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☆ Opinion | How Long Will A.I.’s ‘Slop’ Era Last?
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-24 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

investments might be three times as large as expected returns, while another analyst, in several assessments published by Sequoia Capital, calculated that investments in A.I. (He called this “A.I.’s $600 billion question” and warned of “investment incineration.”) In a similarly bearish Goldman Sachs report, the firm’s head of global equity research estimated that the cost of A.I. “Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed,” he noted. expenditure, more than the United States spends annually on its military, and think: What exactly is that money going toward? slop”: often uncanny, frequently misleading material, now flooding web browsers and social-media platforms like spam in old inboxes.

Persons: Goldman Sachs, ”, Erik Hoel, Anthony Aguirre “, A.I, “, slop, we’ve Organizations: Barclays, Sequoia Capital Locations: A.I, United

☆ Thomas Crooks, Donald Trump, and the Banality of Gun Violence - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-17 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Eleven of the last 12 American presidents have endured an assassination attempt or a plot against their lives. The same is true for 20 of the country’s 45. Most of the recent plots have been foiled early, making the indelible image of Donald Trump fist-pumping in Pennsylvania seem like an atavistic monument or an ominous portent or perhaps both. And though we may describe the stochastic terror of the past decade in terms of ugly bumper stickers and reckless speeches, there has been real violence, not just incitement. “No political party, movement, ideology or manner of thinking has had an absolute monopoly on this violence, and it really hasn’t mattered whether the surrounding political atmosphere was aggressive or docile,” Dayen wrote.

Persons: Donald Trump, David Dayen, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton’s, Barack Obama’s, Donald Trump’s, Gabrielle Giffords, Steve Scalise, hasn’t, ” Dayen, “ Organizations: The, White, Financial Times, Republican National Convention Locations: Pennsylvania

☆ Opinion | The Tragedy at This Year’s Hajj Is Just the Beginning
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-10 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

A potter’s field burial site on Hart Island was receiving 24 bodies each day, as many as the city typically used to bury there in a week. Last month in Karachi, Pakistan, temperatures approached 120 degrees Fahrenheit and hospitals reportedly treated thousands for heatstroke. A nonprofit operating four mortuaries registered 128 deaths in a single day, mostly of people on the margins of society. In June, more than one-third of the country’s population was under extreme heat advisories, but immediately after Independence Day things intensified. In Palm Springs, Calif., temperatures reached a record 124 degrees, Las Vegas broke its own previous record by three degrees and in Death Valley, Calif., temperatures reached 129, within one degree of the all-time, anywhere-in-the-world modern record.

Persons: Yorkers, ” Jeff Goodell, Mikhail Chester Organizations: New, Edhi Foundation, Las Locations: New York City, Hart, Karachi, Pakistan, Palm Springs, Calif, Las Vegas, Death Valley, California, Phoenix

☆ America’s Antivax Disinformation Campaign in the Philippines - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-07-03 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Typically, Americans learn about the clandestine depravities undertaken abroad by their government only decades after the offenses were committed. When the Pentagon was confronted with the report, its spokeswoman didn’t just acknowledge the existence of these sorts of programs; she appeared to defend them. The Reuters report is very much worth reading in full, a showcase of American recklessness in what may already be a new age of Spy vs. Spy psyops. But we’ve had very little reporting, or reckoning, with what the American side of that information war might look like. ), to counter adversary malign influence”; that “this process is deliberate, methodical and comprehensive”; and that this work employs “a variety of platforms, including social media, to counter those malign influence attacks.” The Chinese have been, predictably, more hyperbolic: An editorial in the Chinese Communist Party-run Global Times called the social media campaign simply “brainwashing.”

Persons: Chris Bing, Joel Schectman, didn’t, we’ve, ” Organizations: Reuters, Department of Defense, Pentagon, Chinese Communist Party, Times Locations: Philippines, Central Asia, China, Russia

☆ Global Warming is Having a Big Effect on Our Oceans - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-26 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

It’s the shuddersome, floppy Greenland shark, which can live to 300, perhaps even longer, its life span slowed and distended by the deep cold of the northern oceans. Since then, measured by weight, 90 percent of the largest creatures sharing the oceans with them have disappeared. This is not just a parable about the warming of the seas. Ninety percent of global marine fish stocks have now been fully exploited or overfished; 81 percent of monitored migratory freshwater populations have declined since 1970. But the story of that warming is nevertheless astonishing, even for those of us anesthetized by exposure to the world’s rapid ecological transformation.

