What Mr. Trump seems to have buried as he grew up was the core emotional need that all human beings experience from the day they’re born: to feel safe, secure and worthy because they’re loved unconditionally by their primary caretakers. From my observations — and what the movie details — that kind of love was never available to Mr. Trump or to his siblings.

Mr. Trump’s father, Fred, was openly disdainful of any acknowledgment or expression of weakness or vulnerability. He had amassed a fortune building low-income, government-supported housing and, along the way, he developed a harsh, zero-sum view of the world: You were either a winner or a loser in life. If you weren’t a killer, you were forever at risk of being victim and a sucker. Brutality, in the service of winning, was no vice.

“The most importance influence on me, growing up, was my father,” Mr. Trump told me for “The Art of the Deal.” “I learned about toughness in a very tough business.”

The second lesson is that nothing we get for ourselves from the outside world can ever adequately substitute for what we’re missing on the inside.

At the time that Mr. Trump first met Mr. Cohn at a private club in 1973, Fred and Donald had just been sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent to Black people and other minorities at their Trump Village apartment buildings in Brooklyn.

The evidence of racism was overwhelming. But Mr. Cohn urged Mr. Trump to fight back rather than settle. “The Apprentice” distills Mr. Cohn’s worldview into three life lessons he shared with Mr. Trump: Attack, attack, attack; admit nothing and deny everything; and claim victory and never admit defeat. Mr. Trump took those principles to heart.

“Whatever else you could say about Roy, he was very tough,” Mr. Trump told me for “The Art of the Deal.” “Sometimes I think that next to loyalty, toughness was the most important thing in the world to him.”

For Mr. Trump, however, loyalty went only one way. By the time we began work on the book, he had long since bailed on Mr. Cohn, who had been diagnosed with AIDS. It didn’t seem personal for Mr. Trump because in my experience nothing was personal for him. It was all business, and Mr. Trump seemed to have no further use for his longtime lawyer, mentor and friend.

Mr. Trump did encourage me to interview Mr. Cohn for “The Art of the Deal,” and I went to see him in his last days. Over two rambling hours, Mr. Cohn shared an odd blend of hurt, bitterness, resignation and a certain awe at how easily his longtime student had walked away from their relationship. “Donald pisses ice water,” is the way he’d put it to one reporter.

It’s long been deeply unsettling to me how many behaviors associated with psychopathy Mr. Trump exemplifies. There are seven characteristics associated with “antisocial personality disorder,” according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders:

deceitfulness, impulsivity, failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, irritability and aggressiveness, reckless disregard for the safety of self or others, consistent irresponsibility and lack of remorse.

I’ve observed all seven in Mr. Trump over the years, and watched them get progressively worse. It’s the last one — lack of remorse — that gives him license to freely exercise the other six.

Ever since Mr. Trump announced in 2015 that he was running for president, I’ve argued publicly that the only limitation on his behavior as president — then and now — is what he believes he can get away with.

Mr. Trump has made it clear that he believes he can get away with a lot more today. If he does win back the presidency, it’s hard to imagine that he’ll have much more on his mind than revenge and domination — damn the consequences — in his doomed, lifelong quest to feel good enough.

“Expectations for a white-collar job have gone up, but in a way that is not commensurate with their skills,”

Disenchanted graduates are migrating abroad, sometimes illegally. In 2022, 36% of recent immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally and are between the ages of 25 and 64 had a bachelor’s degree or higher, up from 17% in 2007

At the dawn of the new millennium, expanding higher education seemed like the surest road to national wealth. The world’s richest nations boasted what are known as knowledge economies, where innovation drove economic growth. Development experts warned governments that if they didn’t boost their ranks of highly educated youngsters, they would be left in the dust.

Youth unemployment is around 15% in China this year, according to government statistics. University graduates in the country joke about becoming “full-time children,” taking care of their parents in exchange for an allowance.

Among the worst-affected countries is India, where an unprecedented expansion of higher education over the past 20 years has tripled the share of young people with college degrees or comparable diplomas. Some of them are highly skilled engineers and technicians who are thriving in the country’s booming southern tech hubs. But many are struggling.

In 2022, 29% of Indian graduates under the age of 30 were unemployed, roughly nine times the jobless rate of Indians who don’t have a primary education

Other disappointed degree-holders are delaying marriage and putting off having children, contributing to a demographic slump that is weighing on global growth. After bouts of unemployment, many graduates settle into low-wage jobs in retail or as taxi drivers, where they contribute relatively little to the global economy.

Parents were likewise determined to send their children to college. By the 2000s, the manufacturing sectors of many developing countries had stagnated or declined, a phenomenon known as premature deindustrialization. That meant that the good jobs were generally found in government, teaching or technology—all of which required a college education.

