What too many of us don’t know now is that the rise of Nazi Germany and the lead-up to the Holocaust was a slow play fertilized by denialism about what was happening in plain view—not the Final Solution out of the gate. Non-targeted Germans continued their daily lives, even as their kids trained to be hardened and hateful Nazis, and believed the bigoted lies that it was “subhuman” people—which is not a thing—causing all their economic problems.

What's going on here isn't especially confusing. Prior to Dobbs, calling yourself "pro-life" was a low-cost way for Republican voters to tell a story where they are morally upright heroes while casting feminists, urban liberals, college kids, and racial minorities as oversexed heathens. When abortion is legal, it's easy to condemn other people's abortions as a matter of "convenience" or say they're "using it for birth control" or employ other euphemisms for promiscuity, while quietly believing the abortions you and your friends get are justified.

Les années 1980 représentent un seuil dans cette histoire et dans les années 1990, on peut parler d’un basculement et d’un délitement de tout l’héritage ouvrier du XXe siècle et de cette espèce de pilier syndical de l’État britannique d’après-guerre – il y avait quand même 13 200 000 syndiqués en 1980 ! Au gré de la désindustrialisation, de la montée du chômage de masse et des lois antisyndicales, il y a un reflux de cette construction sociale et politique gigantesque, centrale dans la culture politique britannique, et ce reflux devient une véritable relégation symbolique dans des médias appliqués à célébrer la nouveauté de la fin de la guerre froide et de la disparation des bastions du monde ouvrier le plus familier.

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul. And in Britain we traditionally side with David, not Goliath. All our heroes are plucky underdogs: Robin Hood, Dick Whittington, Oliver Twist. Trump is neither plucky, nor an underdog. He is the exact opposite of that. He’s not even a spoiled rich-boy, or a greedy fat-cat. He’s more a fat white slug. A Jabba the Hutt of privilege.

But moral outrage must be closely managed, or it can do more harm than good. Ganz, who eventually became a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, has spent years teaching people how to use their anger to effect change. Stoking the emotion is easy. Learning how to channel it to useful ends, he told me, is harder. For anger to be productive, at some point, it must stop. Victory often demands compromise. “You have to know how to arouse passions to fuel the fight, and then how to cool everyone down so they’ll accept the deal on the table,” Ganz said.

Walz, with his cheerful goober dad persona, offers a view of masculinity that is far tougher than that displayed by even the most steroid-inflated men of the MAGA world. He's a guy who isn't afraid of basic empathy. A man who is confident enough not to run from those who are different. A man so sure of himself that he can let a woman be his boss without acting threatened by her power. That's what real strength looks like. No wonder a weak man like Trump thinks Walz is the apocalypse.

Heroism is overrated. It is always movements that lead to large-scale change, though our dominant cultural narrative of change focuses on individuals. It is not naive to think you can change the world, it is naive to think you could be in the world and not change it, but that change happens in community.

I work in tech. I think a lot of cool stuff is being built and a lot of good work is being done. But tech is a mature industry, and most of what is interesting these days has to do with bringing the things we learned from 2000-2015 about how to use software into places that have not yet modernized. We’re at the tail end of what’s interesting and good and novel. Software technology has very little left to change in a major way. And the entire ethos of a16z and the like has utterly failed to produce breakthroughs in computer hardware, biological sciences, energy, environment or any other major sector. The last decade of innovation has been entirely about reducing friction in commerce. That’s it. And it’s not that profitable and will end up with a very small number of winners.

You’ve heard this refrain before – giving money to homeless people is not the best way to help them because it might be squandered, or spent on harmful habits. But a new Canadian study makes a powerful case to the contrary.

Une étude montre que la majorité des Américains se préoccuent des questions liées au changement climatique et sont en faveur de mesures pour lutter contre celui-ci. Mais plus intéressant : la majorité des Américains sont également persuadés que seule une minorité de leurs compatriotes partagent ce point de vue. Cette "fausse réalité sociale" peut à son tour dissuader les politiciens de prendre des mesures fortes.

Distorted beliefs about support for climate policy, and about concerns over climate change in general, are so commonly held among the more than 6,000 American adults in the researchers’ nationally representative sample that the study’s authors call these misperceptions a “false social reality.” Recent polls from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication show that 66 to 80 percent of people in the U.S. support major climate mitigation policies. But participants in the new study estimated that only between 37 and 43 percent do so. A range of 80 to 90 percent of those polled by the researchers underestimated the U.S. population’s climate concern and support for major climate mitigation policies.