Persons: preteenagers, Helen Czerski, Czerski, Mike Davis, “ Locations: Atlantic, England, El

☆ Opinion | What Voters in France and Britain Really Want
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-25 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In France, a snap National Assembly election has delivered a distressing first-round victory for Marine Le Pen, long the bête noire of European liberalism, and a humiliating defeat for President Emmanuel Macron, almost a caricature of the continental elite. At present, the British elections appear set to deliver for Labour the most thumping victory any party has achieved in any mature democracy for at least a generation. Some suggest a 4-to-1 margin is plausible, and Conservative efforts to warn voters of a coming left-wing supermajority appear to have backfired, making them instead much more likely to support Labour. (And the party is expected to only win about 40 percent of the national vote in a low-turnout election.) But after 14 years of Tory government, a 3-to-1 or 4-to-1 Labour Parliament would still be a truly historic shift.

Persons: Emmanuel Macron, Keir Starmer Organizations: Labour, Tories Locations: France, Britain

☆ Climate and Kathy Hochul’s Pause on New York Congestion Pricing - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-12 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, who announced her unilateral decision about the suspension last week: perhaps slightly better chances for New York Democrats in a couple of fall congressional races. Tax coffers have rebounded, too, to the extent that the city canceled a raft of planned budget cuts. The one obvious measure by which the city has not mounted a full pandemic comeback is subway ridership — a measure that congestion pricing would have helped and pausing it is likely to hurt. In announcing the pause, she also expressed concern for the financial burden the $15 surcharge would impose on working New Yorkers, though the city’s working class was functionally exempted from the toll by a rebate system for those with an annual income of $60,000 or less. But each of them was within spitting distance of Grand Central, where an overwhelming share of foot traffic — and commercial value — comes from commuters using mass transit.

Persons: Kathy Hochul, Hakeem Jeffries, Hochul, she’d Organizations: New, Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Democrat, New York Democrats, New York Republicans, Grand Central Locations: York, New York State, Manhattan, New York City, Grand

☆ Opinion | Why Children Are Missing More School Now
▼ + stars: | 2024-06-05 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The raw data looks inarguably bad: The share of American children missing at least 10 percent of school days nearly doubled over the course of the pandemic, leaving perhaps more than six million more students “chronically absent” than had been in the 2018-19 school year. Almost everything about school performance and the well-being of children and adolescents now seems to orbit the duration of remote learning in one school year, which lives on years later as the gravitational center of our retrospective universe. The most recent available national numbers show that 26 percent of American students missed at least 10 percent of school in 2022-23. In Britain, chronic absenteeism jumped from 11.7 percent of children before the pandemic to 23.5 percent in 2022-23. In Belgium, the problem has grown by 90 percent, and in New Zealand, more than 45 percent of children missed at least 10 percent of school days.

Persons: “ Organizations: Covid, National Agency for Education Locations: Sweden, Britain, Belgium, New Zealand, Japan

Opinion Guest Essay Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points Illustration by Mike McQuade. Here’s what we now know:1 The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located. Wuhan China Taiwan Laos South China Sea Thailand The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab. Wuhan China East China Sea india Taiwan Myanmar Laos South China Sea philippines Thailand The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab. In the United States, virologists generally use stricter Biosafety Level 3 protocols when working with SARS-like viruses.

Persons: Mike McQuade, Anthony Fauci, —, Shi Zhengli, Shi’s, Sarah Temmam et, Shi, coronavirus, EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, Biden, Daszak, Baric, Jesse Bloom, Fauci Organizations: Getty Images, National Institute of Allergy, Wuhan Institute of Virology, China East China, U.S, New York, Facebook Locations: United States, Wuhan, China, Yunnan, Southeast Asia, Laos, Yunnan province Taiwan Laos, Laos South China, Thailand, China East China, Taiwan Myanmar Laos South China, Laos philippines Thailand, Taiwan Laos South China, China East, philippines Thailand, Wuhan China Taiwan Laos South China, Wuhan China East China, China Wuhan East China, Covid, MERS

☆ Britain’s Snap Election: Bad News for Tories. Good for Labour? - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-29 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

But perhaps it will also be an indictment of the Labour Party opposition, which seems remarkably uninterested in seizing the moment. is 8.4 percent below its 2007 peak — a significant decline, which has helped make the country outside of London poorer than Mississippi. And although the prolonged slowdown in productivity may be the worst Britain has experienced since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the country’s struggles aren’t purely economic. Britain has been governed by austerity-minded Tories now for 14 years, and the results have been bleak. Brexit was another self-inflicted wound from the British right and is now lamented by a large majority of the public.