With space at public universities limited, governments authorized the expansion of private institutions, which typically receive little or no government funding. These colleges couldn’t easily raise tuition rates, because the students they catered to were often poor. Instead, many of them earned money by lowering entrance standards and boosting enrollment.

From 2006 to 2018 the number of students in developing countries enrolled in higher education nearly doubled, from 79 million to 150 million, according to a 2022 report by Higher Education Strategy Associates,

By 2018, around three-quarters of the students enrolled in higher education lived in emerging economies—up from about half in 2006.

“Diploma mills are everywhere,”

Even in Latin America, where youth unemployment had dropped 4.5 percentage points to 13.4% last year, compared with 2019, many university graduates find themselves stuck.

“It just blew my mind that there are these degrees that are being offered, but you can’t do anything with them,” Mokhoantle said. “Nobody told us this when we were in school.”

Some scholars say that a slower, more deliberate expansion of higher education would have been better for developing countries.

“The door was opened too wide and too indiscriminately, too quickly,

“The idea of maintaining standards was not kept in force properly, and once the genie is out of the bottle, it’s very, very hard to put it back.”

this is more than just a misinformation crisis. To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.

The result of this fearmongering is what you might expect. Angry, embittered citizens have been harassing government officials in North Carolina, as well as FEMA employees.

According to an analysis by the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, an extremism-research group, “Falsehoods around hurricane response have spawned credible threats and incitement to violence directed at the federal government,” including “calls to send militias to face down FEMA.” The study also found that 30 percent of the X posts analyzed by ISD “contained overt antisemitic hate, including abuse directed at public officials such as the Mayor of Asheville, North Carolina; the FEMA Director of Public Affairs; and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.” The posts received a collective 17.1 million views as of October 7

It is difficult to capture the nihilism of the current moment. The pandemic saw Americans, distrustful of authority, trying to discredit effective vaccines, spreading conspiracy theories, and attacking public-health officials. But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit.

Kremer wasn’t alone. The journalist Parker Molloy compiled screenshots of people “acknowledging that this image is AI but still insisting that it’s real on some deeper level”—proof, Molloy noted, that we’re “living in the post-reality.”

Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it

The technology writer Jason Koebler argued that we’ve entered the “‘Fuck It’ Era” of AI slop and political messaging, with AI-generated images being used to convey whatever partisan message suits the moment, regardless of truth.

This reality-fracturing is the result of an information ecosystem that is dominated by platforms that offer financial and attentional incentives to lie and enrage, and to turn every tragedy and large event into a shameless content-creation opportunity.

This collides with a swath of people who would rather live in an alternate reality built on distrust and grievance than change their fundamental beliefs about the world

So much of the conversation around misinformation suggests that its primary job is to persuade. But as Michael Caulfield, an information researcher at the University of Washington, has argued, “The primary use of ‘misinformation’ is not to change the beliefs of other people at all. Instead, the vast majority of misinformation is offered as a service for people to maintain their beliefs in face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.”

This distinction is important, in part because it assigns agency to those who consume and share obviously fake information.

What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built.

Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not. Such was the case last week, when Republican politicians shared an AI-generated viral image of a little girl holding a puppy while supposedly fleeing Helene. Though the image was clearly fake and quickly debunked, some politicians remained defiant. “Y’all, I don’t know where this photo came from and honestly, it doesn’t matter,” Amy Kremer, who represents Georgia on the Republican National Committee, wrote after sharing the fake image. “I’m leaving it because it is emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now.”

It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview.

What is clear is that a new framework is needed to describe this fracturing. Misinformation is too technical, too freighted, and, after almost a decade of Trump, too political

Nor does it explain what is really happening, which is nothing less than a cultural assault on any person or institution that operates in reality

If you are a weatherperson, you’re a target. The same goes for journalists, election workers, scientists, doctors, and first responders. These jobs are different, but the thing they share is that they all must attend to and describe the world as it is.

This makes them dangerous to people who cannot abide by the agonizing constraints of reality, as well as those who have financial and political interests in keeping up the charade.

The world feels dark; for many people, it’s tempting to meet that with a retreat into the delusion that they’ve got everything figured out, that the powers that be have conspired against them directly. But in turning away, they exacerbate a crisis that has characterized the Trump era,

Americans are divided not just by political beliefs but by whether they believe in a shared reality—or desire one at all.

if you are a man under 30, Donald Trump has been running for president most of your adult life. For a lot of these men who are particularly distrustful of institutions, cynical about politics, feel victimized by various social trends that have happened, Donald Trump is their antihero, and he speaks to them in a lot of ways. He has put in the time to court these voters.

There is this hope among a lot of people in the pro-democracy movement that if we were able to defeat Trump, there’d be a possibility of returning the Republican Party closer, at least, to its pre-Trump form. And that becomes impossible if half of Gen Z, the one that’s gonna be aging into the electorate over the next five decades, becomes radicalized by Trump.

“Unlike a newsroom where many stories are often checked, fact-checked and triple-checked by copy editors and others to make sure it’s verifiably accurate, the same isn’t necessarily true of political news influencers,

It is the informality and break from tradition, however, that are among the keys to news influencers’ increasing prominence. People want “someone that they relate to and trust” to interpret and curate their news

Share of U.S. adults who regularly get news from TikTok, by age group

No news-focused creator broke through as often this summer as Harry Sisson, CredoIQ data shows. The 22-year-old New York University senior drove more than 100 million views from viral posts in June and July through what he calls “a mix of news and advocacy for Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party.”

Sisson’s July video reporting Biden’s exit from the race, in which he called Biden a “fantastic president,” has 1.3 million views—more than the TikTok videos on the same topic from CBS News, MSNBC and C-Span.

“A lot of people get their news from social media,” said Sisson, who said he aggregates news for his one million-plus followers from a variety of sources, including the New York Times and the Washington Post. “If I can be a reliable outlet in the eyes of the people, I want to fill that role.”

Joey Contino, 33, who is based in New Jersey and runs an account focused on politics and the Russia-Ukraine war, says viewers are drawn to creators’ stripped-down, conversational approach to news.

“When it comes to mainstream media, I understand they have a certain way they do their broadcast, in front of the lights, in front of the screens,” Contino said. “I think we’re more in the realm of hearing things from your best friend than hearing things on TV.”

He rarely gives his opinion, he said, other than his view that Ukraine should be supported in its war against Russia. Contino’s 240 viral posts this summer picked up more than 35 million views.

The Journal’s analysis covered the 200 accounts with the most viral political posts excluding those that were inactive or not English-language. The Journal categorized the accounts as news influencers, legacy outlets or others, such as politicians and comedians, based on criteria developed with several media researchers.

As a whole, the influencers’ feeds were more likely to lean either progressive or conservative, the Journal found, and 80% of them were classified as partisan by CredoIQ. Legacy-media accounts, on the other hand, were more politically independent, according to CredoIQ, which assigns partisanship leanings based on the views expressed by creators and topics they cover.

Share of TikTok accounts with the most viral* political posts in June and July, by account type and partisanship

There’s a certain sort of Christian who (to their credit) has grasped much or all of the above - and would like to let you know that you can thank their holy mother church, which made the nightmare end.

I got me slaves and slave-girls. For what price, tell me? What did you find in existence worth as much as this human nature? What price did you put on rationality? How many obols did you reckon the equivalent of the likeness of God?

St. Gregory of Nyssa, born in the 4th century A.D., is sometimes cited as the first recorded abolitionist in the Western tradition. His Homilies on Ecclesiastes certainly denounces the practice with a rare intensity

Never mind that Roman slavery did not so much “end” as merge seamlessly into serfdom, and the middle ages’ vast profusion of new and slightly varied ways to find yourself unfree: servus and colonus both dissolved into a vast morass of ancient rights and liberties, which by their presence prove that you are bound, as your children will be.

For what is such a gross example of arrogance in the matters enumerated above – an opulent house. and an abundance of vines, and ripeness in vegetable-plots, and collecting waters in pools and channelling them in gardens – as for a human being to think himself the master of his own kind? I got me slaves and slave-girls, he says, and homebred slaves were born for me.

It is here that the key Christian contribution was made, if you believe in that sort of thing. It is not selfless loving-kindness, or the essential unity of man - these are old, old themes, and though they never took the ancient world by storm, they were thick enough upon the ground for anyone to see.

What is new in Gregory is not a view at all, but a great and mad refusal. It is the messianic edge which says that one way or another, things are going to change. True Faith has its advantages - chief among them that it leaves no room for a washing of the hands.

Gregory was not quite fit to drag the future back a thousand years upstream. When he condemns our Earthly kings, he bears witness and he waits; he does not immanentize the eschaton, and can conceive of no such thing. Justice is, he says, not the mere recognition of equality; it is not a matter of ruling fairly or administering well

so Gregory could not bring himself to make that last essential leap - not just to condemn but to abolish. He may well be the closest thing the ancient world has to offer, or at least the closest thing permitted pen and parchment; he was not close enough. I am happy to blame slavery’s persistence on material forces alone, on who the real good organ stabbers would listen to and why - but shift the goalposts back to being prominent, or even just non-negligible, and certain death becomes cognitive dissonance, and that has quite a bit less power than an answer would require. I fear I must conclude that it was culture - which is to say, something else, beyond objective factors that any human being would face. Which is to say, really, that I can offer no account at all.