Persons: Rishi Sunak, Brexit, Boris Johnson’s, it’s Organizations: Conservative Party, Labour Party, Britain, National Health Service Locations: Britain, London, Mississippi, British

☆ Can Biden Win America’s Green Tech Trade War With China? - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-22 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

On May 14, President Biden announced a major escalation of the country’s emerging climate trade war with China, raising existing tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles to 100 percent — a unilateral quadrupling. A few days earlier, responding to reports of Biden’s plans, Donald Trump outdid him, promising tariffs of 200 percent should he win the 2024 election. Five years after blasting Trump for imposing tariffs on Chinese exports, Biden raised them — on aluminum, steel, lithium batteries, solar cells and semiconductors, among other products. In 2019, Chinese E.V. Nearly 60 percent of all the world’s E.V.s are now sold in China, which is home to three of the world’s four biggest E.V.

Persons: Biden, Biden’s, Donald Trump outdid, It’s, “, Gaia, David Autor, Tesla, BYD Organizations: Trump, Democratic Locations: China, U.S, Washington, Chinese

☆ The Campus Protests, the Democrats, and the Election - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-08 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

The colleges had a choice; in most places, they chose to escalate. By May 2, according to The Appeal, a nonprofit criminal-justice news site, there were at least 100 encampments in nearly 40 states, and more than 2,000 protesters had been arrested. In proudly defending the mass arrests in New York, Mayor Eric Adams did not focus on trespassing or the disruption to campus life. What he emphasized instead was the urgent need to literally police an ideological threat. It is also a case study in the dynamics of escalation, and I’d like to emphasize three stories, each related, that may help explain the pattern.

Persons: Eric Adams, ” Organizations: Indiana University, University of Virginia, University of Texas, Columbia, New York City, Hamilton Hall, United Locations: U.C.L.A, Austin, New York, United States, Israel, Gaza

☆ Are Smartphones and Social Media Driving a Teen Mental Heath Crisis? - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-05-01 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

First, that American teenagers are experiencing a mental health crisis; second, that it is the fault of phones. “Smartphones and social media are destroying children’s mental health,” the Financial Times declared last spring. What do we really know about the state of mental health among teenagers today? But the American suicide epidemic is not confined to teenagers. Is there a stronger distress signal in the data for young women?

Persons: Haidt’s, Jean Twenge, —, Z, ”, It’s, Max Roser Organizations: Big Tech, Financial Times, New York Times, Guardian, Yorker Locations: France, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, Greece, Poland, Norway, Belgium, Sweden

☆ Ozempic and Wegovy Have Health Benefits Beyond Weight Loss - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-24 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Last year was called the year of Ozempic, though it was also a year of Ozempic backlash and Ozempic shortages, which could persist for years. Even so, we appear very far from a peak for GLP-1 drugs, like Ozempic and Wegovy, which are powered by a molecule called semaglutide, and Mounjaro, which uses its cousin tirzepatide. It seems possible to imagine a future in which almost everyone is taking some variety of GLP-1 drug, and with a pretty good reason to do so. Patients on Ozempic and Wegovy can lose 15 to 20 percent or more of their weight in a little over a year, and if they stay on the drugs, the weight tends to stay off. Semaglutide has been shown to eliminate or reduce the need for insulin among those with recent-onset Type 1 diabetes.