In December of last year, Netflix provided an unprecedented map of its library by releasing a comprehensive look at its viewer data for the very first time. It comes as an Excel file, less than a megabyte, and ranks 18,214 pieces of content in Netflix’s gargantuan library by the number of hours viewed during the first six months of 2023, rounded to the nearest 100,000

Netflix excluded titles with fewer than 50,000 viewer hours. At the top was “The Night Agent,” a sub-Clancy-quality thriller about an F.B.I. guy, with more than 812 million hours viewed. At the bottom was “선생 김봉두 (My Teacher, Mr. Kim),” a South Korean comedy from 2003 with 100,000 hours, though this placement is an artifact of Excel’s sorting through the vastness of the catalog. Roughly the last four thousand entries all have 100,000 hours viewed — this is as low as the scale goes — and are arranged alphabetically

Outside the very top, which is dominated by Netflix Originals and kids’ movies, it’s not totally clear why anything winds up anywhere.

to scan through it is to appreciate how the library’s sheer size has heightened the importance of chance in our consumption habits.

Your view into the catalog may feel like a grand vista, but in actuality you are peering through a keyhole. When I open up Netflix on my TV, I am immediately met with a carousel of 75 shows and movies New on Netflix; then the Top 10 TV Shows in the U.S. Today; beneath that a carousel of another 75 suggestions Because You Watched “Rebel Ridge”; beyond that, an algorithmic selection of 33 Today’s Top Picks for You; then Bingeworthy TV Dramas, 75 of them. Then there’s Your Next Watch, a combination of stuff my kid watches and stuff I might, 75 more. Next: The last 10 things we didn’t finish; then, a list of 75 more titles because I watched “Shot Caller.” Beyond that, no fewer than 30 more carousels of about 75 titles each. That’s a whole lot of TV, but it’s still just a small slice of the catalog.

What we’re paying for, in the end, is not any one show, or any three or 10 or 50 shows, but rather this fathomless sense of abundance.

Matt Stoller, the anti-monopolist writer, cited this same story in a blog post about Hollywood’s travails. His theory was that Hollywood has gotten so big that it can’t even discover what people really want anymore

As a contrast, he cites the success of “Back to the Future,” an odd movie that became an enormous hit, eventually earning hundreds of millions. But as Stoller points out, in 1985, this happened slowly: It opened small in July, in about 1,400 theaters, and crept up to 1,550 theaters by the end of August, staying in at least 1,000 theaters until the Christmas season. (A big-budget Hollywood movie released today typically opens in about 4,000 theaters and is gone in a few weeks.

The movie, Stoller writes, “was put into a market, where information circulated among buyers and sellers.” There was a constant interplay between the art and the audience (and the middlemen) that determined its reach and legitimacy. Now, in Stoller’s eyes, the public is instead subject to something like content gavage, delivered 4,000 theaters at a time.

Which isn’t to say that the streamers don’t make hits and that people don’t watch and enjoy a lot of streaming television, as Netflix’s 183 billion viewer hours in 2023 can attest.

The producer and writer James Schamus has lamented what he calls the “Uberfication” of Hollywood under the streamers: Netflix and the others have demoted the creative talent from sharing in profits to working for hire, like Uber drivers

he leash has been off for a decade now, and eventually you face the same problem Richie Rich did: When you’re drowning in cash, it’s always tempting to say yes.

to look at these Netflix numbers is to realize that high-quality television is not the necessary outcome of the streaming model but possibly the happy byproduct of an industry in transition — and at this point maybe something like a small subculture.

It was practically a rounding error in comparison to “FUBAR,” an Arnold Schwarzenegger series I’d never heard of, and the first season of a show called “Ginny & Georgia,” which came out in 2021 and is apparently one of the most popular shows on Netflix, with both seasons appearing in the Top 10, together accounting for nearly a billion viewer hours. Never heard of it. Don’t know anyone who has. Maybe that’s my problem, because I’m an out-of-touch magazine editor. But maybe it’s yours too.

the fact of the matter is that we all spent years basically having no idea what was going on in there and taking guidance from friends, social media, newspapers, magazines and websites — all similarly blinded

it makes you wonder about the Talmudic discourse that surrounds every episode of buzzy television shows, trying to use them to make sense of the zeitgeist. What if the geist of our zeit mostly involves bingeing some British murder mystery based on a Harlan Coben (?!) novel called “Fool Me Once”? That was the most-watched show on Netflix in the first half of this year.

There are some economists who fretted about ZIRP because it can enable so-called “zombie businesses”: companies that survive only because of the availability of cheap capital, who stagger along, refinancing debt, never failing — artificial, undead things. And I think about this concept when I look back at the tech world’s takeover of culture

these business strategies, and this river of money diverted to bring them to fruition, created a sort of zombie discourse in our culture, one that appeared vital and real, and then — coincidentally or not, over the last few years — started to dissolve before our eyes.

just as the old market signals had become obsolete, an entire meaning-making apparatus arose to take its place

New, synthetic replacements were conjured, with a constantly expanding supply of televised content to direct them at. And social media feeds made up of highly nonrepresentative samples of the public to put all of this back into, spraying the messages around this new ecosystem like light from a disco ball.