Persons: tirzepatide, Wegovy, we’ve, Semaglutide Locations: Alzheimer’s

☆ Lumina’s Cavity Vaccine and a New Era of D.I.Y. Medicine - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-17 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“Cavities are a communicable disease, and if you’re among the 90 percent of Americans who’s ever had one, you probably got them from your mother.”So begins “The Rise and Impending Fall of the Dental Cavity,” a remarkably engrossing and, for me, genuinely eye-opening survey of the history and science of tooth decay, published last week by the pseudonymous Cremieux Recueil on his Substack. The bacterium Streptococcus mutans might not seem like the likeliest subject for a 7,600-word general-interest deep-dive, but Cremieux takes detours into the immaculate teeth of dinosaurs, the practice of Neolithic dentistry, the agricultural and industrial revolutions and their effect on our diets, and the dental agony of America’s founding fathers. Probably, you remember admonitions from childhood that eating candy will rot your teeth, but that story turns out to be a bit simplistic — the problem isn’t that your teeth hate sugar but that Streptococcus mutans loves it. And when it consumes sugar, the byproduct is lactic acid, which is what really starts to eat away at your dental enamel. Not everyone has an oral microbiome dominated by Streptococcus mutans, but chances are if you do, it was passed to you by your parents, very early on — and if you eat any sugar, you’re very likely to suffer tooth decay.

Persons: who’s, ”, Recueil, Cremieux, Streptococcus mutans

☆ Opinion | What War by A.I. Actually Looks Like
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-10 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

apocalypse — visions that sometimes featured autonomous weapons systems going rogue — you might have expected an enormous and alarmed response. Instead, the report that a war was being conducted partly by A.I. Perhaps that was partly because — to an unnerving degree — experts accept that forms of A.I. are already in widespread use among the world’s leading militaries, including in the United States, where the Pentagon has been developing A.I. Many of us still regard artificial intelligence wars as visions from a science-fiction future, but A.I.

Persons: Yuval Abraham, A.I, Obama, It’s, ” Elliot Ackerman, James Stavridis Organizations: Israel Defense Forces, Pentagon, Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, Associated Press Locations: Gaza, United States, Ukraine, Yemeni, Red

☆ Which countries has the best and worst Covid response? - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-04-03 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The number was just a ballpark estimate, drawn from modeling by the epidemiologist Trevor Bedford. But the burden of Covid is also obviously subsiding, and the shadow of the first-year emergency is retreating even further. As the fourth anniversary of the pandemic’s start brings a new flurry of retrospectives, I find myself marveling not just about the many narratives we’re still getting wrong but also about how many seemingly contradictory stories can be justified by the facts. In 2020, we often assessed that toll pretty crudely, using raw death counts, which invariably made the United States look like the world’s biggest pandemic failure. This produced one of the dominant morality tales of the pandemic’s first years: that the countries that should have expected to do best were, in fact, faring worst and that the United States under Donald Trump was the world’s most conspicuous example of pandemic mismanagement.

Persons: Trevor Bedford, marveling, we’re, Donald Trump Locations: United States

☆ Opinion: I’m a climate scientist. If you knew what I know, you’d be terrified too
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-07 | by ( Opinion Bill Mcguire | ) edition.cnn.com time to read: +6 min

CNN —Are you frightened by climate change? While those of us working in the climate science field know the true picture, and understand the implications for our world, most others do not. As a climate scientist, it is my duty to tell you about what is happening to our world, whether it engenders fear or not. Critically, the authors of the study observed that the reality of climate change has to be communicated without inducing a feeling of hopelessness — and this is the key. Climate change is no different.

Persons: Bill McGuire, Read, David Wallace, Wells, Sean Gallup, ” Organizations: University College London, CNN, University of Bath, American Psychological Association Locations: —, Disko, Greenland

☆ Opinion | John Kerry: ‘I Feel Deeply Frustrated’
▼ + stars: | 2024-03-06 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

Kerry, now 80, is stepping down this week but will continue to work on climate change. It is the test of our own times, a test as acute and as existential as any previous one. When Biden came in, the credibility of the United States was in the crapper, and we were viewed with suspicion if not derision. Our job was to go out and create credibility for our nation and for the president. At the time, the U.S. didn’t really have a global strategy, and so we laid out “keep 1.5 alive.”

Persons: John Kerry, Biden, didn’t, ” Organizations: Munich Security Conference Locations: United States, Kerry, Paris, U.S

☆ Coups and Climate Change in the African Sahel - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-28 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

On the time scale of human civilization, this might still be true, particularly when it comes to interpersonal violence. But on the time scale of human memory, it isn’t true any longer, particularly when it comes to warfare. By some measures, it’s more conflict ridden than at any point since the end of World War II. Nonstate violence — conflict between nongovernmental armed groups, such as gangs — has more than tripled, according to Sweden’s Uppsala Conflict Data Program, since a low point in 2007. In 2011, when Pinker published “Better Angels,” there were nearly 40,000 deaths from warfare worldwide, Uppsala estimates.