It’s hard not to wonder, looking back at it all, if this situation created a pack of zombies, and they started to follow one another down a strange course, one paved with a whole lot of, you know, “Nanette” — titles that implicate the viewer in ways that are more interesting to write about than they are to watch

All we can say for sure is that the gulf between elite and popular discourse that so famously opened up during this era was helped along by the intrusion of the tech world into pop culture.

But it can certainly account for the rise of so-called Mid TV: shows that look expensive, are reasonably smart and packed with talent and somehow manage to be, in the Times TV critic James Poniewozik’s words, “. . . fine?”

Uber, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the ZIRP era, has similarly ushered in a world that is obviously superior in many ways and subtly, almost imperceptibly worse in others — less distinct, less interesting and sometimes even less useful.

According to the latest data, there are now more than 100,000 ride-share vehicles in New York City, and Manhattan’s streets have never been harder to traverse

Ambulance response times are getting measurably worse by the month

more than half the cars on the road are for-hire: the city’s iconic yellow cabs now engulfed by an anonymous fleet of sedans and S.U.V.s summoned seamlessly through apps, serving the market so well that the streets have nearly ceased to function.

perhaps that is what will become of our entertainment landscape too: There’s always something available. More of it than ever before. More than you could have dreamed of. And it’s available to you at the tap of a button, like magic. The way you always hoped it would be. Whether it can always get you where you want to go is another question

“It might be you can create a certain soundscape that has an invigorating, growth-promoting effect,” he said — music to a forest’s ears.

Jefferson Cowie: One of the great sort of struggles throughout American history is: Where does freedom rest? The biggest fight over that was, of course, the Civil War. But I think the entire American history can be seen as a tension between local versus federal realms of authority, with regard to this slippery idea of freedom.

Cowie: And then on Election Day, 1874, as Black people came in from the countryside to vote, white people just pulled guns out of every nook and cranny of downtown Eufaula, Alabama—from sheds, from windows, from underneath porches—and opened fire on Black voters that were lined up to vote and shot them in the streets.

He describes how white settlers in the 1830s refused to abide by treaties that the federal government had signed with Native Americans and, instead, would repeatedly steal their land.

Applebaum: And then, after the Civil War, during Reconstruction, Barbour County also revolted against the federal government’s demand that freed slaves be allowed to vote

Applebaum: Jefferson Cowie is a historian. He teaches at Vanderbilt University, in Nashville. In his book Freedom’s Dominion, he writes about a place called Barbour County, in Alabama, where the two different forms of freedom have come crashing into one another for two centuries now

At least 80 were shot. Some say as many as 150. It’s a difficult number to come up with, but 80 confirmed, at least. And that ended Reconstruction violently, in what was essentially a coup d’état in the name of white freedom.

Applebaum: Then in the 1950s and 1960s, this version of freedom, the freedom to defy the federal government, emerges again.

Applebaum: George Wallace, born in Barbour County, became governor of Alabama during the fraught civil-rights era.

the most iconic speech of George Wallace’s life. He only mentioned segregation one other time, for a total of four, but he invokes freedom or liberty two dozen times.

The more I dug into the local history and how local and state powers saw themselves in opposition to federal power and saw that their freedom was a local ability to control, to dominate, a freedom to dominate others—the land, the political power of others—then you realize, Oh, what Wallace is talking about is a very specific kind of freedom

We allow the word freedom to work in the political discourse because it appears to be a kind of liberal value, but underneath it is actually a very powerful ideology of domination.

that’s what he’s really talking about there, because it’s at that moment that the federal government is coming in to take away their freedom to control the political power of Black people.

Cowie: Because if you’re running as a snarling racist, you only get so far, he realized. But if you’re running against the federal government, as freedom from the federal tyranny, now you have yourself a coalition, right? Now you have the anti-taxers. You have people who don’t want to deal with integrated housing. You have people who don’t, you know, want the federal government meddling in their lives. And now that’s a broader group that you can bring together.

Pomerantsev: So this is not what we traditionally think of as freedom—you know, the freedom to vote, to choose your representatives, the freedom to engage in politics. This is something much darker.

Cowie: What happened in Barbour County: The idea of civil rights and the idea of political participation were mobilized effectively in pursuit of the freedom to dominate.

Cowie: That’s the model that I’m afraid of for the future.

Applebaum: So what you’re saying is: We could elect somebody who would alter the political system.

Applebaum: So it wouldn’t be that, you know, a dictator comes to power by driving tanks down the street and shooting up the White House but is, rather, elected with the consent of the voters. Cowie: Right.

Cowie: Absolutely. But my nightmare is that fascism comes to America, but it’s marching under the banner of freedom.

Cowie: The difference now is they’re beginning to capture federal authority, right? So these people who’ve been anti federal government are now tasting federal power. And this is something that people like John C. Calhoun from South Carolina and George Wallace from Alabama actually envisioned

Applebaum: “Transform federal power into their own vision”—that sounds like some of the things we’ve been talking about throughout this series. Tom Nichols reminded us of how easy it would be to subvert the military. We’ve seen how a congressional committee can be used to harass its chairman’s enemies, and, of course, the Justice Department could be used in the same way. We know how weak some parts of our system are; there is not a guarantee that the rest of it is stable.

Pomerantsev: In the present day, we often hear about this idea of freedom as being synonymous with freedom from government—or, to be more precise, from democratic government, from checks and balances, from elected officials—that if Americans are just left alone, they’ll be free and achieve their best.

Pomerantsev: Yes. You live in a society that makes it possible to do things—to become educated, to be creative, to found a company, to be healthy—and that, not the absence of government, makes you free

If you have very poor government, the people are not free. People are then subject to arbitrariness and violence. They’re subject to the rule of the wealthy. Just taking away government and imagining people are free is a kind of magical thinking.

Pomerantsev: Anne, you know Timothy Snyder. He’s a professor at Yale, and he’s written a new book, called On Freedom. He lays out a different way of thinking about the word.

Timothy Snyder: The basic way that this argument about freedom is now run is that people say, The less government you have, the more free you are, which is fundamentally not true.

Applebaum: So Snyder means that you are free to do something, not just free from something.

Snyder: Freedom has been an axe, right? It’s been a blade which has been used to cut through things. And I’m trying to suggest that freedom should be more like a plow. Freedom should be a tool which allows us to cultivate things. Freedom should be something which justifies action.

the argument is usually made in terms of justice or fairness or equality, and those are all good things. But both politically and, I think, morally, just in terms of the correct description, freedom is often very much more central.

Pete Buttigieg: Yes. It’s important to make sure that people are free from overbearing government. But also, government is not the only thing that can make you unfree, and good government helps make sure you’re free from other threats to your well-being.

t means one party can try to claim a positive vision of freedom for themselves, and it also means the followers of the other party might oppose it reflexively, just for partisan reason

Pomerantsev: I think one way to keep democracy is to make sure we use that word a little more carefully than we do now. I hear a lot of Americans say, Democracy is not working. And I know what they mean

But that’s not democracy—that’s autocracy at work. Autocratic tendencies are to blame for this sense that democracy is not working. Even the word democracy is becoming so tainted for so many people that you have to almost avoid the term and really show how the growth of autocracy makes life worse for people every day.

Applebaum: Peter, I spoke with David Pepper, who’s written several books about how America is becoming less and less democratic. In a recent evaluation of elections in Texas, nearly 70 percent of races were uncontested, and in Georgia, it was about the same.

Pepper: It really changes the entire dynamic of those in power. I mean, think about the incentive system. If you’re in a kind of a competitive race, your incentive system in that kind of system is: You know you can be held accountable by the voters. You better deliver good public results, right?

I’ve seen it in country after country. I saw it in Russia and Ukraine and Hungary. It’s no accident that Alexei Navalny, the Russian dissident killed, would call his struggle “the final battle between good and neutrality.” He knew that apathy was the enemy.

Applebaum: So autocrats and their enablers craft a dysfunctional system, the dysfunctionality, understandably, makes people disgusted or apathetic, and then they start clamoring for something different, something less democratic, because democracy seems so impossible, so incompetent.

Pomerantsev: When people choose not to engage—not to run for office or vote or participate—that’s actually just the beginning, because apathy, cynicism, and nihilism grow. And as they do, the appetites of those who want to degrade democracy and seize more power grow, too.

Well, in these systems where you literally, for the most part, don’t face an election ever, or a competitive election ever, every incentive in that world is upside down.

Pomerantsev: But, Anne, these achievements—they don’t happen in a vacuum. People don’t just spontaneously go out and protest, and then great things happen. Movements take planning. You need to create coalitions—this is where a lot of people mess u

America has had success with coalition building in its history. The suffragettes, for example, weren’t just radical women fighting for the right to vote—they found ways to embrace and engage conservative women and get them to join the movement too.

Pomerantsev: The answer to the authoritarian urge is not a democratic savior. The answer is going to be: lots and lots of people-powered movements working together, because that already is the essence of democracy and central to taking back—truly taking back—control.

There was the illusion that a secure Jewish community would remain so.

In 2013 the A.D.L. recorded just 751 antisemitic incidents in the United States. In 2023 the organization counted 8,873 incidents, an increase of over 1,000 percent.

Backward in literary circles, where being identified as a Zionist — even if it’s of the most progressive kind or has little to do with an author’s work — can lead to ostracism and cancellation.

Unless this changes, the American Jewish community is on its way to living how the European Jewish community has for decades: apprehensive, suspected and under ever increasing layers of private and state protection.