Persons: Steven Pinker’s, ”, —, Pinker Organizations: International Institute for Strategic Studies, Survey Locations: London, Sahel, Uppsala

☆ Opinion | Just How Many People Will Die From Climate Change?
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-22 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

How deadly could climate change be? Last fall, in an idiosyncratic corner of the internet where I happen to spend a lot of time, an argument broke out about how to quantify and characterize the mortality impact of global warming. The claim was quickly picked apart by experts: “An oft-quoted adage within the climate-modeler community is that garbage in equals garbage out,” the climate advocate Mark Lynas wrote. But it did make me wonder: How big would the number have to be to strike you as really big? If you include premature deaths from the air pollution produced by the burning of fossil fuels, you may well get estimates stretching into the hundreds of millions.

Persons: Roger Hallam —, ” Hallam, Mark Lynas, “ Organizations: BBC

☆ Fires Are the Sum of Our Choices
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-14 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In early February, the deadliest South American wildfires in a century swept through Valparaiso, Chile, killing more than a hundred people. In the United States, mercifully little land burned — only 2.6 million acres, which was less than half the recent average. But in Canada, fires ate through more than twice as much forest as the country’s previous modern record, the total burn scar large enough that more than half the world’s countries could fit inside. In Greece, one fire forced the country’s largest-ever evacuation, and another became the largest fire in the history of the European Union. And in the United States, especially, you increasingly hear a somewhat contrarian explanation that emphasizes fire suppression rather than warming.

Persons: “, Stephen Pyne, Daniel Swain Organizations: European Union, Sydney Locations: Valparaiso, Chile, Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii’s, United States, Canada, Greece, Australia, McMurray , Alberta, Hawaii, Boulder County, Colo

☆ The Measles Outbreak in Europe is a Warning to America - The New York Times
▼ + stars: | 2024-02-01 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +1 min

In 2022, there were 941 reported cases of measles in the World Health Organization’s European region. And it appears even more significant compared to recent years, when efforts to limit Covid also resulted in almost entirely eliminating measles in Europe in 2021. But as the year drew to a close, the European measles outbreak kept growing. Almost certainly, the virologist Rik de Swart of Erasmus University Medical Center in Rotterdam tells me, these official case totals are significant underestimates. The epidemiologist Bill Hanage, also at Harvard, lamented it to me as a “chronicle of an outbreak foretold.”

Persons: Rik de Swart, Michael Mina, Bill Hanage, ” Organizations: Health, Erasmus University Medical Center, Harvard Locations: Europe, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Britain, West Midlands, Rotterdam, Harvard

☆ Opinion | How Hot Was It Last Year?
▼ + stars: | 2024-01-17 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

That threshold describes a long-term average rather than a single-year anomaly. But because it describes a multidecade average, the measure will always be backward-looking, with the precise moment the world crossed the 1.5 mark clear only in retrospect. This year a handful of prominent scientists have suggested that when we do look back to mark that time, we may well circle 2023. Not that long ago, it would have been pretty contentious to suggest that the world’s most ambitious climate goal was already lost. Perhaps 2024 is the year we may finally be ready to retire it publicly, too.

Persons: — Organizations: Berkeley Earth, Global Locations: Paris

☆ Opinion | Has the Age of Mass Protest Actually Achieved Anything?
▼ + stars: | 2023-11-22 | by ( David Wallace-Wells | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

In some cases, it simply dissipates — mass protest as release valve. In others, it is repurposed by more strategic actors with clearer objectives, often political agents friendlier to the establishment and working to enclose the protest energy in a big centrist tent. In still others, the initial protests present the provocation around which outraged others can mobilize a reactionary backlash. The pattern holds not just across the poorer parts of the world, where Bevins concentrates, but in more affluent and outwardly “stable” parts of Europe and North America as well. Here, recent protests have been characterized by the same two distinctive features: their enormous scale and their mercurial shapelessness.

Persons: Bevins, “, Lula Organizations: Occupy Wall, Tea Party Locations: Gezi Park, Turkey, Brazil, Chile, Ukraine, Hong Kong, Jair, Europe, North America

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