There was the illusion that, having achieved a sense of belonging in America, we would keep it.

Today there’s a palpable sense of things going backward. Backward in the Ivy League, where Jewish enrollment has plummeted and Jewish students feel unwelcome and at times threatened.

That included over 1,000 bomb threats to Jewish institutions, thousands of acts of vandalism and harassment, the desecration of graves and more than 160 physical assaults

There was the illusion that antisemitism was a fever-swamp prejudice, to which virtually all educated people were immune.

For those versed in statistics, or Jewish history, this going backward has a term: regression toward the mean

Backward in social justice organizations, many of no apparent relevance to the Middle East, that nonetheless feel called to demand the end of the Jewish state.

People attracted to grand theories of everything, as intellectuals often are, tend to gravitate toward singular causes, sweeping solutions, unsuspected “facts” and decisive explanations.

A century ago, the grand theories were about the evils of capitalism or the hierarchies of race — and Jews wound up on the wrong end of both theories. Today, the grand theory concerns so-called settler colonialism.

Zionism, which since the days of the Maccabees has been the most enduring anticolonial struggle in history, is now the epitome of what college activists seem to think is colonialism, the only solution to which is its eradication

When people argue that education is the answer to bigotry, they often forget that bigotry is a moral failing, not an intellectual one — and few people are more dangerous than educated bigots.

Finally, there was the illusion that America was different, that it couldn’t happen here, that our neighbors and colleagues would never abandon us, that, as a people and a government, America would do right by the Jewish people at home and abroad.

That’s one illusion I still hold dear. My mother came to the United States after World War II as a stateless, penniless refugee; she, and therefore I, owe this country everything. I desperately want to believe that what’s happened since last year on college campuses won’t go far beyond the quads; that Joe Biden won’t be the last Democratic president to also be a sincere Zionist; that the Republican Party will snap out of the populism and nativism into which Trump has sunk it, which invariably produces antisemitism; that Black America won’t turn sharply against the Jews; that America’s exhaustion with being the world’s de facto policeman won’t lead it to forsake small countries faced with aggressive totalitarian neighbors; that Greene and Rashida Tlaib will never hold leadership positions in their parties; that young Americans drawn to anti-Israel politics will rethink their radicalism as they grow older; that envy won’t replace admiration as the way average Americans view personal and communal success; that an America that exists somewhere between Morningside Heights in Manhattan and Berkeley, Calif., still hasn’t lost its moral decency and common sense.

I want to believe all this. I’m just finding it harder than ever to do so.

There is a moving passage in “Not I: Memoirs of a German Childhood” in which the German historian Joachim Fest recalled that his Catholic father, Johannes, had a personal fondness for their Jewish friends, along with his analysis of where German Jews had gone wrong politically: “They had, in tolerant Prussia, lost their instinct for danger, which had preserved them through the ages.”

There are larger strategic and perhaps moral ones. Namely: Are we going to be proud Jews or (mostly) indifferent ones? And if proud, what does that entail?

To have been born a Jew is the single most fortunate thing that ever happened to me. It is a priceless moral, spiritual, intellectual and emotional inheritance from my ancestors, some of whom were slaughtered for it. It’s a precious bequest to my children, who will find different ways to make it their own. It is therefore worth the time it takes to explore and worth the cost — including, tragically, the cost in bigotry and violence — it so often extracts.

To be a Jew obliges us to many things, particularly our duty to be our brother’s, and sister’s, keeper. That means never to forsake one another, much less to join in the vilification of our own people. It means to participate in the long struggle for our survival not only against enemies who mean us harm but also against those who excuse those enemies or those whose moral apathy speeds their way.

Harari: What do Jews do for the next 2,000 years? They learn—they sit in Yavne and they learn

Beckerman: It turned from a religion based on priests and temples and sacrifices into a religion of learning, right?

For me, the birth scene of Judaism is Rabbi Yohanan ben Zakkai, one of the great sages, fleeing Jerusalem and coming to the Roman general Vespasian, who later became Roman emperor, and asking him for a favor: “Please give me Yavne and its wise men.” And Vespasian agrees. This is myth more than history. But this is the founding myth of Judaism. Yavne was a small town not far from present-day Tel Aviv, and that was where ben Zakkai established a learning center, and it changed the nature of Judaism.

Harari: I would say that the other side is Zionist, and it’s important to emphasize and reclaim this word, which has been vilified, not just now, but for decades.

Vespasian could have told ben Zakkai. Why did it take 2,000 years of learning in yeshivas to go back to that same moment and basically adopt the values of the Roman legion? Because if I think about what the values are of people like Itamar Ben Gvir, Bezalel Smotrich, Netanyahu—it’s the values of the Roman legion.

Beckerman: So if Netanyahu and his partners on the extreme right are the Zealots, how do you see the other side—yourself—in this battle for the soul of Israel?

eventually the circle is almost closed. They come back. They come back to Jerusalem. And the Zealots have now taken over Jerusalem again. And the question that keeps bothering me: What did Jews learn in those 2,000 years?

Zionism is simply the national movement of the Jewish people. And if you think that Zionism is racist and is abhorrent, you’re basically saying that Jews don’t deserve to have national feelings

Zionism basically says three simple things that should be uncontroversial. It says that the Jews are a nation, not just isolated individuals. There is a Jewish people. The second thing Zionism says is that, like all other peoples, the Jewish people also have a right to self-determination, like the Palestinians, like the Turks, like the Poles. And the third thing it says is the Jews have a deep historical, cultural, spiritual connection to the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, which is a historical fact.

Harari: What the political conclusion is from these three facts, that’s up for grabs. And throughout Zionist history, for the past 150 years, people had different ideas.

You can acknowledge that there is a Jewish people. It has a right to self-determination. It has a historical connection to the country. And at the same time, there is a Palestinian people. It also has a right to self-determination, and it also has deep historical, spiritual, cultural connection to the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River.

now the political question is, what do you do with these two facts? And there are potential solutions, a two-state solution, which you can argue, where exactly will the border pass and what will be the rights of Palestinians who remain in Israeli territory? And we can discuss all that

basically, Zionism doesn’t deny the existence and rights of Palestinian people.

Beckerman: Do you think that Israelis’ capacity for empathy has been degraded over the past year?

So I shout harder, and like any attention given to the pain of the other person, I feel it as an attack on me, because it has repercussions. I will suffer.

Beckerman: One of the other things I’ve been struggling with this past year has been the inability of most people to contain more than one narrative in their minds—like the two narratives you just described

Harari: This is one of the things that wars do. This is not unique to Israelis. When there is a war, the first few casualties get so much attention. The millionth casualty, it’s just a number. And this is one of the biggest dangers with the current war, is this process of desensitizing people, brutalizing people.

now the police are beating up the families of the hostages. The people spit at them. People curse them. There is a propaganda campaign against them through the right-wing media.

Harari: It bothers me, and at the same time, as a historian, unfortunately it makes sense; it’s humanity. Most people have no capacity to empathize with the suffering of the other side, partly because it’s like a resource that is exhausted.

Harari: To some extent, every peace needs justice and every justice needs peace. But they are different ways of looking at reality, at history. Every peace deal in history required giving up some justice. You can’t have absolute justice. Peace is more objective

people have very, very different concepts of what justice means to them. So if you try to gain absolute justice, you will never have peace. You cannot go back and bring the dead to life

The only change you can make is in the present. How do we make sure that more people are not killed and injured now and in the future?

Beckerman: I’m curious what you think about the pro-Palestinian protests here and why they have been so compelling, in particular, to young people

Harari: Obviously, as often happens, you project your own problems, your own issues, onto a distant conflict. And many times, people don’t really understand the conflict. I see it especially with this projection of the colonialist interpretation. People take this model, which is very central in the United States and other Western countries, and impose it on a completely different situation. And they say, Okay, the Israelis are the white Europeans who came to colonize the indigenous Palestinians. And there are some kernels of truth in this, but it’s a wrong model.

For 2,000 years, Jews were one of the chief victims of European civilization, and suddenly now they become the Europeans? This also ignores the fact that more than 50 percent of Israeli Jews are not European

Harari: Yes, and then even after everything that has happened with October 7 and the war, Netanyahu and his colleagues are still at it. You know, he has not taken any responsibility for October 7. I don’t hold him responsible for every decision of some company commander in the army and so forth. But the prime minister, the leader of the country, has one major responsibility—to set the priorities. He decided that the No. 1 problem with Israel is the supreme court. The priority is to destroy the supreme court. And this is his responsibility, nobody else’s. And if he, if Israel had given a quarter of the attention that was given to the supreme court to Hamas, there would have been no October 7.

The Israeli nation is collapsing, the patriotic bonds that hold the nation together are being torn deliberately by Netanyahu and his colleagues. He is the most hated person in the history of Israel. Like 50 percent of the people just hate him on a level that is unimaginable. I think the No. 1 responsibility of a leader, especially for a country in such existential danger as Israel, is to unify

People here ask me, Should Jews vote for Donald Trump? Should Jews vote for Kamala Harris? Who is better for the Jewish people? The key question is, what are the values of the Jewish people? Are the values of the Jewish people those of a bully who sees the world simply as a power game, where you need to subdue and win over everybody else?

Harari: Israel is facing a real existential threat from Iran and its proxies, and it’s no secret. They say it openly: They want to destroy Israel. What I think is that the United States should continue to support Israel, but demand something. Here, I am with Trump. You know this transactional worldview. You give so much money. Make some conditions for what Israel should do in exchange; use the leverage.